The Z Axis

fifty and one

this is my fifty-first blog entry. I missed commemorating the 50th.

neato.

I've created a couple new colorific category graphics. They want you should enjoy them. You can see all of the existing ones together here. Nobody but me seems to care, but I think they look cool.

I finished all the lessons. 12/12, 16/16. I did it in time.

The long nightmare is over. Though, sadly, I still can't simply goof off all the time. The goofing off, it beckons me. I did, however, spend about 4 hours today playing Battlefield Vietnam. Oh, how I have missed video games.

School had to go and steal my sleep and my video games. And somehow I am not allowed to quit it and go work at Texaco. Bunch of Bullshit. Ah well.

This weekend I get to have more fun and relaxation and get some yumyums and sleeping in. YAY!

Now, I guess I should sleep.

VIDEO GAMES! YAY! FREE TIME! YAY!

[swiss cake rolls]

hannibal, that's a terrible plan

14/16
10/12

I have 4 more to do. Not friggin' bad. I wanted to be done now, but I kind of knew that was a pipe dream.

The good news is everything will be fine. Things will still suck until I am done, but I am now confident it will all get done. And knowing is half the battle. The more you know. Knowledge is power. Free toy inside.

I slept late as hell today, and felt great when I woke up. This means that come Monday afternoon and especially Tuesday morning, I will begin to feel absolutely awesome. It should be noted that right now "absolutely awesome" for me would be what many of you would classify as "raging hangover with acute dementia."

I'm more a little bit tired. And I don't mean in a current, topical way, I mean in the way you would say "I'm more than a little bit of an amputee." I mean a prolonged state of existence kind of way. My eyes, however, became markedly less puffy after sleeping in today.

Tomorrow I get to sleep in a bit, but then jet off to my nephew's thingydoodle, birthday observed. He and I both get birthdays observed this year. Mine I think may be this Saturday. Ha! I have cheated death of two weeks! MAHHAHAAHAHAH. THE CALENDAR IS MY PLAYTHING>

Okay, for the record, I've already said i'm tired. Soon I shall ascend from the ranks of the zombielike and be able to see my one friend and maybe get her together with my other, regrettably "digital" friend for some coffee and sparkling conversation. And perhaps a roundtable on the Best Show Ever. I went to the Wal-Mart tonight after my shower and cranked the soundtrack to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey- and let me tell you something, if you need to get psyched to do the impossible, aint nothin' better than sleeping for 10 hours after running a week on 3-4 hours a night, getting up, taking a long ass shower, and blazing down the highway with Slaughter cranked.

Aww yeah. Self referential hair band. It's okay because they knew it was bad.

Tonight I broke the 'u' key on this laptop while pounding out a lesson of some sort. Right now the U key has been replaced with the tilde key, as fortunately this keyboard design has only 2 different types of buttons, and the designers didn't make it all stupid and at some kind of weird angle. Any key on this board can be exchanged for any other key of a similar shape, and there are only 2 main shapes, which means if my F key suddenly broke, my right Alt key would probably make the great sacrifice.

It looks hillarious though to periodically look down at the keyboard and see

r t y ` i o p.

I'll see if I can take a picture and post it so you people can stop constantly bothering me about how insanely interested you are in my run of the mill keyboard phenomenon.

My tilde key has no key right now, because I basically never use it. However, my enter and space keys have been giving me trouble lately, so I'm getting a replacement keyboard. Fortunately, ebay's got me covered. 4 bucks. Bonus.

I love it when a plan comes together.

[front door]

struck me as funny

hey blog, how's it goin.

an IM transaction of a couple of minutes ago:

Kevin: Are you still up?
me: sadly yes
me: although what the hell are you doing up
Kevin: I dont have class tomorrow, so I beat Halo
me: bonus
me: when in that game do they let you know that the master chief is a robot
Kevin: I dont know, he takes his helmet off at the end
me: does he have a robot head

It's probably just the crippling level of tiredness, but that seems exceedingly funny to me.

So.

11/16, for the psyc.
6/12 for the jour.

Thats 11 lessons. By Saturday evening. Probably not gonna happen. However, I can come close enough that it'll be okay. If I have to do some on Sunday night or even have to push it into Monday night, I'll still be okay.

However, if I can do all those by the end of Saturday, I will be insanely happy. Because I'll be able to enjoy Sunday, and sleep for monday, and things will just be so wonderful. And I can reeeelax.

If i can get the 6 jour ones done Saturday, I will be Golden. I will be the one. And that is not super outrageous, as long as I get up before like 3pm. It's possible. I have the technology.

I should probably shut the hell up and sleep.
Nighty night blog.

3 weeks

dude.

there are 3 weeks (minus a little) from now til April 10th.

I thought there were only 2. The splitting of the middle week across the 2 months screwed me up. I was busting ass. There's another week in there.

Holy crap. This is absolutely huge.

Plus it means I'll be able to go to my nephews pahh-tay. Bonus.

From now on I will continually draw out my own calendar that goes day by day and doesn't give much of a good damn about months.

I have an extra week. I suddenly feel so incredibly much weight lifted about my goofing off this weekend. I needed it to keep sane, but I was still beating myself up about it.

I have 3 weeks. Holy crap.

[stupid windows date & time applet]

i am victorious

Time spent attempting to get SpamBayes installed: 3 plus days, probably a total of 15 hours or more of research and banging, and no less than 5 extraneous bits of software installed.

Time spent getting POPFile installed and working: 23-25 minutes, including the selection of a pretty stylesheet. One bit of software installed, a simple perl module that for the love of god actually compiled without a hitch.

What do these things do, you might ask? They are email proxies. They're sort of like web proxies, which are sort of like nannies. You ask them to get information, and they go get it for you. Usually somewhere in the process of them getting the information, they decide whether they think its good for you to have that information. That's why hornycoedsluts.com doesn't work on your work computer - for some reason, "the man" doesn't want you to have that sweet sweet porn. Email proxies can do sort of the same thing, only this time I'm actually interested, since I am administering the proxy, and instead of shielding me from the boundless wonders of co-ed porn, I can have it shield me from email spam.

They're both learning Bayesian filters, which use some kind of crazy ass word analysis system to figure out what's spam and what is not spam - or, as I have learned it is called, ham. Yes. Good email that you want is called Ham. Hell yes. If only the good, non-viral attachments were called cheese, I would forgive the techie community for the flogging to death of "w00t" and "l33t."

Anyway, you feed these things a bunch of text, tell it whats spam and what's ham, and it gets really damned good, really damned fast. Here's hoping I can reduce the number of people who are desperately trying to reach me in the hopes of extending my penis a few inches.

Although I will miss the hillarious SPAM email subjects like "I was told you are fat."

Man, that was funny. Well, it's late. I did the herculean and got more than my scheduled schoolwork for the day completed. So my goofing off for a while with linux problems and then a video game was okay. Although it's 5am, so it's possible that once again, I've been had.

Also, you will hopefully notice that this entry has the shiny new "geeking out" category logo, which I designed while continually listening to "Take me Home" by Phil Collins. If anyone's got a problem with that, I will seriously kick your ass.

The alert reader will also notice that if you click that logo, or any other category logo for that matter, it will take you to an index listing only entries of that category. I won that battle. Yeah. So, you know, don't think I won't break your face if you give me shit about the Phil Collins thing.

I couldna ha donneit without the linux sageliness of the Busa. Well, I probably could have done the blog logo part. Definitely not the proxy crap. I'm still reeling as to the seemingly limitless power of the tab key. Anyway, Danke, Herr Doktor. See, if you had a blog, you'da gotten a link there. But nooooooooooo.

Also, Greg gets bonus points for being with me on the Ecto cooler thing. Greg, I have so much to tell you about the free-floating phantasm's elixir of life.

Now I'ma shut up, watch a couple SB Emails, (including the hillarious not-one-hundredth) as a reward for my various victories, and go to sleep.

[take that look of worry, mine's an ordinary life]

no pony rides for me

happy birthday to me
happy birthday to me
now go do some schoolwork
crappy birthday schoolwork

I gotta do tons of work tonight, but let me just say, people who get you cookie cakes with candy space robots are amazing and good.

[mildred and patty hill can suck it]

less busy

updated the trb-site.

It had been a while, and I went ahead and did away with some of the blinkyblinkies on the main index.

[less filling]

a disturbance in the force

I don't consider myself into the supernatural at all. In fact, I'm usually pretty disdainful of it, and willing enough to write myself off as a sentimental sucker when I experience things that seem wacky and somehow metaphysical.

But there is a disturbance in the force. And i've not felt anything at all from there in a long time.

And it gives me hope that somewhere out there some red headed geek girl has somehow become aware of my existence. Because otherwise i'm just crazy, and remarkably specific in my craziness.

And while I definitely think I am crazy right now, it's awfully late at night, and there is most definitely a disturbance in the force.

Busa, nope. She hasn't. And thanks.

Ha. I didn't even mean to, and there I go actually acknowledging the tiny readership. Ah well. You's good folks.

And my attention whore side is mildly satiated by the 500% increase in comments since I started taking this damned thing seriously.

[shirley maclaine]

the savage beast

a new TRB song is available.

the rage box - picnic on mars

I started this about 11:30 tonight, and finished about 1.

I made this for my best friend, who's kind of mad at me right now.

i don't like it when she's mad at me, and making this made me feel better. hopefully it will do the same for her.

i'll update the trb page soon, with this and 4 notes of hope.

[seven megabyte daisy]

strange game

Life lately has become a test of wills and a dartboard of accusations. Fun stuff. I'm trying a new tactic in the hopes of pleasing those around me. I've been very tired and downright exhausted for the past couple weeks (shit, see the last few entries) and I just need to relax and do what I can to prepare myself for the next onslaught.

I have managed to get some work done through all this, including setting up the teamspeak server on DatawhoreII and doing some maintenence to the game grid, amongst other stuff. I never would have thought "ridding kitchen of that ass smell" would rank among an accomplishment, but I did it. It is terrifying how long it had been since i'd really done -all- my dishes, instead of keeping just one fork ahead of my next meal, and for those that make fun of my dishwashing schedule already, this is terrifying stuff.

Soon I hope to upgrade movabletype on Michael's server (the host of the page you're reading right now) and get Mister House back up, this time in linux. Let's hope I can avoid the random language-file memory leak.

le dramatik sigh.

My social life, as it is right now, appears to be a game I cannot win.

[how about a nice game of chess?]

taping up boxes

Work continues on the category images/sorting thing. Check out the game-entries only index. That's what you'd get if you clicked on the Games icon by any entry on the main page. Eventually. Also, you may have noticed this entry has no image - I have not yet made a "geeking out" logo.

As promised, i finished making the Red vs Blue and Minibosses archives available. The RvB archive is pretty self explanatory - it's all my saved copies of the episodes and PSAs, including some related stuff such as an interview with Gus. They're quicktime, so if you dont have a QT player, well, sorry. Linux people, I know there's software out there. It's worth it. Since RvB.com has moved to a rolling archive, this is a service for people I want to induct into the RvB cult. Which is everyone who reads this. Start downloading now! There are 25 episodes for you to catch up on!

The minibosses archive is everything i've laid hands on by the wonderful Minibosses, the band with a clever name and a kickass Zaxxon-based t-shirt. The archive's mostly covers of original Nintendo soundtracks, but it contains gems like Contra- and if you haven't heard the Minibosses pump out Contra, you haven't seen Shakespeare, the way it was meant to be played. I've included some mp3 samples of the original music for comparison, with as little deviation as possible (stuff I had lyin' around, including an existing guitar remake of Castlevania 3 that isn't as good) I enjoy remixes of old game music, but it's important to have the original.

Speaking of, I also included a small NSF archive - this is about as close to the original music as you can get without wiring up a 2a03 chip. These are specially-formed files, ripped directly from the game roms though, so not everyone cares enough to get the necessary software to play them. However, if you don't recognize all the tunes that the Minibosses do, I highly recommend you check out the originals. Even if you do, it really shows what an amazing group they are.

As far as the NSFs, you can get yourself a player either by looking at winamp's list of plugins, or if you use linux, downloading festalon as a standalone player or plugin for XMMS. Sometimes you have to dig through the NSF file to find the track that is being covered - and for some reason, the castlevania one seems to include all the sound effects - clocking in at 54 tracks. And Punch-out begins at 23, and then goes to 22.

This is a small taste of the kind of obsessive compulsive archiving I do of things I like - the reason I'm not putting up more is that these are pretty much copyright-safe, as they were available for free anyway. I don't think Time Warner would appreciate me making my Space Ghost collection available, so for the moment, you guys get screwed. Boo hoo. Go watch Red vs. Blue.

[like a cat of some kind]

bobbin and weavin

wow. It's 5:42 am, and I can hardly see straight.

But I re-wrote an entire short film script, and now it's actually pretty damn good in parts. If it were directed by someone even halfway competent it might even be a watchable little bit of something.

and now I get to turn it in tomorrow and not have to go to class at all on friday. whee.

this weekend will see me decompress a bit, and actually get to posting the RvB and minibosses archives I mentioned in the last entry. oh, and continuing work on these category images. I think i may do subtle color for each, because i like the fact that they draw attention. Of course, I will also have to make it so when you click on them it takes you to an archive page of just that category of entries.

databases are cool. so is sleep, though.

[myZZZZql]