The Z Axis

enough is too much already

Well, I've gone to defcon 2 now. Last night I was making some template changes and noticed that the server was going ridiculously slow - sure enough, I was being commentspammed again. This time, I was able to spring into action and disable comments, but they were still hammering the 404 page to the point there the server was sluggish. I managed to stop them before I went past 252, which means I only had to delete 180 or so. I'm missing a perl module, so I was unable to install Blacklist to aid in the deletion.

I have now taken some of the (in hindsight elementary) measures to protect myself that are listed on countless popular blogs such as Yoz's. Yoz put together this really great list, and also gets my award for Best Blog Title I've Heard So Far Ever. It may be long, but it's comedy gold.

So, after renaming my comment script and breaking some stuff, I think I've now got everything pretty well back to normal for average users, but should provide me with a bit more shielding from google-happy spambots. Soon I'll be adding dummy forms to the comment pages to further confuse them.

It's a crappy measure, but I've implemented the throttling in MT 2.661. So, if you need to leave multiple comments, make sure there's 60 seconds of time between 'em. Wouldn't wanna get autobanned.

I hate this, but that's the price we pay for having a searchable index of pretty much all human knowledge. Google makes us all accessible and makes us all targets for people wanting to boost their ranking on Google. Ashes to ashes. The circle of life. The bitch is back.

But, the same thing that let these spam bots incest up my comments sections let me find about a hundred entries on how to deal with it, and generally enriches the life of the wired english-speaking world on a regular basis. So, we lump it. Google is still bad ass.

There's only gonna be one more entry before the redesign.

[it's curtains for yous]

this is why we can't have nice things

So. Yesterday, I log in to my happy Movable Type console, and I have 70 entries, and about 74 comments. About 70 of these are legit, as I still hadn't weeded out a couple of the Phentermine ones mentioned a little while ago. I'm about a one-comment per entry guy, one woman man, one man army, one two buckle my shoe. Anyway.

Today, I log in, and I have 70 entries, and 1220 comments.

So, you know, if you tuned in and thought I had a bunch of questionably literate readers who really enjoy promoting beastiality sites, well, sorry to disappoint. I got blogspammed pretty hard, which is odd, because I have yet to actually take the time to add myself to the blog lists that I mentioned before.

Needless to say, deleting almost 1200 comments individually sucked pretty hard. I went to get the latest version of MT, which I've been meaning to do for some time, and found that I'd slept through what has become a rather big fiasco. While I don't agree with the angry mobs claiming they've sold out and ruined everything, I will admit that they really botched this very delicate maneuver pretty badly. This is like New Coke level botchery (corn-syrup marketing genius conspiracy theory aside.) Only, in Six Apart's case, they don't really have Old Coke to fall back on. And Pepsi's giving it away, with the pretty strong argument that they legally have to under the GNU license.

After some digging, I managed to find the last normal version that is still free, 2.661. I did the upgrade from 2.21 and it went mostly smoothly. That's what I'm typing into at the moment, which is good. Sadly, it doesn't have anywhere near the comment-spam fighting capabilities that I was hoping for. I've banned the offending IPs from today, and hopefully the scant new measures will make it so I dont have to tick 1200 bloody check boxes again. That's an insane number, especially given how unpopular and insignificant this blog is. Even if I do get that many, I've at least become aware of easier ways to cleanse them. (I dislike blacklist systems, but this appears to have the kind of comment-deletion interface MT mysteriously lacks.) However, if it starts to really become a problem, I may implement a CAPTCHA-based verificationeratermatron (by this guy) to the comments section, because, frankly, it looks cool, the people who really want to comment probably won't mind entering the code, and it keeps me from getting 1200 bits of spam while still allowing people to post within an hour of their last comment. You know, "Oh, and also, I forgot to mention..." kind of posts. That is the weakness of MT's new spam stuff- all it really lets you do is auto-ban an IP for posting within x time period of their last post. Which, sure, keeps people from posting 10 times a second, but to be meaningful also means people only get to post once within a 30 min period or so. Not a great solution. If I could say "post more than 10 times in a 24 period = ban" then I'd be in good shape. I could delete 10 malignant posts easily.

Anyway, I'm not going apeshit about it, which seems like what I would do. But if I have another 1200, man, that means war.

I have, however, decided to test out the Pepsi mentioned earlier. I'd looked at Wordpress before, but it was kind of crappy at the time. I'm still not turning my back on MT, but I figure it's best to familiarize myself with it before I have to. Plus, it's been a while since I tried to wreck my linux box with some new MySQL-based mouth to feed.

It took me about 3 minutes to install, and another 45 seconds to seamlessly import all my MT entries. Well, they're making it hard not to like them, I'll say that. I haven't changed the design template at all, but behold, the test version of the Wordpress Z Axis.

FARNSWORTH: Good news, everyone, it's got easily-readable CSS that Patrick has yet to turn into a usability nightmare!

Actually, needless Futurama references aside, I very well may pillage some of the CSS from their design. The text does look quite gorgeous. Plus, it incorporates some of what I've done here manually (the "Stuff I like" box) into the actual administration interface.

Very nice so far. We'll see how it goes.

At the very least, I will probably move the TAB blog to wordpress, simply because right now I am having to abuse MT far too much to get the result I'm trying for. It wasn't designed for what I'm doing, and Wordpress seems much more up that particular alley.

Anyway. 1200 bits of rape and beastiality porn spam. I'd say this is the big time, but nobody was interested in reducing my mortgage rates.

[just wait'll your father gets home]

now i am leaving earth for no raisin

Been going over some aspects of the site and trying to prune anything that hasn't been updated in 8 months or more. I'm finding a terrifying amount. In the course of doing so, I began rereading TAB, and I've already found a couple more proofing errors. This is especially bad given that before I posted chapter 3, I thought I'd done quite a job on the first couple chapters' errors.

Also, I am finding continuity errors and stuff- really amateur crap. Maybe it's because I've read it a hundred times now, but the story overall is seeming pretty crappy to me. There are some funny one liners here and there, and some concepts I still like in their zanyness, but it doesn't have the feel of something I'm jazzed about anymore. That's discouraging, given that I'm trying to invest some energy in Chapter 4.

Ah well. Everyone who's weighed in on writing ennui who's got a writing portfolio I admire pretty much says you have to write a bunch of crap to get to the good stuff.

I was just assuming these entries were crap and that TAB was fairly good. We'll see. Maybe it's just exceedingly-late-night self doubt, and a couple days from now I'll re-read about how a year before and then a year and a half later Brad did something, which is a continuity error somehow placing the events of the first well-described night in the story 6 months after when they're supposed to have taken place. I guess it's good that I don't have any confusing timeline constructs in the later chapters. (After the funeral that occurred like half a chapter ago, but a day after what you just read, anyone?) Sarcastic as that is, even those are at least comprehensible, just convoluted, unlike chapter 1, which is just plain wrong and contradictory.

Also, I failed so badly at what I was trying to do with the actual text in the prologue that it reads like some awful fanfic or the dreaded Eye of Argon.

Paper cup one: Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth.

Paper cup two:
He threw the cup to the rotting wood floor. His pained face looked to the anthropologist for an anchor to reality.

Which one is new Hackneyed Soda, with 2 times the ridiculin?

Of course, mine was trying to be overly wordy (without using dialog) to fit the overly complicated metaphor I was setting up, but I don't think anyone got that. So I just look like a jackass.

Again, this all may just be self doubt. Maybe you're all geniuses and got what I was going for. See, the playwright is described with, uses, and supports dialog, the anthropologist eschews and denounces it.

See, because I don't use dialog much in the story.

But I use regular language as if the story was being told to you by a friend.

It makes sense, I promise.

Anyway, after hitting a despair threshold there, I moved on to messing around with Photoshop while zoning to music. It was my original intent to re-do the graphics for the security login console for all my web-admin stuff - the root of theempire.homeftp.net's web nexus. (See, there's a reason all my web services are called Imperial Something...) I'm still going to do that, but tonight I ended up making something else.

Behold: the new logo for Sol Enterprises, LTD. I've given it it's own album over at imperial surveilance. It utilizes the LOH Brainbomb, one of my favorites among all the things I've ever designed, and for once, people who don't already know what it is may be able to see the damned fuse and figure it out.

Even if not, it appears, even in my very down-on-me-creatively mood, that I'm making real progress in photoshop voodoo magickery.

That's something, though it comes on a night when my most involved work to date feels like a crummy world full of plot holes and spelling errors.

[i am the greetest]

at last we will reveal ourselves

After much consideration, I've finally decided to add some update pings to this blog, and list myself on some blog indexes. Blogdexes. Blindexes. I dunno, I'm sure there's some super l33t 'net jargon for them.

Imagine it. The readership, it could climb...climb as high as 10, nay, 15 independent visitors. 20 unique hits a week. I COULD RULE THE WORLD!

Also, this kind of marks the end of the blog being something you either have to have plugged to you directly by me, luck into, or trip over in my AIM profile. In any case, something's changing, and the world is getting bigger. The paradigm is shifting. I'm thinking so far outside the box I am in some other euclidean equilaterally-definable boundary. Okay, perhaps it's a just a bigger box, and I am still sitting there inside it, in a uniform, coloring inside the lines. But that paradigm is so shifted, man, it doesn't even know what is going on. The revolution begins now. Welcome to the next level. You are not e.

Odd. Devolved into video game console taglines there.

The reason I've been putting off this process is fear of an influx of cretins, or malicious folks that can't damage my impenetrable wall of duct-tape network security and so must take refuge in "First Post!!!!!!!!11one1" comments, with ASCII boobs and Counterstrike Clan logos.*

Greg said he has yet to be overrun by the unwashed masses, and so here I go, being brave and unique by directly copying someone else after I've been assured everything went okay.

[this entry narrated by ray park's voice double]

*- the hillarious spelled-out 'one' in this joke courtesy wil wheaton

mr. owl's dating service

So tonight, after much debate, I decided to reinstall Warcraft 3, because I've been jonesin to play it since school ended, but knew I was going to be reinstalling my OS - whether on new hardware or not, it's gettin' to be that time. Past time.

Anyway, I decided, what the hell - I can skip past whatever I beat now with cheat codes or something and pick up right where I left off in the fresh OS install. It'd be a nice way of celebrating getting all the drivers installed and everything humming right.

Well, tonight I installed it, and played through the entirety of the Human campaign. That's a fourth of the game - like 9 levels. This is a loooong ass game. The first time I played through it it took me probably two weeks, and I was playing the thing any time I wasnt sleeping or in class. And either I am a strategy game god, (which, yes, I am, toot toot) or I spent wayyyyyy too long tonight playing. Either way, that was some crazy stuff. I whipped a lot of ass. I never even saved the game. It was great, but now I feel kind of conflicted about it. I'm sure part of the ass whipping was because generally I knew what was coming in the levels, which I didn't the first time, but I deliberately waited long enough to reinstall so that I would have forgotten most of the game's details. Still, seems like I bitchslapped a bit too much undead ass. At this rate, this game's replay isn't going to have that "what day is it again?" effect that it did the first time. Still, it's fun. And I whooped ass.

My profile is saved at the beginning of the Undead campaign, and chances are tomorrow I'm gonna dive into that head first, and I'll probably finish the whole damn game before the time comes to re-do the OS. Fortunately, other patrick got the expansion pack, which I've never played. So there will be that to tear through. Whee.

Oh, and the linux dedicated server for UT2004 is still doing strange things. Bugger.

I really enjoy being able to stay up late playing games without having some creeping deadline I'm having to shove aside to do so. Niiiiice. Guilt free. Niiiiicer.

Now all I need is some woman who's a fan of animated comedy and games, and also staying up incredibly late.

Can you imagine it? You both cooincidentally walk into the kitchen at the same time, barefoot and glossy eyed, for some more caffeinated liquids, and have the following exchange:

ME: Hey, how's it goin?
HER: Oh, some motherfucker just came at me with this +1 mace (insert upgraded laser cannon here if you are like me and generally dislike fantasy as a genre) and I was dead before I knew what happened.
ME: Ouch.
HER: Yeah, I'm gonna load and do that over again.
ME: Pssh. You don't need to take no shit off somebody who thinks they're all Mr. Jerrywinkles just because they got a fancy-ass mace.
HER: (laugh) Mr. Jerrywinkles?
ME: You know, the guy with the mace.
HER: No.
ME: I -may- have made him up. I'm pretty tired, anything's possible.
HER: (laughing again at my constant and hypnotizing wit) Hey, we gotta get to bed before too late tonight.
ME: Yeah. Poke with a stick pact?
HER: Poke with a stick pact.
<We kiss and go back toward respective activities>

And see poke with a stick pact would be this cute thing we'd have already worked out, where we both tried to remember to do something, and the first to remember got to take this stick, that is an honored and revered stick set aside in a prominent place in the home for just this use, and go poke the other with it until both of us did what was supposed to happen. It would be even cuter because it would be just some piece of shit stick from the yard that was arbitrarily deputized for this purpose.

In this case, I'd probably poke her with the stick an hour after we'd both wanted to be asleep.

Bearing in mind that if I had someone like that, we'd do tons of stuff together. She'd probably be totally sick of me. It's just sometimes we'd wanna be nearby but in our own stuff. Hear each other say "Oh what the hell is this?" and shout ribbings at one another. And have unplanned little kitchen pow wows every so often, or show each other really cool shit we found, but without the pressure to be joined at the hip that bogs down a lot of relationships.

Perhaps I've just gone off on a tangent and shared too much.

the world may never know.

[ah-one]

Aces full of twos

Well, that was an awful lot of sleep I got.

Twas a pretty good day, but it ended on a bit of a shitty note. I HATE the fact that there seems to be no consistency whatsoever in terms of when MDF will crack as a result of not pre-drilling a hole enough. So, the presentation of the second part of the recent hardware hacking stuff shall have to wait, because it's not done. I can't make cutting noises quite this late.

I don't have a handy way of linking these things, but here are some links that I've stumbled over since the last (substantive) entry, which were saved in a draft entry, and now unceremoniously slapped together here.

Check this out - tron computers. Cheap-ass but really really cool mod from MetkuMods, one of the places that got me into hardware experimentation.

I'm gonna sell a bunch of stuff on Ebay during their freebie selling period, and so I'm looking to do the financially responsible thing and immediately roll that money over into needless computer upgrades. I found this crazy ass thing in my looking around, and though it's way too expensive, I may end up getting its much more reasonably priced little brother. Crazy looking stuff, but it eliminates the fan-style dead zone in the middle of the heatsink.

And now, the first bit of Game Grid related hackery of late. In addition to getting the lightgun stuff all happy and good, and organizing the unholy mess of wires in the back, I've now completely redone the power switch on the side, complete with spankin-new indicator LED. Pictures and quasi-amusing descriptions are available at Imperial Surveilance.

I've made a prelim list of geek projects for the summer - stuff that for the past year or so, I've been saying "When I get time..." I'm going to wait to post the whole list, but of the game grid-related stuff, I've now done 2 of the 3. Hopefully soon there will be pictures posted of the third section, and then I honestly can't think of much else feature-wise to do to it except feed it quarters. Sawheet.

Of course, really I have another idea for the game grid, that is purely cosmetic, but still respectable hackery. These lists have a way of blossoming that way.

Anyway. Blue LEDs are cool. The game grid is cool. I am the curator of things that are cool. One day women will find me fascinating and handsome for this.

For the past little bit (that's my way euphamistic way of saying "For a period of time that I have lost track of") I've been doodling more with Reason, and have found an illicit copy of a little program by Ableton called Live. It is the melted cheese to Reason's ham. The rich peanut butter to Reason's jelly. Oh, am I going to make some incredible things with this.

It fills in all the stuff that's missing in Reason, because the Propellerheads know they shouldn't bother doing what other people are better at- multi-track mixing, final effects, recording. The chorus filters on this thing are heavenly. And it supports ReWire, which means I can pipe real-time Reason audio channels into it for mixing, effects, mastering, etc. You hit play in Live, and reason starts playing. You adjust a loop duration in Reason, and Live knows before you can Alt-tab over to it. ReWire is cool as hell. Finally I can mix live reason stuff with loops and rendered audio from other sources in a really easy package, and tweak every little damn thing. Plus, it sounds absolutely fantastic. Look out for more cool stuff, even if you hated the last track.

Aww yeah. Don't have to mess with reason's pathetic-ass mastering qualities any more. It's a wonderful program, but it's a bitch to produce pro-sounding music from it and it alone.

Now I think i'm gonna watch the finale of the first season of Celebrity Poker Showdown, because I missed it the first time around, and though I know who won, I wanna see how Schiff does. It's interesting to note that Jeremy produced this show - someday I really have to meet that man. Also, the 2nd season looks bad friggin ass.

I dunno why this particular marketing-department-crafted fever didn't catch me before - my brother was obsessed with the world poker tour the first time it was on Travel Channel..but this past year or so, man, it's hooked me. I still pretty much suck at it, but I am now one of those weirdos who gets transfixed by televised high-stakes poker.

Anyway, I'm gonna go watch that and hopefully sleep before daylight, so see y'all tomorrow, same bat time, same thing with the whatever.

Hold 'em's still for sissies.

[all in]

dead baby sleep

A new TRB song is available.

the rage box - the machines do all the work.mp3

I have discovered how to do gates in Reason. And I went kind of nuts with it. You can use the drum machine as a 10-gate patch panel. I don't know if the program's designers are insane, or just the people who figure out weird ass workarounds. Either way, it's pretty sweet. What I have been trying to accomplish in vain with vocoders shall now come to fruition.

This one's short, but I like it, though it kept me up til 7am. Man, I miss the high-tempo stuff. And now I can do sweet basslines. Walter Flakus beware.

Wow. I should really go to sleep.

[unintentionally morbid mixed metaphor]

boring and obligatory summary

Weekend roundup:

Friday-
Drove around Atlanta a ton, in the course of finding the place i was looking for. Big city businesses have such cool signs. I miss Atlanta - it's changed a lot since I've been there for any significant time.

Went to Dad's garage. Saw Ask Dr. Frapples. Twas no UCB, but I'll definitely be going back.

There was one-A.M. chinese food.

and later some Family Guy.

It was most excellent.

Then there was a lot of not sleeping due to extreme heat, and reflection due to birds chirping and so on.

It was nice, but it made saturday a hell of an ordeal. On account of the no sleepings.

Saturday -

Installed a CDRW in my mom's home computer, troubleshot my dad's DVD woes, secured my mom's new wireless network. Despite express instructions on what to get, she got ripped off on a Belkin router, but whatever. It does the job, and it's got most of the stuff she needs. Though I'd have liked support for DYNDNS, so that we can unfuckulate her network remotely whenever she inevitably gorps it up.

Set her up so she's not broadcasting her SSID to the neighborhood, and generally made her home network wardriver-proof.

Fell asleep on the couch downstairs after setting up the hard-line network down there - now i have DSL-jack-in when I go there to visit. Bonus.

Talked to my dad about school and job stuff, and found my mom had jumped the gun and potentially screwed me over again. She does this thing where she assumes my dad is going to be all belligerent and stubborn about something he mentioned in passing, and so she escalates it to full-out war, and that leaves him with little option but to actually participate in the war, because she just won't accept anything but escalation.

So, something said in passing that wouldn't have been an issue is now an enormous fight, and takes center stage, when it could've just gone away. It's especially bad because she wanted it to go away, and her counterproductive escalation usually screws her out of what she's going for. Which in this case is me being free to take my time getting on out of this place. So now it's my problem, and I had to have this discussion with my dad. Bleh.

Thankfully shortly after that (and having a conversation with my mom where she was COMPLETELY unaware that she had orchestrated the very problem she sought to avoid) I got to go to Smyrna and bring Carrie back to Athens.

After that, and getting no response from Kevin, I pretty much passed out til Sunday afternoon.

Sunday -

Got up, dottered around the house - felt kind of sick and odd from the weird sleeping and 1am chinese. Set up the dual-gun system on the Game Grid, though it doesn't work on House of the Dead 2 yet, virtua cop 2 is both guns full-a-blazin. Awww yeah.

Did a lot of internal network maintenence, updated my ExternaBrain, changed some passwords, including all the ones for Knet. Discovered the magic of netstat -ta.

Slept waaaaaayyy too late today.

And that pretty much brings us up to speed.

[it delivers what it promises]

Emtarkander undersgunderson*

*- title edited to unbreak my index template

Anatomy of a blog entry:

It all starts with some notes, often just a list of links, that I eventually copy to a temporary or "draft" blog entry. When enough stuff comes together, I organize all that into some kind of related sequence of thoughts, and sometimes even a gimmick, and then the actual writing begins. I usually try to introduce things with a general statement of what's going on, what's happened since the last entry (especially if it's been a while), all sprinkled with interesting links I've found or things I've done that are accessible via the web and I feel like bragging about.

So Kevin and Anna came and went, and sadly there was no bocce in the interim. However, I'm now back to being super productive, and documenting that productivity in this here blog. I added the Gearwhore and Fluke albums to Imperial Radio, as well as a really great BT track I got off the official website while adding it to a list of music bookmarks. Apparently, it's an old one that he found and decided to mix and release. I think that's really cool, but that may be because I do that all the time with TRB stuff. Sometimes, you people are basically eating the musical equivalent of hotdogs I found in the back of the freezer. Er, listening. Audio pig intestines.

Through this part, I'll try to include lots of self-deprecating jokes, and talk to the readers as if there are more than 4 of them. It's usually about here in the entry that I begin talking about hard core geeky projects, if any have come about, and this is where the link/bragging frenzy really begins.

So today (Tues) I found a server-side RSS aggregator that doesn't have a crappy UI like feeds on feeds. It takes all my happy RSS feeds (which I now found Livejournal automatically makes- woohoo, syndicating linds and the bp) and puts them in one place, where I can read the headlines and click only the articles I want to read, without having to actually go to a whole bunch of web pages. I'd done this before with this clunky-ass portal server called metadot, but this rnews is way better.

It opened the links in the same window, though, and I wasn't havin' that. And so I did the unthinkable. I (dun dun dun) modified open source software. In all seriousness, I'd done that before, but it was to customize text or change colors or something - in a single, solitary word, it was Mac-user-grade wuss-hacking, not the full-on adding of features. So this is some pretty big shit. I had never messed with PHP, or writing to databases, or anything even juggling data about multiple users, and plus I have a pretty paralyzing fear of screwing up linux apps once I get them working. And this was a thing I really liked, and it worked, so this was pretty scary.

But, after an hour or two of learning PHP by trial and error and screwing around, I had added my feature. Since Rnews supports multiple users, each with their own feed lists, I wanted the feature to allow people to pick whether stuff opened in the same or a new window (target=_self or target=_blank for the savvy), and so I had to write that preference to the database, and make the page load the preference from the database and then adhere to it.

This is all just a complicated-ass way of saying I paraphrased some of the code in the existing documents, but it was a big deal for me. Of course, once that worked, and my house didn't erupt in purple flames, I went nuts with it, and added all kinds of other stuff. Users can now customize the titlebar of the browser window for their feed list, as well as specify link behavior, and I added a needed link to the "new account signup" page from the login screen. In the out-of-box (or sourceforge mirror) config, after the first person makes a user, the only real way to get to the new account creation screen is to just magically know to add "?newaccount=1" to the URL of the login screen. Not the most newbieproof system.

The modified Rnews is up and running, though on my feed sheet I'm calling it Imperial Newswire. If you wanna make an account, you'll have to IM me or otherwise reach me to get the super secret password. You can look at the feeds I read without logging in or creating a user, but if you create a user you can rename it from Imperial Newswire, which is clearly a more important draw than the ability to aggregate news feeds. The default picture for feeds will still say Imperial Newswire, though, so nyeah.

Often, after explaining it, I'll try to ground the geekiness in something useful, or at the very least, somewhat cool, so people can see the pitiful reasons I have for wasting my life away in the various ways that I do.

After getting this up and running, I was able to check out this bizarre Wired article. This is the kind of thing my family would devise if we had state funding.

Now, I can check out all the news that's fit to absorb from slashdot to wheaton to barry in one little page that loads fast as a bat out of new jersey. Bonus.

Later today, I got sitebar up and running, which is a nice complement for rnews Imperial Newswire, in that it is a web-based set of bookmarks useful for checking up on all the web places I like to go, but which have still not seen the holy light of RSS. Like the news feeds, I can browse and edit the bookmarks from any computer, anywhere, which already has proven remarkably convienient. I haven't created a lot of bookmarks yet, but my live sitebar is up and running here. Go on, check it out, make fun of my taste in music.

Still later today, I got Mister House back up and running on Datawhore, and lo and behold, ImperialClerk lives again, magically. I thought MH was breaking stuff and cookie-monstering RAM on the linux machine, so I killed it, but I figured out it was the RvB leeches from google (see prior entry) and am just now bringing misterhouse back.

Ahh, controlling my living room lights through instant messenger, using software I got for free from some dude named Bruce that I've never met. What an age we live in.

Towards the end of an entry, I'll impart some microcosmified story or vaguely philosophical parable in a way that might be thought provoking if it oozed slightly less melodrama.

In and amongst the mounds of TV I've managed to watch now that I'm on Patrick Standard Time (EST minus Daily Obligations,) I saw the star trek TNG episode "Darmok," which is one of my favorites. It's about a race of people that speak in metaphor, using references to stories and mythology to relate the feelings of everyday situations. This is their entire language - references to other stuff that fill in the blanks. It's incomprehensible to all but the intrepid Picard, who once again proves Troi absolutely worthless, even when paired with Data.

I do this kind of speech all the time - it's not quite "Darmok on the ocean," but it's Sports Night, or hell, Sorkin in general, it's cartoons, it's music that isn't exactly well-known. Given that most of what I write in forums like this is either to tell people HEY HEY LOOK AT WHAT I DID COOL HUH or for my own later review and self-loathing/amusement, many of these things are cryptic, so I'll know what I was feeling at the time without having to spend 9 pages of goth-album-lyric text describing it. It's even better than that, though, because sometimes references like that can do a better job of jogging a memory even when compared to 9 pages of original text. A good, generally applicable story is worth a thousand words. Shaka, when the walls fell.

I think the power of references to analagous situations is that they allow us to explain things standing on the shoulders of others, or relate some concepts in a way that someone else has already done better than we could ever hope to.

I'll usually close with a semi-cryptic line in [brackets], that somehow ties the entry in with the title. Sometimes this will be a secret or subtle link that explains the title and the closing line a little better, to clear up the crypticness. Other times it will be a link to whatever the title and the closing line are referencing. And in some cases, it will go to some kind of vagely analagous page that draws a clearer picture of what the entry was trying to do.

[sounds like a pretty lame email show you got here]

cool on the inside

A new TRB song is available.

the rage box - strictly a club record.mp3

The title's a mixture of a pun and a Wyclef Jean reference. This song is just a technical demo that grew into a song. I know I say that all the time, but in this one it's really noticible because beyond the 2 semi-neat effects, it's really, really boring. This isn't one of my better bits, but its got some complicated-ass vocoder effects, and the neat-o screechy/searing sound on the "cello" towards the end. This is a basic test - testing the sturdyness of a club by whacking it on something. Nothing more. There's where the pun comes in.

I'm trying to complete the tons of half-completed bits I have lying around my hard drive on trb, and so you can expect a rash of not so great but at least released tracks in the semi-near future. This song has been around since like November, and I've finally given up on livening it up and have just put the thing out so I can move on.

I've added a couple Gravity Kills albums into the Imperial Radio playlist. I was going to get started on the promo spot, but instead I spent a bunch of time sleeping and making a network diagram. Next up is a more service-based diagram, showing the empire from the outside.

On that note, Gravity Kills' self-titled album is one of the most perfect discs I own - from art design on the disc and liner notes, to the actual music itself. I hadn't played it in a long time, and it owns. That is all. Now it too can get old to everyone, playing repeatedly via shoutcast.

Finn actually posted to Panoa! Good heavens! Everyone run for the hills! The locusts, they come!

[15 separate automated mixer controls you can't hear]

aersome

Like the sound of thousands of choirs of angels played over the
greatest visual memories of your life, while you're on some really kick-ass painkillers.

Awwwww yeah. It was every bit as good as I knew it would be. Aersome. This was the super cool part of Carrie's welcome back party last Tuesday.

We had a little party, and we watched Turtles. On DVD. Oh, it is beautiful. It's a bit misleading to call it a season, but it is accurate - the first season was a 5-episode mini series. Which is now available on DVD. Which I am holding in my glowing-with-the-righteous-green-glow-of-joy hand above. Aersome.

[klang? did you say klang?]

i got da poison

coming in for a landing.

The school stuff is over. Completely. I've gotten past the independent study, past the everything. It's done.

Time for massive amounts of booze.

Nobody got the secret thing in the last entry. There was a secret link. It explained some stuff, I thought, but was still cryptic enough to be very me and very fun. It still makes me smile, but nobody got the thing.

The following is a mismatched amalgam of notes from like 3 aborted entries I began putting togther at various times during the Week of Hell (04):

Rearranged the playlist for Imperial Radio. In the next day or so, there will be some more CDs added to the rotation, and hopefully I will finish up an intro spot. Think classic rock station identification / monster truck rally ad.

Got the following from a google search while trying to iron out windows/linux file sharing bullcrap:

mount -t vfat -o gid=[gid of samba user(s)] -o uid=[uid of samba user(s)]
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/data1

where:
gid=group id
uid=user id

Totally saved the day. The mount command I was using didn't take into account linux's compulse permission systems, and so I couldn't do what I needed to. I can now write to a mounted FAT32 drive in linux via Samba, which means I don't have to try and back up and reformat the huge ass drive with all my various cartoons and mp3s and so on. I can recategorize and add new Mp3s and videos to the collection, and leave that bitch plugged into the linux machine. Aww yeah. Got teamspeak, got shoutcast, got spam filtering Next stop, DVArchive for linux. That machine is gonna earn its oats.

The other day, I learned that you can use the verb triage just for any kind of priority sorting. Doesn't have to be medical. I can say "Can you triage these dirty dishes for me?" and it's perfectly valid. Okay, perhaps my world is rocked a bit easily these days.

Last night at like 4am, on the University's community channel, I saw a tape of John Warnock's keynote speech at the USC Annenberg school's 2002 Symposium. In the bit I saw, which was the end of the speech, he was describing the first "digital book." It was this prayer book made on a punch-card jacquard loom. This frigging 50-page book was -woven- into silk in a process involving tens of thousands of these punch cards, that they had to design. It was essentially the first digitally encoded book, because a jacquard-loom with punch cards produces something that fundamentally isn't that different from a modern-day bitmap. Pixel coordinates = stitches.

They didn't quite hit their deadline, but they finished it. In 1890.

That's hard core, man. Plus, I like the notion that the first digital book was made of silk.

There's another entry swirling around in here about Carrie's welcome back party time. There was aersome. And I have pics. But right now there is booze to be had, and I am in a cooincidentally Cinco De Mayo mood.

Viva la no more school! Arriba! y so forth!

[i got da pulsating, rhythmical remedy]

warren!

[i felt like it]