11/26/1998 11:59.59 PM MST [6575:1]

Today's subject: 'Today commemorates my 18th year of continuous operation (beat that ihpled).'

Well, I've succumbed to peer pressure. After spending many days reading the logs of Brock and Adam, I realized how little talent it acutally took. And it's not like I have a lack of views to express. Without further ado, my first entry:

Well, the first order I should adress, as is the precedece, is my date system. It is an extremely complex system, but I will try to explain it in terms you will understand. The ten-character grouping that starts at the beginning of the log and ends at the first space in the date entry is for denoting the day the log was written. The first two digits are a single decimal number, one through twelve. This number denotes the current month. After a slash is another two-digit decimal number, indicating how many days into the month we are. After a second slash is a four digit decimal number indicating how many years after the believed birth of Christ this entry was written (actually it's now believed that Christ was born in late summer seven years prior to this, but oh well (just goes to show you Y2K is nothing to worry about, we passed it 5 years ago and never even noticed...)). The next two-digit number is another twelve digit decimal number indicating the hour, past noon or midnight, of the current day. I'm getting bored with this so I'll just skip to the only part of the system you might not understand. The number at the end in brackets is the number of days since 11/26/1980. I will get to why I put it there later in this entry.

Also, you may have noticed, this index.html isn't HTML at all (unlike the other logs). You are correct. I decided not to waste all this time with HTML when it doesn't actually matter (this is a journal of sorts, just be thankful I didn't hand-write it). Awe, what the heck, maybe ONE HTML tag, just to make the page look pretty. Hmm... darn, doesn't work. Better turn it off in case someone tries to look at this log with MSIE... As for a name, I'm open for suggestions.

Okay, today's happenings... Well, after playing a bit of Civilization II (I don't know why I got re-hooked on this game all of a sudden), I went to bed at 2:15 AM. Anna was still up and kidnapped Sandy inadvertantly so I slept with Kirby. I woke up at 9:30 AM to find a phone to my ear and Brock singing. I promptly went back to bed. An hour later, the phone was again to my ear. This time, the singer was Heather. Apparently Amber also called, but got another family member who was more respectful of my sleeping habits (I've beaten her up enough times for waking me up, she's caught on). I finally bothered to get up at 12:30 PM and took a shower. The shirt I originally chose to wear had spent hours under the anti-iron and I didn't feel like ironing it, so I chose another shirt. While(shirt!=smooth):rand(shirt)->shirt:End (have to practice my TI-Basic). I emerged at 1:30 PM to find my entire family engaged in showers.

So I continued my game of Civilization. INSANE I TELL YOU. A group of barbarians larger than the entire Chinese army? Sheesh. I got mad at India for constantly bombing my engineers so I looted Dehli with armored tanks and blamed the Romans.

Everyone by this time was finished with their showers, so I went downstairs to open presents. I received a T-shirt with a ski picture and the words "powder is cool" on it. It was indeed XL (bloody about time). I also got a VERY NICE bike to replace the one that was eaten by the cat (I parked it next to the cat food in the garage and someone left the garage door open). My mom says it got stolen but I think the cat wandered in and, after drinking some of the antifreeze we use to coat the cement floor, got confused. The handlebars and front derailer needed adjusting (of the bike, not the cat (or the antifreeze)) but it rode beautifully. Spiffy present.

I then went to Copelands for thanksgiving dinner. Rather early for dinner but oh well. Jeff had a whoard of new demos, some interesting, most rather sucky. I still wonder how they fit so much waste on a 4GB drive. It doesn't matter though, they'll be getting rid of some of it before they add more. Under 100MB free. They also are now using active desktop, which rather terrified me. Jeff and I played a game of computer-Monopoly, which was impressive. I didn't think it would be possible to electronicize such a board-dependant game. We finished a rather long and heated game in less than 30 minutes thanks to the computer and Jeff's mouse talent. I spent 95% of the game in the lead but I landed on Jeff's Boardwalk with a hotel three times. This cost me about $15,000 (I have to give Jeff credit, he had a very good (but risky) strategy going the whole time). I went to go eat cake with $95 left in my account. I also learned Jeff has no clue how to set up croquet properly. The time not spent with Jeff on the computer or eating was spent watching football home videos with Jeremy and my father. Namely last Friday's playoff game, Greenway vs the home team. Greenway lost. Interestingly enough, they lost on the video too.

The actual Thanksgiving dinner was eaten outside in the center of a heated foodfight. Olives and muffins hurling in excess of 10mph. Vicious. I think Jeff and Jeremy were the only people who actually threw food though. This is not necessarily good since they're both good baseball players and Jeremy is probably going to end up with scholarships for his pitching arm. We also spent several minutes mocking Tara's yams. They weren't bad at all, but it was entertaining (I accidentally got some in my mouth during the foodfight).

We also (well, we being Jeremy) fixed Jeremy's potato cannon. This is an interesting device. You stick a potato in one end of a pipe, hair spray in the other, seal it, then light it. This thing could easily put someone in the hospital or break a window (surprizingly considering the fact that hair spray is usually used to KEEP things from moving). Remind me to keep potatoes away from my head.

After returning home, I went to Holts to try to secure their dog (it stays outside all day but sleeps in a kennel in the kitchen). This dog is a good 6 grams of sheer barking energy. I don't think it likes me either (it's the same breed as Sandy but significantly stupider). I then returned Amber's call. Apparently it had reproduced twice while I was gone. We talked for thirty minutes. I talked to Brock as well. Then I got on the internet. I had recieved IM's from Brock, Adam, Ashley, Kim, (I'm forgetting someone), and six other people I didn't know. Most of them were to wish me a happy birthday. I remember this happening last year. Apparently there are some extremely bored people who search all the people online for people who have birthdays today and IM us just to wish us happy birthdays. Brock suggested I change my profile to give myself another birthday next week.

#ti remains taken over by an unkown force with high bandwidth, so we're using #ticalc for now. The only problem is some of the bots have #ticalc hard wired in the bot config file as +i.
*** LinkPort sets mode: +i
*** TIDroid sets mode: -i
*** LinkPort sets mode: +i
*** TIDroid sets mode: -i
I am also now an op in #idle_nation if anyone cares. Apparently, this is a replacement for #calc-ti made by it's owners, mainly because the chan wasn't about calculators (any more). The name fits the normal topic of discussion quite well, both for it's current status, and the last few months of #calc-ti.

I then got on telnet TALK with Adam to establish my password for this account so that I could actually put this page here. I could have just as easily used an IM or /msg but it's less fun that way (really, it is). An interesting question that should leave you is "How did you telnet there at all without your password?" Let's just put it this way. My password was a lot harder to figure out than Brock's.

Also Adam and I got into a bit of a competition about whether I could beat ihpled in uptime. This is my opinion on all that: Ihpled has been up four or five days now. Today commemorates my 18th year of continuous operation (beat that ihpled). I only have a 17y 51w head start though. Easily caught up. And this brings up the reason for the number in brackets on the date entry. That's my 'number of contnuous days of operation'.

That's what happened today. Don't expect logs this long in the future. I suppose I have 18y of back logs to write as well. Sucks for you. I don't remember the last 18 years anyway...potato-related injury.

11/27/1998 11:59.59 PM MST [6576:2]

Today's subject: 'Why'd you blow up the building?! Because you made a phone call.'
Alternate subject: 'Kun is gay (or bisexual).'

First off, I will now link to Brock's and Adam's logs. I'm inpressed I got those links to work on the fisrt try. An interesting fact about myself is, though I've written many web pages, those are the first two links I ever hand-typed the HTML for. I am not even quite sure how I knew how to do it... Instinct I guess. I'm too lazy.

Well, today started off with the uploading of yesterday's entry, about 30 minutes after midnight. I then spent a few minutes discussing it with Brock and Adam (Adam had logged off AIM by this time so I got another opportunity to use telnet TALK, this time from my account). Brock said, in reference to my log, "It's about time." Adam said, "It's funnier than either of ours have been for a long time." I then promptly prepared for bed. The next event is probably the most interesting point of today.

I did my standard routine of randomly wandering the house shutting off lights and locking doors/windows as I come to them. I went into the kitchen and noticed a very VERY strong odor. An odor I recognized immediately to be a very bad odor indeed. Well, see, it seems my allergies have damaged my olfactory nerves. There is only one smell I can still smell as well as anyone else. The smell of a fossil fuel. In this case, natural gas. I told you it was bad (and interesting). So, anyway, my first instinct was to check the stove. That instinct was not ill-placed. Burner #2 was indeed set to low. Further inspection showed that there was no pot on burner #2. Now, normally, this wouldn't be too harmful. So we have a hot burner and wasted gas. So what. Well, the problem was basically that the burner wasn't actually lit. And, as this was about 2 AM, hadn't been lit for a good 4-5 hours. As I informed my parents later, had the burner decided to light itself (we have those cool stoves that don't require matches), I would most likely be staying the rest of the night in the hospital and the rest of my family would probably be spending the night at the Red Cross.

Oh well. As long as someone remembers to save Kirby.

Went to bed shortly before Anna. Uneventful sleep. My dad woke me up at 9:30 AM to talk about something I don't really remember. Lunch? Woke up officially at 11:30, took a shower, active by 12:15. Continued my game of Civilization II. The Indians are now down to one small city somewhere in Denmark. And the Romans managed to get everyone to declare war against them at the same time (typical Romans (idiots)). I only hope I have time to get units in there before they are finished off (I get more points if I am the one to finish another nation off).

Somehow the Indians are still pulling an attitude with me. "We demand you break off your treaty with the evil Zulus at once." "We demand you give us the secret of nuclear fission." Etc. And then, when I say no, they have the nerve to declare war on ME? Well, don't tell anybody, but I have eight tanks sitting off the coast of Denmark. Say goodbye to the Indians. I showed Brock the map. He thought it was hillarious that the English got kicked out of England at the very beginning of the game. London is in a jungle on the east coast of South America. Right where it should be.

I went to lunch with my family at 12:45 PM. This is when I informed my parents of the stove incident. Tara and I then returned home in the Avalon while my parents took the gift-laden Durango to Barnes & Noble. Continued my game. Did a few things on the net. Nothing eventful. My mom informed me that her and my dad would be going to the football semi-finals. I asked her who was playing. She said to ask Dad. I asked her where Dad was. She said I should probably ask Dad that as well.

As it turns out, he was watching football with Einstein. We don't have cable but they do is the reasoning. So I went across the street to talk to my dad and say hi to Einstein. I don't think he likes me much (Einstein, not my dad). Though he's been a bit more cordial with me the past few days than normal. He really needs someone to do something with that hair of his... I'm beginning to think he doesn't care what it looks like. Oh well, let's just say he's special. It's amazing how mentally deranged your genetic makeup allows you to be. I don't know many mammals that are lower on the intelligence scale. And Holts should really teach him not to bark so much...

I was unable to attend Renee's dinner. It kinda made me feel guilty, but oh well. I'm sure she'll ask again. And just her luck, it might actually happen eventually, my situation permitting. She gave me a gift (which greatly increased my guilt). Delivered by Brock, it turned out to be two Hot Wheels. Only if they were about 100x larger and not built by an American toy company (like Parker Brothers or Ford). I'll take them to college with me anyway. Brock arrived late in the evening and we went out (without my parents permission) and watched Enemy of the State. That was a good movie. Definitely worth seeing, but not incredible. "Why'd you blow up the building?!" "Because you made a phone call." As Brock pointed out, Will Smith is very good at running (or acting like he's running). Then again, maybe it's computer-generated running. Brock paid for our tickets, as my birthday present. I paid for our food when I realized that I hadn't gotten me a present (all the excitement about Thanksgiving I guess). Pretty sad that I forgot, considering nobody spends more time with me or knows me better.

Got home, showed Brock my game of Civilization II, got on the net, sent Brock home at 10:45 PM. I had several interesting conversations on the net. I'm still not sure if Ash is coming over tomorrow or not. Kun and I chatted about how cute the teachers were. Bryan and Kun are in agreement that Mr. Burgess is the best looking. Kun is gay (or bisexual). Bryan is asexual. I'd ask him to show me sometime, but then I realized... If everyone reproduced asexually and then someone discovered sexual reproduction, would I want them to show me? No. So I'm not even going to ask.

Other things happened today but I forgot them. Oh, yeah, Tara is at Brea's now, sleeping over. I wrote another sentence here but then deleted it as it's contents were classified. Agua Fria beat Flagstaff Sinagua 20-7, in case you missed it (my parents didn't). Oh well, I'd better go. There's this funny smell... I'd just better not make any phone calls.

11/28/1998 11:59.59 PM MST [6577:3]

Today's subject: 'Do not look at my pancreas.'
Alternate subject: Well, as they say, the grass is always scalier on the other side of the fence.

Well, first off, I changed the page a little. It is officially in HTML now. All I had to do to change it from text to HTML is add two tags so I did it. It didn't change the look of the page at all. Second off, I broke precedent and inverted the order of my log. My log is now officially in little-endian format (earliest entry first). Just be glad I didn't choose midendian format. That could get confusing. Also, I added an extra number to the date system. This is simply the log entry number. I decided I'd need some way of keeping track since my log won't be rotated on the month like the others. Lastly, per Brock's request, I closed all my pagagraph tags. This doesn't affect you in any way unless you happen to be a web browser (in which case, I'm quite surprized you're reading this). All of the above changes were also made to prior log entries.

Well, at about 1:30 AM, I posted yesterday's log (I should note here, the date shown is the closing date and time of the inforation in the log, not the date and time the log was written). I told Bryan and Kun to go read it but neither of them did. I had every intention of going to bed at that time, but someone from Networking 1-2 caught me and we chatted extensively until 2:30 AM. I had no intention of being up that late... This was the first time in several days Anna went to bed before I did. After checking the stove, I went to bed.

This morning was the first morning since I started this log that my dad did not wake me up prematurely. I got up at around 12:30 PM and was out and about at 1:30. Played Civilization II some more. The Indians are now indeed dead. I used all of my now-idle millitary units to make a small blockade between Southwestern Europe and the rest of the world. This will prevent anyone from killing the Romans before I get a chance (I don't want to right now, we're "allies"). The Romans did manage to make peace with the Aztecs though. It's about time they were at peace with someone other than me, though I doubt the Aztecs will have much of an affect on them. It's just too troublesome getting boats across the Atlantic, even for me and my nuclear subs. I'm thinking I'll kill the Zulu's next if I can't painlessly break this alliance with the Romans. I now have 23 cities and 45,000,000 people, over 2/3 of the world's population.

At about 3 PM, Copelands arrived with our table and chairs that we used in the get-together mentioned in my first log entry. When I say "used", I actually mean, "didn't use, but broght over because we thought that we would use." Jeff came, but spent the vast majority of his stay conversing with Anna. I was expecting more guests at 3:30, but all that happened was Brock and Kari stopping by at 4.

A bit later, I went to the 4:40 game of LaserQuest. I didn't exactly do badly, but I thought I'd do better. Fifth place out of thirty. I guess I'll just have to face up to the fact I won't be getting first again for a while. It is rather hard to get first. Heather met me there and then went on to beat me by a good hundred points (third place). We then returned home and ate pizza and watched parts of old movies. Ash did indeed come over (as I mentioned in yesterday's entry), but at like 6 PM. She has learned this trick where she can hurt your pancreas just by looking at you. I said, "Do not look at my pancreas.", but I ended up in the hospital with severe pancreaticationalized lasserations.

Heather gave me a birthday present. I gave her tomato paste. Then I went to the back fence to chat with Bryan. He was engaged in furious budding (a form of asexual reproduction) on the back lawn (check yesterday's entry). When I say "lawn", I actually mean, "something vaguely resembling the topsoil of a pearl scale farm". Well, as they say, the grass is always scalier on the other side of the fence. The reason the lawn is all torn up is because they're installing a new pool. Remind me to extraopolate on this tomorrow.

What made this specific fit of asex so interesting was that Ginger thought Bryan wanted to play. Ginger is Bryan's diseased dog. I can't think of the name of the disease right now; all I can think of is bolemia. Well, that is true too. Countless times, I've seen the dog barf all over the back pearl scale farm. The dog usually does this five or six minutes after eating it's own poop. And of course, the dog then goes and eats the barf (once again, a very bright product of sexual reproduction). You know, maybe Bryan's on to to something with this budding thing. Maybe I'll have to ask him to show me how after all. As long as my offspring don't eat their own poop. This paragraph turned out much less amusing than originally intended.

After that, I spent about an hour on the road. I returned home a couple of times to alternate cars. Returned home at 11:55 PM. Watched a few seconds of a movie Anna rented about a love story involving a gay guy. Oh, and just for congruancy's sake, Moo-bunny.

The Burkes picked up Kirby quite unexpectedly this evening. My dad kept yelling at me to turn the movie down so they could talk with the Burkes. Oh well, now I only get to sleep with one life form.

In the news: Someone shot at a city bus and hit the driver in the arm while it was driving over a bridge. It fell off the bridge and landed on the roof of an apartment. Miracuoulsly, the roof did not collapse and there were survivors in the bus. The police caught the shooter. The Nasdaq rose again today to reach another all-time high. Scientists report that they have something that just might be a cure for AIDS. They'll know for sure in a year. AOL bought Netscape for 4.2 billion dollars. AOL does not plan to replace it's integrated browser. Two big oil/gas companies are planning on merging. If all goes well, gas prices are expected to drop to as low as 75¢. A new study shows that, for the first time in 60 years, the average household has a negative amount of saved money. Everyone is once again spending more than they have. Credit cards are the main culprit. Apparently, the Internet, and it's "one-click spend" are also fueling the fire.

Other stuff happened today too, but I have to go mow the pearl scale.

11/29/1998 10:42.42 PM MST [6578:4]

Today's subject: 'I have enough trouble untangling four strings of lights, let alone a few thousand.'
Alternate subject: 'Churros are good.'

Rather uneventful day. This will probably be my least entertaining log entry yet (you may have noticed each is less entertaining than the one before it, I wouldn't want to break the trend). I don't really remember what happened today before my sleeping cycle. I obviously wrote yesterday's log as it did indeed get posted. Then I probably went to bed. I was awakened at 8:00 AM by my mom and informed we were leaving for church in 20 minutes. I think this was the first time my parents actually woke me up correctly. It didn't matter though. I just went back to bed and slept until noon. I had every intention of getting up...well maybe not EVERY intention. But some intentions.

I then sat in my room for an hour or so waiting for the bathroom. Anna was cleaning it. My family returned from church soon after I woke up. Kari called about then to apologise for not going to church and to tell me about plans to come over prior to evening church. I discovered later that these plans would not work out.

I was out of the bathroom and ready at roughly 1:30 PM. Ate breakfast. Got on the computer and did some stuff I can't mention here as it involves Christmas. Then I tried to apply to Cal Poly. I continued trying right up until success at 4 minutes before I departed for evening church. Other stuff happened between there too I will outline now. At 3 something, Kari called to report she didn't have a car and would come over just before I left for evening church.

I put the Cal Poly CD in the drive (the one I had to DOWNGRADE QuickTime in order to use) and spent an hour looking for an application or any information about where to find an appl*ication. There was none. So I went back to there page on the net. No info there either. Eventually I found through the California College Board that they had the application (Cal Poly neglected to tell anyone that). So I filled it out. I did have some problems. For example, "What state do you live in? [ARIZONA]" "When did your stay in California begin?" Also, they demanded that I fill in at least one college I attended already (I did double check, this was indeed the freshman undergraduate application and not the transfer application). I put [NONE]. Then they said, "You forgot to tell us what city, your starting date, how many credits you recieved, ..." So I just BS'd through that.

The * in the above paragraph indicates exactly where notepad ran out of memory and I had to continue writing this log in wordpad.

Kari arrived about the time I had the "prior colleges" problem. She sat and watched 10 minutes or so while I finished up. Then I grabbed a Kudo and my rollerblades and we went to church. We picked up Sean on the way. We arrived at church 5 minutes or so late. They rushed through the singing/praise time so that they could get an early start on the video. This video wasn't quite as good as the first one, but insightful nonetheless. Heather went to great lenghts to keep us awake. I think she was just bored.

They have the lights set up for Festival of Lights. 100,000 christmas lights hanging from the ceiling and connected to a computer. They're a reall pain to set up too. I have enough trouble untangling four strings of lights, let alone a few thousand. They bring a cherry picker inside the sanctuary to set the lights up. Supposedly, they drive it right through the front door, though I strongly doubt the door is big enough. I think they just procure the assistance of angels. It is a church after all. Don't misunderstand me. I don't mean angels from Heaven. I mean the Albania Angels. The basketball team who's motto is "We're super tall but we suck anyway. And we have big feet." Reminds me of Brock.

Then we went to the aftershock. By "then", I mean "after wasting an hour of my time for Sean". When I was about to leave for the aftershock, I realized that only Tara and Brea were in the car. So I spent ten minutes or so searching for Kari and Sean. I eventually found them. Then Kari reminded me I had to take Sean home before going to the aftershock. I told him to walk (but took him home anyway). Wordpad sucks. I discovered after dropping Sean off that he dumped Kari during that time I couldn't find them. I have no official position on all that. Most of what I know about their relationship was rumor anyway.

This pretty much deems our four-year group of church friends dead. Nobody from the Colorado group goes to Palmcroft on even a monthly basis any more except me. Oh, that reminds me. Brock, scan those pictures or give them to me Friday. It's your choice. Well, give them to me Friday even if you do scan them. I need to give them back to Joni. I told her I'd return them in a week. It's been like 4 months.

The aftershock, skating, was uneventful. I paid $4.00 for a tiny saltless pretzel and a burned, overseasoned churro (and a drink). Churros are good. I proved to myself that I could still skate quite well even though I almost never do. I suppose you never forget what you learn playing hockey with Bryan and VJ. I miss doing things like that. Now that all the little kids moved, there's nobody to spontaneously play sports with except Bryan. And no more 3-player games of 007. That game rox. We must have spent weeks (not straight) on that game. Anyway, now that it's just Bryan and I, my most athletic regular activity is walking (or, more accurately, "running") the dog. That and looting Dehli and blaming it on the Romans.

After delivering the seven people in my car to their respective points of origin (Heather's hous and chucrh was all), Kari and I returned home. Kari's mom arrived just after I did and took her home. I had bean soup and bread for "dinner". Not bad, but nothing to rave about. Then I got on the net and began chatting with Ash about Matt. I should note here, whenever I talk about Matt with either Kari or Ash, his butt always comes up in the conversation. Of course, that disorder I have, heterosexuality, prevents me from caring. This is what I was doing when my clock matched the close time for today's log (which you'll note if you scroll up was not a second before midnight). I have school tomorrow so I don't intend to wait that long.

Adam responded to my mail but still does not appear to be home. Brock has been having A LOT of fun with his new compiler and wine (the emulator for linux, not the antifreeze-based drink) so I don't expect to see him for a while. The Internet is much more empty without either of them.

You forgot to remind me to talk about Bryan's pool. Since I'm almost out of time, I'll tell you tomorrow.

Other stuff happened today, but my bean soup is getting cold... and I still haven't bothered to begin my current stay in California.

12/01/1998 11:59.59 PM MST [6580:5]

Today's subject: It's not allegory. It's absurd nonsense.
Alternate subject:

Well, I didn't write a log yesterday. Suffer. I have a lot to write and very little time, so I'm skipping Bryan's pool and several other things once again. I'll use them when I don't have much to write.

I can't recall what happened in the early hours yesterday (prior to my sleep cycle). Something about a conversation with Ashley about Matt. I recall doing some random nonsensical rambling. She thought it was some sort of allegory. I told her, "It's not allegory. It's absurd nonsense." And indeed it was.

I woke up at 7:00 AM, courtesy of my mom. Apparently my alarm was set for 8:00. I'm thinking that's why it didn't wake me up on time. My mom drove me to school. Just as she was pulling up, she asked me how much time I had to get to class. I looked at my watch. It said 7:21.10. Thank goodness it is 1.14 faster than school time. I told her I had four seconds. The bell rang before I was even completely out of the car. No matter though, I caught up with Eric on the way in and we chatted for a few seconds. Then I went to band, about two minutes late. Mrs. Badkae didn't come out of her office, as usual, until about 7:25. There were people even later than that who were ignored. Thank goodness for cool teachers. Like it mattered though.

Band was uneventful. I finally got my own folder. Mr. Kinnaman always had about two folders per person for concert season. Mrs. Badkae somehow managed to get about four folders TOTAL. So we had to pair up. I was paired up with the musical instruments. But we finally got more folders. They are just ten times uglier than any folder I have ever had before. I am contemplating using last year's (of which I have two anyway).

I placed my folder, out of habit, in slot 42. I was unaware of this coincidence until yesterday. Apparently that's always been my slot (for the past few years). I noted Charity and Tasha were both absent yesterday.

Physics was hillarious (well, the second half). We were doing a lab with little carts on tracks. I don't really remember what was so funny except something about Isaac using the photogates to measure dissolved oxygen. Brock tried to convince us that the photogates needed calibration. That wasn't too hard to do. On. Off. On. Off. When we did the experiment with heavier carts, the carts rolled almost to the photogates, stopped, and started rolling back. The photogates were supposed to measure the velocity of the carts, which is rather hard if the carts don't actually reach the photogates. So we repeated the trial. This time, one of the carts stopped IN the photogate. This made for very good velocity readings. We threw out all the data and did the lab over again today.

Had another quiz in bio. Talked about venus fly traps and light and other stuff that had nothing to do with the subject matter. I spent some of the time sleeping. Oh, yeah, KunWoo was absent as well.

Nothing eventful happened for the remainder of school. After school, I slept. Woke up, did some research on GCC (I may be taking English 101 after all), ate, played with the dog. Oh, yeah, I also got my SAT test back. Went through and corrected all the answers I missed. That took ten minutes or so. Quizzed my mom on the verbal portion, then my dad on the math portion. My dad missed the same question I did for the same reason (in the math section). They kinda tricked you with the drawing into thinking it was a square when it wasn't.

I watched Star Trek. This was the first half of the two-part episode where Picard gets assimilated. Either I had never seen that part or I hadn't seen it in a very very long time (I'm leaning toward the latter). I played some Civilization and got on the net only very briefly. Did not write a log entry (obviously). It's 12:27 PM now so I'm going to post this and sign off. This will become one long 3-day entry.

06/06/1999+01 03:46.00 AM MST [6737:6]

Well, I made another entry after all. Quite amusing, don't you think? The layout of this page is by no means complete, and I still very badly need a name of some sort. Today was an interesting day indeed. In fact, I believe the entire purpose for today was to pave the way for the eventual consumption of a TV dinner at 3:30 in the morning (which is what is going on now).

Well, this sucks. Netscape won't open this file. It thinks it's an "X Bitmap". It also thinks it's corrupted. I find this interesting as it is called "index.html"... But I can work no further until this problem is resolved.

Well, unpleasant as that is, it seems the problem is on my end. Once uploaded, the log worked fine. Grr... stupid Netscape... Well, today today. I started today off by waking up. And I did quite a lot of that. In fact, I did that about once every fifteen minutes from 10:30 until the last time I woke up. It was mildly annoying to say the least, but, on a per-incident basis, almost all of them were definitely worth the sacrifice. The main problem was that they all chose to happen in the same morning, and always just far enough apart to catch me right after I fell back asleap.

Woke up. Had brunker (a meal that definitely deserves it's own name might I add). Did several hours worth of nothing. I need to spend a lot of time on that this summer, but I seem to have a head start. Got on the net and made the semi-annual trek to The Darwin Awards. If you haven't been there lately, you are really missing out. After that, I went to the sports complex and ran the scoreboard/lightboard/soundboard/music for the first half of the game, and then Brock took over the music portion. (Immediately following his return from Idaho, he literally went straight there from the bus station.) I was stopped once or twice during my attempt to get to the PA booth, but a mere utterance of the word, "NEEP" (followed by the word "Brock" (or ecky ecky chu-pang boyt zap)) can get you far in life.

I suppose I should add a few marginally amusing details about that soccer game. In the prior games I have been a part of, the lightboard was always blank when there was no event going on that would qualify for something to be put up on the board. This began to annoy me during this game, so I grabbed the Arizona Saguaros soccer logo (the "home team") and set the board to have it up whenever there wasn't something else to put up. About fifteen minutes later, I was using the computer to make some other graphics, and didn't realize that I neglected to turn back on the graphic after something else happened. Within only about 45 seconds, the manager got on the walkie talkies wanting to know why the lightboard was blank and to have me put back up the logo. Hillarious indeed... I wonder if he'll notice that the screen is blank the next time Rena works it. Yet one more proof of how little anybody knows what's going on. The announcer referred to the game as the "comedy hour". As well he should. Every word he said was ad-lib anyway. And he'd never seen a soccer game before in his life. Nor had I.

After that, we went to Adam's house (as mentioned in his log). Chatted for a while about math and standardized tests and about 30 other things I don't remember. And I met the oldest sibling. Then we went to AMC to ambush Bryan and Kun (and others who were not there). I also noticed in attendance at that movie Brian Baley and Michelle Whose Last Name I Can't Recall. Apparently, that was three separate coincidences. Then to Lee Anne's house. Somewhat entertaining that was, as always. Discussed sex in the Middle Ages. Why not? We end up discussing sex everywhere else! Took us awhile to get back though. (If you are confused, read it again. It was a stupid pun. If you didn't like it, go look at breasts or something like everyone else instead of reading this crap.)

After that, I took KunWoo home (just north of Flagstaff). After that, I took Brock home (just west of the Pacific Ocean). Even though I left Lee Anne's at a semi-decent hour (for leaving a Saturday night party), I got home at like 2:50. And that includes the record-breaking trip from Brock's house to my house. 9 minutes! (Yes, I drove below the speed limit (then the light turned green).) That is 25% shorter than Brock's record, though you have to consider he made that record in the morning rush hour, trying to move in the direction of the rush hour. Then... the absolute uncontested point of the entire day, I microwaved up myself a TV dinner. Quite good actually. There were only two mislocated pieces of corn (both in the green beans). I think that's a record of some sort. And this brings up one last topic... in celebration of the TV Dinner's 50th anniversary, they came out with a new hi-tech "Internet Dinner". Which is exactly the same, but Y2K compliant. It's worth the extra $40.

06/07/1999+01 00:46.00 AM MST [6738:7]

Didn't do a whole lot today. Woke up late. Did a little SMI work. Went to SMI. The cumulative test was even easier than I expected (and I was expecting it to be extremely easy). Kinda silly considering how hard some of the single tests were. SMI itself begins two weeks from today and ends two weeks after that. The final week thereof will put me in New Mexico somewhere, teaching a bunch of first and second graders. It will be fun, but I was hoping to go to Coloarado this year. Oh well.

After that, I came straight home as I was not feeling well (and I don't feel a whole lot better now). My parents encouraged me not to sleep, so I didn't. Watched TV. Helped my mom care for a baby bird that fell out of it's nest. Sandy was the one who found it, which is definitely a mixed blessing for the poor bird. It would have starved to death had Sandy not found it. The trade-off being it spends 5 minutes or so as a squeak-toy.

After that, I watched the final episode of Deep Space Nine. I was not even aware this was the series's last year until about 15 minutes before the final episode started. A good episode all-in-all. Nowhere near as thought-provoking as TNG's final episode. It reminded me of The Phantom Menace in that there were three battles going on simultaneously at different fronts, all depending upon one another. One which involved a huge army trying to avoid annhilation by a larger army, one with a small group of people going for the leader, and one that was no less than a one-on-one battle involving lots of hand combat and spiritual "force" type things (and a guy with red eyes). If nothing else, the episode really showed me how long it's been since I've watched that show. It was quite surprising to me that the episode opened with Bashir and Dax naked in bed together. Dax is married to Worf! (And I wouldn't have known that, or that Jedsia died if I hadn't watched an episode this year).

Then I got on the net and did nothing for a few hours. Then I cooked up a TV dinner. 3 mislocated corn kernels and a mislocated green bean. The one thing that disappointed me the most, though, is the fact that they didn't give me a spork (or any other hybrid-utensil). Oh, and Brea is spending the night here again. If you wish to know why I said "again", reread my second log entry. Good night.

06/08/1999+01 03:25.00 AM MST [6739:8]

Boring day. Woke up at 5:30 after repeatedly hearing "squeak squeak squeak WHAM! bump bump bump, squeak squeak squeak WHAM! bump bump bump..." The bumps I determined to be various wall ornaments throughout the house hitting the wall repeatedly after being disturbed from their resting place. I determined what disturbed them to be the WHAM! noise, which was caused by the door stopping the forward acceleration of my dog and dispersing it into the infrastructure of the house. I can only assume that the door was repeatedly colliding with the dog at a high velocity because the dog wished to move through it (not an altogether effective means mind you, but probably more productive than lying on the bed as I wanted the dog to). The squeak noises were the impatient whines of my dog. I have no idea why it had so much energy at 5:40 in the morning, but I got up, took the dog back to my bed, and spent 20 minutes awake making sure it stayed on the bed. My dad came and got it as usual at 6, not noticing that I was even awake.

Went back to sleep. When I woke up again, it was nearly 12 hours later. Decided it was probably about time to get up. I found two small packages had arrived during my slumber. A positive thing to wake up to. The first was the motherboard cables I ordered a month ago but no longer need. Oh well. At least I got them. The second was a caller ID box. Amazing my parents actually got the thing, but it was quite needed. We are now almost matched up between usage and convenience phone-wise. There was a time we were worse than AOL (busy signal wise) ... A LOT WORSE.

After that, I went to the VBS meeting scheduled for today. Decidedly boring and well under par productivity-wise. My leader is much too organised IMHO, and it's costing everyone time. I don't think she realizes that she's over-planning and that it's going to take a lot of work (especially during VBS, where we're pressed for time as it is) to make everything work the way she planned. She has already put SOOO much unnecessary effort into all of this (especially with regard to trying to organize US). Oh well. Unimportant.

Came home. Finished eating the only meal I've had today. Watched a little TV. Played a game of StarCraft with Bryan. We defeated the computers once again. Oh, speaking of that, I have now spent time playing both StarCraft and Command & Conquer...and I don't see how ANYONE could think C&C is better! It is far worse. Significantly worse than WarCraft II as well!

One last item I will mention...the war. I can't believe there are Americans who oppose it! People are being driven from their homes and shot! All of their belongings are being destroyed! NATO has repeatedly told them to stop. They didn't. How can a person morally oppose NATO taking action? If NATO doesn't, it not only means that the atrocities will continue, it would also instantly end the abilities of NATO to ever do anything again! You must do what you say you're going to do. As for NATO's current policy ... we need troops on the ground. Bombing hurts a country most economically, and much less millitaristically. And it seems quite pointless to me to try to beat a third world country into submission by threatening their economy. Hmm...this was the least entertaining entry I've ever made...

06/09/1999+01 03:02.00 AM MST [6740:9]

This time the dog wanted out of my room, I hadn't even fallen asleep yet. And it was quite a bit later than the last time the dog wanted out. In fact, it wanted out because it was awakened by the departure of my dad. Let the dog out, then finally fell asleap. Woke up again at a time I don't remember by Renee. The final time I woke up today, I woke up to Brock's voice. Quickly got dressed and took a shower (quite hard to do without getting your clothes wet). Then Brock and I left, picked up Adam, picked up money, and picked up Taco Bell (nice brunker). Won a free straw hole. Brock and Adam did too. Also got little circles with pictures of Star Wars characters on them. If it were half a decade ago, I might go so far as to describe them as "pogs". Of course that would be silly to do now, so I will relate them as best I can. They look like flat cardboard Beanie Babies.

Went home. Got on the net and watched some TV (unrelated activities). My parents went to the Diamondbacks game, which, I will add out of sequence, was quite heart-breaking. We were winning until the very end. And then a homer gave the Cubs 3 points. Sosa struck out twice. (I know all this because it was on channel 3 in case you missed it.) At sometime before sunset, I went to Fry's to get tinfoil and toothpaste (goona follow /. suit and build myself a huge exotic coolant system for my computer (no)). Then I went to Sonic and got myself and sibling dinner. My cup had a small structural defect that was not noticed for a good fifteen minutes and, even though I lost almost no drink in quantity, the cupholder sure got messed up. Hmm... remind me to clean that out before I go to bed. My mom will be mad. I also put $10 of gas in the Durango (once again to avoid the wrath of my mother).

Came home, ate dinner, mowed the back lawn (which really didn't need it, except in small spots where the dog has helped supply nutrients). Watched the aforementioned ball game. Played StarCraft with Bryan. He made a new map. Quite nice, but mildy confusing. First time I ever saw a Zerg computer beat out all of the other computers. I lost 16 groups of 24 scourges in that game (somewhere around 400 altogether). Man do Zerg go through those quickly! Brock stopped by at about 11:50PM to get various items that he should have removed a long time ago, (and he tried, but he never seems to leave thinking about why he came).

Speaking of that, my sister spent about 15 minutes today frantically looking for her keys so that she could go feed the neigbor's cat. She finally found them and immediately rushed to get over there. She made it to about our front door and realized that she had already lost them again. Took her another fifteen minutes to figure out what she did with them between where she found them and the front door. Mildly amusing to watch.

Spent the final evening hours talking with Kim and writing this log. And, for the first time in a very long time, I can say with confidence that I understand Kim. More than that, I can even relate. And not just because it involves sex.

I'll leave you with that thought, good night.

06/10/1999+01 04:06.00 AM MST [6741:10]

Let's see... I forgot to clean out the Durango's cupholder in time (no thanks to you for reminding me). Went to bed just as my dad was waking up. I woke up at 1500 (3PM) with 9 hours sleep, not bad. 9 hours is about right. I don't really recall what happened after that. Mowed the lawn at 5-something. It looks a lot better (which was the purpose), but it didn't really need it per biomass removed.

My mom was complaining to me about how I have made the shutdown time on the computer too long. I am not sure what she was talking about. Something about a "white box where you type" during shutdown. Of course, when I got on the computer, AOL wouldn't even load completely. It was something she did, I can only assume during shutdown. Took me an hour or so to fix too (as a problem requiring you to reinstall AOL usually does). The first time I tried to reinstall AOL, it didn't work. The second time, it couldn't find the existing copy of AOL! When I typed in the directory manually, it said "there is already a copy of AOL in this directory". Yes, I know. The very one you were supposed to find.

Talked to one of my many friends who is an AMC employee. Perhaps I will work there. The outlook is good.

I still need a name for this log. I stole the one that we used for our boat this fall (no, I didn't actually forget the name), but that's a very temporary fix.

That's about all that happened today. I really should actually do something one of these days...

Time to change log editors, notepad is out of memor

06/11/1999+01 03:25.00 AM MST [6742:11]

Hello everybody. I did more stuff today than usual. Not much more mind you. Woke up at 1400 (2PM), an hour earlier than my body wanted, but a few minutes later than I should have. Still nearly 9 hours sleep though, so that was good. Took a quick shower, then off to the person who has the ability to break pieces of hair off of my head. Apparently this is a rare talent. This activity cost me (my mom rather) about a dollar a minute. In addition, it took me a month (after signing up for the next available appointment) to get in to receive this service. And I didn't even get to keep the removed hair! I could have put it next to my spleen collection (you know, "the highly vascular ductless organ that is located in the left abdomin" --mid).

Ran some errands, including an errand involving my dad's birthday, and an errand involving large sums of money being deposited in accounts of mine (I really enjoyed that last errand). Oh, Brock, by the way, the money is there now. Just so you know. Do not spend more than $108.86 or you pay the overdraw payments.

Came home, sat around, got on the net (but didn't do anything due to time constraints). Ate brunker. Somebody came over to discuss something about money with my parents, so I got back on the computer and played some StarCraft (by myself, since Bryan is sleeping pending his work tomorrow). That really is an interesting map. Watched the first 15 minutes of TNG, an episode I hadn't seen before (or at least since the episode first aired a decade ago). It looked like a really good episode. Once again on the plot of scewing up the timeline. I missed the remainder of the episode as I had an equally informative conversation with company that arrived at that moment.

EBay is dead. Oh well. I hear Lincoln is dead too. I wonder which will stay dead longer... Had an interesting conversation on IRC. I said 3 quotes.txt's today, 2 short of my one-day record. Obviously, the conversation was about sex (with people who look like Janet Reno's mother). Nothing else interesting happens. Tomorrow promises to be a more interesting day.

08/02/1999+01 02:17.00 AM MST [6794:12]

Ever think to yourself, "Self, if I went back in time six hours and told you what is going to happen to you in the next six hours, I doubt you'd believe me. And not just because you don't believe in time travel."? Well, I haven't either. But it would be kinda interesting. That's the type of thing that's been happening to me a lot lately. And it's all Brock's fault. For instance, six hours ago, I had no idea I would be on my way to Idaho before sunrise. Then again, something will probably happen within the next six hours that would be equally surprising to my current self. While I was writing the headers for this log entry, linux gave me the most applicable fortune I've ever had.

Fortune: You will be attacked next Wednesday at 3:15 p.m. by six samuri sword wielding purple fish glued to Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Well, linux fortune isn't known for it's direct accuracy. But that is very accurate in it's underlying point. You don't know what the next day will hold. Sometimes you'll have a pretty good idea. Sometimes you'll have a very good idea...and be wrong. I guess the moral is, if you ever come across yourself, and you are told that you are going to be attacked by purple fish the next day, kill yourself. That way, you will prevent yourself from going back in time to warn yourself, which will in turn create a paradox that will eventually fold in upon spacetime, destroying the known universe. On second thought, you'd better not.

Lots of interesting stuff has happened since I last wrote here. Not surprizing, since it's been two months. Too bad you won't hear about most of it. But you will hear about some. I guess I left off at VBS. It went well. I had quite a full table. I had supplies for 8 but ended up with 10 (never exceeding 8 in a single day, thank goodness). Hmm... I suppose I should mention what VBS is in case some of you aren't familiar with it. Vacation Bible School. I was a table leader in a first-grade class. Eight kids per table times eight tables times two classes. That was the first grade. Now I will skip all of the least bit entertaining stuff that week and go to the next. SMI was the next week. SMI stands for Student Missionary Internship. In SMI, members of FFL who complete the OJT and attend WNL run VBS's for churches that can't afford/staff it. The trip went very well. Almost went without a hitch. Well, there was only one hitch, in that, there was only one hitch. You can't very well tow two trailers with just one hitch. As soon as they fixed the other hitch, we were on our way.

We arrived in Gallup to their first power outage in 5 years. They fixed some of the power, but we were literally on the corner of the grid. The park to the west and the buildings to the north (directly adjacent) got power. We did not. Since we couldn't cook food, we went to Wendy's...at 10:30PM. First VBS started off great. Well, it would have if someone had shown up. That's okay, 25 people showed up the second day. I have become bored with narrations of such distant events, so I will move on to recent.

Last week, I woke up to a phone call from Brock, asking if I wanted to go to Show Low in a few minutes. I promptly went back to sleep and forgot the whole conversation. (If you want to know my original response, you'll have to ask him.) He then called a bit later and got my dad, who said no. His reasoning was the fact that my mom was returning that evening from a week-long trip and she might want some family time (and she wouldn't arrive in time for me to ask her myself). Well, Brock came over before his departure (about two hours after his planned departure) anyway. This break gave my mom the necessary time to arrive. She had no problem with it. My dad forced me to mow the lawn before I could leave. And so, without six hours warning, I was on my way to Show Low for three days.

It was an incredibly fun and entertaining trip. And, as I expected, not at all as I expected. We stayed with a Mormon family with 2.8e352495 kids (rounded to the nearest gigaquintilzillionoplex). Their religious background wouldn't have been significant enough to mention here except for the fact that it was. I was expecting to learn a lot on the trip, but LDS was not a subject I was expecting. Turns out it provided the most interesting (cerebrally speaking) portion of the entire trip.

Now, I was pretty familiar with it prior to the trip, I have plenty of friends who are LDS and I guess you could consider my denomination to be in a little "competition" with it. Then again, I hadn't read much at all from The Book of Mormon or the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible. I got to learn all kinds of things that were new to me. "Quorums" and the two priesthoods and "garments" (don't ask how that came up). They gave us candy. And I think the three of us (Brock, I, and Jake) were the only males in the whole church not wearing white shirts and ties. "Yes, this is Brock and David. They are visitors today." Like it was hard to tell or something. White white white white white red blue white white... I actually got to participate in the lesson though. "It is believed that two disciples were with Jesus when he was arrested. How do we know one of them was Peter?" Because he cut off the ear of one of the soldiers that came to arrest Jesus. Well, nobody else answered it!

Brock and I also got to go to their reunion. (I'm telling the story out of order but you wouldn't know that unless I told you so just pretend I didn't even tell you.) Lots of people I didn't know, and lots of people I had very recently met. "Hey, how ya doin'?! Been a long time since I've seen you! Ever get that project of yours finished?" "Who are you again?" "Cousin Ed's boy! Too bad that accident put him in a coma or he'd be here too!" "Oh." Okay, so it didn't quite go like that, but it was entertaining nonetheless. Deanna entertained me with her many talents (I was quite impressed). Reminded me of some of my SMI kids in previous years. Anyways...

It was time to go and we were finally ready to start, but the van wasn't. Two hours passed with no success. Finally someone with sufficient mechanical know-how arrived. He wished to begin his assessment by hearing the noise the van makes when it we try to start it. You can probably guess what happened. It worked flawlessly. So we went home.

At home: did a bunch of nothing. Added 16 more megs of RAM to Undead. Found out it was fast page and not EDO (contrary to what Adam had thought). Took out the 16 megs of RAM. Put in 16 megs of EDO RAM. Put 16 megs of RAM in Jenna's computer as well. I think I'll put the last 16 megs of RAM in Pointless. It only has 4 megs in it now. Which leaves the problem of what to sell with the extra motherboard. Fixed Rena (the computer temporarily named after it's owner, not the owner). Now I won't have baby computers to worry about. That was the hardest computer fix I've ever done 100% effectively. Took me like 3 months. After fixing it, I ran into a bit of a jumper fiasco. (The jumper charts on one drive told me to remove C/D, but they failed to actually mark which jumper was C/D. I had 8 to choose from. So I cheated and looked it up on the Internet. The jumper charts on the other drive managed to hide the "standalone" option from my eyes. The result was 45 minutes of frustration and bad mood until I saw it.)

And that brings us to today. Brock told me he was coming over at 8AM just prior to going to Idaho. He arrived four or five hours late and didn't leave again until after sundown. Returned at 9:30 (exactly 6 hours ago (which shows you how long this log is taking me to write if you observe the end of time covered in the headers of this entry)) asking if I could help drive to Idaho. The idea is to go straight there without stopping, and then immediately straight back without stopping (after dropping off cargo). Then we go get more clothes and go to Flagstaff. I expect to return Monday.

And so it was finished and so it was written.

08/12/1999+01 02:00.10 AM MST [6804:13]

If you are thinking I wrote a new log entry, you are mistaken. I didn't. You already read this one. Remember? The one with all of the lame jokes and the ramblings about things you don't care about? Now you remember! See, I know you read it already.

Well, where was I? Oh, yes, on my way to Idaho. Well, I went to Idaho. I made much better time than was originally expected. Took a 15 hour layover in Idaho (including sleep, a shower, errands, and a huge tour) and still got back two days early. Idaho is very beautiful. And their house is very nice up there. Not that I don't like spiders (they proved to be very entertaining as I wrote my last log entry). The van's speedometer is too small. "The people in that sports car probably don't appreciate being passed by a minivan at 100mph." There is a lot more I could say about the trip, but most of it is rather boring. I'll be happy to tell you personally if you're interested.

After I used up the extra two days in Phoenix, I returned to the road for a trip to Flagstaff. Very uneventful. Nothing I can think of to report. Well, except that it was a family camping trip in which I and my sister got to invite a friend of our choosing. I chose Brock (try to control your amasement) and Tara chose Sam. Yes, Brock's Sam. As far as I can tell, this was a bad thing. Sam was very mean to Brock. "Go pitch your tent 500 feet that way. As far away as you can get." The whole trip was like that. Sam is quite well out of the norm in Tara's choice of friends. She's just about the only friend of Tara's that actually appreciates (and understands) my jokes about Tara. If she treated Brock a little more normally (based on their current relationship), things would be perfect.

Came home. Nothing happened. Well, actually, it's been very busy. But nothing noteworthy. Went to the Hamiltons a few hundred times. Went to a Bible study with Renee (Heather came too). Went bowling with the band. Actually I didn't. Because Brock was at the Hamiltons and for some reason would not will himself to leave. Perhaps I should have forced him. It would have been good for him. But I did get to the bowling alley eventually. 12:05AM. I sat with Adams and the people waiting for rides for a half hour and talked.

Oh, I forgot to mention, Tara (G.) and I have apparently made up. Bryan will be happy to know that I actually made up with her. Yes, I talked to her. It was quite civil, although pretty boring. At least it's a start. I'm too damn forgiving. (Any similarities between this and other logs are purely coincidental. Really. I didn't cut the above paragraph out of Tara's log, reverse the gender of all of the pronouns, and then paste it in here. Would I lie?)

There are things I wanted to write in here but I have forgotten them. Perhaps I should write them down. Oh, wait, that's exactly what I wanted to do with them! Oh well. Good night.

10/17/1999+01 12:47.36 AM MST [6900:14]

You are mistaken. This is not a new log entry. See, it's the same as last entry. Doesn't it sound familiar? No, don't scroll up. I assure you it is different. Oh, and I regret to inform you, this will NOT be my last entry. Anyways... Lots has happened to me since my last entry. Namely college. I will go into greater detail later.

The first time I recall seeing the car, I was looking through the winshield at the dash board from about four inches away. The next image I recall was at about the same distance from the car, but vast changes had occurred. The windshield had turned white, no longer transparent, and was moving inward with respect to the frame of the car. I slid off the side of the hood, about lined up with the right front tire. My bike had fallen under my feet. Quite astoundingly, I realized my feet were still holding me up. When I finally realized the magnitude of what had actually occurred, two or three seconds later, I took a step away from the car and tripped over my bike. This was the only time I hit the ground. I promptly got up and realized that I was not in significant pain. The course of thought that ran through my mind through the event went basically like this. "Whoa there's a moving car in my path." "Whoa I hit the car." "Whoa I feel okay." No dizziness. No loss of consciousness. No disorientation at all. I might as well have tripped on my shoelace while walking and not even fallen.

The driver immediately got out of the car, and some people nearby came running. They asked me how I felt and I said something like, "Okay", an answer whose truth surprised me as much as anyone. Someone commented on my chin. I touched it and sure enough, it was bleeding just strongly enough to drip a few small trickles down my shirt and on my hand. The driver got some kleenex from his dashboard (I remember seeing it in about the center of the dash just before impact). I commented I should probably stop by Fronske (the on-campus medical facility). Everyone seemed to agree about that. During this time, one of the observers got a carphone and was trying to remember the non-emergency police number. After the four of us there at the time couldn't remember, she called 9-1-1. My story gets exponentially less interesting from there. My chin was hurting a little from the pressure I was putting on it with the kleenex when the police arrived. I did a few brain-injury tests. I was able to correctly identify the day of the week and month, but I was off by one on the actual date. So they sent me off to the asylum. Oh, no wait, that was later.

I was given the privolege of doing the spinal injury test a good half-dozen times. "Push on me with your feet." "Does this hurt?" "How about this?" "John, get the sledgehammer. How about this?" A nice paramedic, I think his name was Mr. Barver, broke a few cinder blocks on my chest to check for rib and pelvic injury. Nope. They then strapped me to a board with tape, put a collar on me, put one of those cones around my face so I can't lick my privates, and lifted me into a truck marked "Flagstaff City Pound". After five minutes or so in there, (where a nice lady taught me morse code so I could tell her all the information for her forms without her having to remove the very tight neck brace from under my jaw), I was wheeled into the emergency room. They gave me one of those indestructible bracelets and one of those gowns and told me to change into it and lie on the bed. So I bled on the bed for about three hours. Then they gave me ten stitches in the chin. Then I filled out more forms. Then they told me to go away. I didn't bother asking them how I should do so, considering I had no idea where I was and my only mode of transportation got me here without bothering to join me on the rest of the trip.

I found a payphone and used the last 6 minutes of my calling card to get a ride. Ate Taco Bell, picked up a new computer at the post office (more on this later), and then took a nice long nap.

Well, if anything, I've got bragging rights. Most of you cannot claim you got hit by a truck while on your bike. And most of you cannot claim you broke the windshield with your face without breaking anything else. And I'm betting none of you can claim you got hit by a moving truck while on your bike and broke the windshield with your face WITHOUT BEING KNOCKED OVER (by the car). I guess there's a moral to the story. "Do unto others' windshields before they do unto you." Or perhaps "don't make eye contact with strangers' windsheilds." Or maybe "the early biker catches the windshield." "A windshield a day keeps the math classes away." "Do not split into the windshield." "A windshield saved is a ride in an ambulance lost." "A face in the windshield is worth two in the bush." "Do a good turn right into a windshield daily." "Love thy neighbor lest they run you into their windsheild." "Be prepared for oncoming windshields." "Always yield to oncoming windshields." "Do not run into the windshields of oncoming vehicles." Lastly, "Always wear a helmet...on your chin."

11/18/1999+01 02:16.42 AM MST [6932:15]

A new log entry? Absurd. Hmm... absurdity has been a rather prevailant topic these days. I think I'll go, for at least this log entry, back to the original proceedure of only talking about today, simply because there's too much to do otherwise. And as Tara G. politely pointed out, too much is boring, especially in my log. Remind me to spend more time mocking Tara G. in my log. Remind me now. Yes, I'm logged on AIM. You know full well I am. There? Heck no. Why would I be there and logged on at the same time? Remind me anyway, so I see it when I get back.

Ah, thanks for reminding me. I believe I'll do that now. What do you do when someone tells you "thr rbd hppptm tndng n brk ft". Well, first off, you should probably tell Tara G. to buy a new keyboard. Perhaps one with vowels. Then you should probably tell Brock to move his foot out from under the hippopotamus.

Well, the day started out like any normal day. Actually it didn't start like any other day in my life ever has. Which makes it quite normal indeed. I vaguely remember something about being asked to decide whether or not I'm well enough to go to my computer class (and perhaps something about having a conversation with Brock regarding e-mail viruses). Well, see, perhaps I should go back a step. My allergies got really kicked up two days before. So I took my allergy medication. I'd bet you didn't know this: Claritin-24 is used both for treating allergies in humans and for keeping sperm whales tranquilized. (You are supposed to cut it in half for tranquilizing sperm whales.) They call it Claritin-24 because it is able to continue either function for 24 hours straight. Needless to say, I didn't have a whole lot of allergy trouble...until I regained consciousness at least. Which was shortly after my computer class ended.

At this point, Brock came running back into the room with two tests in his hand. He was excited because he got a 42/50 on his test. I was quite proud of him. I was excited because I apparently set the curve on the test (47/50). This was good. My previous two tests were both C's. Apparently, when Brock went up to get our tests (since I was um...beached), the teacher mocked him. "Good job Brock, but DAVE set the curve this time." Yes, apparently he called me "Dave". Only a few people ever call me Dave. Of course that's what they decided to use; guess the letters are two big to fit "David" on the shirt. Adam agrees with me, do you? If you agree with me and are a devout Christian who uses the F-word a lot, you are eligible for a free green T-shirt. E-mail A123453@aol.com for more info.

By the time I was ready, I had already missed enough of math to make going rather pointless. So I went to electrical engineering. It's a good thing the drugs had worn off by that time. There was a test in there too. And my previous tests in there have not been incredible either. But the test was not hard. I believe I did much better than usual. Let's see if I can keep this curve-setting going. I'll just have to avoid anything that is used to pacify half a ton of lamp oil. (Not intended to offend whale lovers. Whales have many uses other than burning. They apparently explode rather well too.)

Came back to my room for the first half of lunch. Became very engaged in an argument on the NAU mailing list. Apparently they are of the opinion we pass our opinions on to our children, and this is always bad. They are also of the opinion that the word "freak" is derogatory and offensive. One of them called me a bigot and told me to be more tolerant of those who are not normal. I realised that they implied I was normal. I was offended. I then went to lunch. I was short on time, so I only had a sandwitch, a slice of pizza, some jello, some chips, and a piece of cake. That was not a pun, however it sounded. I really did have to skip most of my usual meal due to time constraints.

Then I went to my english class. Four people were there, other than myself. And that's if you count the teacher. It's also 4 if you don't count the teacher. I didn't count the teacher. He wasn't there. They said it was "movie day", so that's why nobody showed up. Why aren't I ever told these things? I could have eaten a much better lunch. The movie that was watched appeared to be a movie made toward the end of WWII. It depicted what someone with their brain shot out might think about while on life support. It was rather boring (as you might expect a story narrated by someone in a permanent coma to be), except for the flashback he had involving his last day in America before going off to war. Considering the estimated copyright date of the movie, I was quite surprised at how much of his girlfriend we actually saw (they even took a special shot so we could see her entire back side). I think Poslaiko might have shown this movie at one point.... I don't remember though. If he did, I didn't wake up. Well, heck, we don't need that 'if' on that last statement. I didn't even wake up for the bell... I would just wake up 10 minutes later to find myself in gov't.

Then I went to FYE. The subject was "cultural awareness". It was quite unproductive as always. Of course, it's the only class I've got an A in right now, which is why I'm still enrolled (that and it's probably less work taking it and getting the A then filling out the withdraw form). Someone brought a cat. I thought that rather interesting. And it once again solidified the primary difference between HS and college. If you had brought a cat to high school, you'd probably spend a few years serving in-school suspension (they'd say it was for the cat, but the referral would say "insubordination" and you'll find the rule they claim you actually broke in the "things you're not allowed to do with computers" section). Can't go to HS without shoes? Don't worry, just go to college naked to make up for it. In high school, if you stand in the restroom of the opposite gender, naked, with a beer, it's life without paroll. In college, it's how you find someone to take to the dance (I don't generally go to the dances).

It was only 4PM, but it was getting dark. I think it has something to do with sunspots. The rest of the evening was rather uneventful. At 1AM, we went out and watched the meteor shower from the observatory (that one that found Pluto). I saw six meteors. We listened as two rather large guys in a pickup argued about whether or not they were comets. I think their final conclusion was that they were.

Go see Dogma. Good movie. God likes skee-ball, for your future reference.

And remember, if anyone ever says to you, "nw thr whl n h ft", resist the temptation to hand Brock dynamite. Go straight to the allergy doctor. If you agree with me, write A123453 and ask for a t-shirt.

02/05/2000+01 02:13.50 AM MST [7011:16]

Ah, what a month it has been. And here I wasn't expecting to have to write any more log entries because all of the computers should be long dead by now. BUT NOOOO. Which means I have to change ALL of the didgits in the date this time (which is a bit of a pain because the date appears in this log about three times as often as you can see it (what, do you think that table at the top reads minds?)). Speaking of which, I did lose one computer...well, sort of. Technically I didn't lose it at all. But the BIOS did read "Jan 07 1900" when I took it down for maintenance. That was the most eventful highlight of my Y2K. Well, that and all the toilets started flushing backwards. Oh, and on a good note, the date lines on all of my checks did make the rollover from 19__ to 20__.

Well, this weekend signifies the ending of the third week of the second semester of the first year of my college education. I went home to celebrate this momentous occasion. When I got home, I found a nice new Dell computer (and I thought I might make it six months before micropolis got shown up, but nope). Speaking of which, I am writing this log entry on micron. Only one of the above log entries was NOT written on micron (the one just prior to this was written on micropolis). This is quite saddening, as micron is basically being retired, meaning this will probably be micron's last chance to assist me in writing a log entry.

Well well, what happened to me today... I woke up. Yes, I remember that distinctly. I seem to be waking up a lot lately. Basically as often as I go to sleep it seems. Waking up is not fun. Homework isn't fun either. Taking apart lots of computers for no reason and cutting your left index finger into lots of itsy-bitsy pieces on all the sharp metal parts is a lot of fun. Trying to type a log entry at 80WPM with said index finger is extremely not fun. What was I doing to cut up my finger so bad? I don't quite know. This is the second time I discovered a significant self-inflicted computer-related injury on my finger by tracing the blood trail to it's origin. Well, the good news is that everything I was doing that day (that could have resulted in such an injury) was successful. And that's extremely surprising considering it was all dealing with computer hardware and computer hardware never goes right.

I fixed Carrie's computer (weird CD-ROM related difficulties, a definite contender for Hardest Problem I Ever Successfully Completed). I also made some slight alterations to the ATA/66 controller in micropolis to do something quite ground-breaking. For my readers who aren't incredibly hardware-savvy, there's a slot on the motherboard that you are allowed to choose to put in either a PCI expansion card or an ISA expansion card (depending upon which you need). Well, micropolis has a lot of cards in it and I was out of slots, so I thought, "Hmmm, why can't I choose BOTH, besides the whole rule of physics that states no two objects can be in the same place at the same time?" Adam, who was monitoring my thoughts at the time, told me that there was no reason (other than that "technicality" called physics). Well, several months went by and then it became last Wednesday, and I suddenly woke up on Wednesday morning (I told you I've been waking up a lot lately). And I realized that how I might circumvent that one law of physics had magically appeared in my head while I was sleeping. I wasn't expecting it to work, though it was an idea definitely worth trying. Well, to my extreme surprise, it DID work, and now a motherboard rated for 7 expansion cards is housing 8. Aren't you proud of me?

I got a haircut today. I needed it. I get harcuts about as often as I write log entries, and more often than I do math homework. I do everything more often than I do math homework though, so I guess that was a bad reference point. After that, I washed the Durango. I wash the Durango about as often as I see my parents. I doubt if that's a coincidence. Then I went to Deanna's house. We watched Dr. Doolittle, which was amusing. And, like Toy Story, I'm glad it's so far fetched, because otherwise there are quite a few intelligent things in this world that aren't getting the treatment they deserve from me. You KNOW we wouldn't feed them dog food if they could talk.

Well, I would write more but I have to go to bed now. Good night.

02/15/2000+01 03:42.42 AM MST [7021:17]

Hmm... generally the last thing I do when I'm bored is write a log entry. Go figure. I just finished reorganizing my wallet. There are now 38 honored individuals pictured there (most of which can be found in my picture directory). This is a surprising change from what I was doing this afternoon, which was fixing micropolis. What was wrong? I don't know. It miraculously fixed itself shortly before I returned from math. But it did result in ~18 hours of downtime. And 10 kilobytes of error messages in the logfiles. Sorry (about the downtime, not the logfiles).

On Friday, Brock and I installed the last two speakers in our sound system. We didn't get around to it until now because the speakers didn't work until now. We were going to send them back to Micron, but that is a significant hassle. So I decided I'd give it one last desperate attempt at repair. (Adam and I have attempted repairs before and all we could do was make the speakers make all kinds of hideous noises they weren't supposed to.) Wanna know how I fixed them? I fixed them using my proprietary "take it as far apart as you can so that there are more individual pieces than were used to build it and then whack the individual pieces against something hard". (This method of repair was purchased from me by Packard Bell and is now a standard production step in their computers.) We ran a 25' wire from the back of micropolis to the back of the room and stuck speakers to the ceiling (directly above my bed). I just hope that mounting tape works better on speakers than it did on those aisle signs at OfficeMax. Otherwise the sound system might be waking me up a bit more forcefully than I prefer. Hmm... come to think of it, that sound system already wakes me up more forcefully than I prefer. Now that we're on the subject, I believe I should give some credit to a prank Brock pulled on Adam not-so-recently, as more credit is definitely due.

Here it was, 3AM on a school night, and Brock and I were both bored. Brock was logged into Adam's house, looking for something-or-other, and got an idea. He was already logged into deepthought, which is in Adam's garage. He then used deepthought to log into mediocris, which is in Adam's room (and Brock is apparently the only person on earth besides Adam himself with passwords for mediocris). He then turned on Adam's mp3 player and played "The Imperial March". About 20 seconds later, Adam's mp3 player was promptly shut off, and not by Brock. Upon further conversation with Adam, we discovered that he did not appreciate that joke until after a few more hours of sleep. Speaking of sleep, I'll write more later.

05/27/2000+01 04:25.31 AM MST [7123:18]

Wow, I decided to write a log entry 40 minutes ago. And it's taken this long just to start typing. It's as if something's preventing me from doing this (when in fact it's long overdue). I tried to open my log for editing, but one of my favorite registry tweaks was somehow...removed, preventing me from doing so. So I fixed it and then made a file for automating the process in case it happens again. Grab it if you want it (gets rid of the "open with" dialog and allows you to open any file with notepad). But this file is too large for notepad to open. Then I changed the table at the top to handle multiple log entries on the same day (shut up). That took longer than I expected because I forgot I wrote log entries in 1998 (shut up again). Then I noticed that I needed to add a new row to the table (which took longer than it should've since I forgot how I was supposed to do it since I haven't done it since last October). And last but not least, thanks to deepthought's new software upgrade, Adam's little program for me figuring out my continuous days of operation (the 7123 in the header of this entry) didn't work. So I ran it on dana. But that's not what you came to read about.

Speaking of which, What DID you come to read about?

I went to Jenna's on Wednesday. We made whirlpools by running in circles in her pool. We did this for a good twenty minutes. I tore up the bottoms of my feet. Oh, and on a completely unrelated topic, hampsters are so dumb, running in circles for extended periods of time like they do, sheesh! Karen, Deanna, and Shannon (Bryan, yell at Shannon for having nothing for me to link to) were there too. And some other guys of negligable importance. :) We also attempted to drown Jenna, but only had partial success. Then everyone else left. However, Jenna and Mom.Jenna (yay, an excuse to use object-oriented programming) fed me pizza, for which I am grateful (moreso than object-oriented programming, for what is programming without pizza?).

Today, I went to Heather's graduation party. I knew a ton of people there. Out of her about 30 relatives there, there were only about 28 I didn't know. Oh, and she had it at a house other than the one she lives at. She lives at 59th Ave. and Cactus. She had it at 46th St. and Tasmania. Not to imply I actually remember crossing the Pacific Ocean in the Avalon (not to imply the Avalon couldn't cross a major ocean (it's done it already (Toyota is not technically an American car, regardless of how many times you've heard the word on TV (same goes for Nintendo)))).

I'm hungry.

My mom made me juice grapefruit. It's not that it's a hard job. It's that there are soooo many of them. And then you cut them in half, which doesn't help matters I assure you. It was a 10-gallon barrel full of them. It wouldn't've (double contractions were declared proper grammar by a unanimus vote of the Board Of People Who Are Adam) been nearly as troublesome if that 10-gallon barrel were full of say 20 huge grapefruit. And it would have been a bit more pleasant if they had been picked when ripe, and then juiced relatively promptly thereafter. But NOOO. It had to be three months after they were picked and it had to be like 800 little grapefruit that, if left in the sun another week, I could sell for titanium golf balls (with a little genetic engineering, I might just have you seedless golf balls by next season). Took me four hours, and I produced about a gallon and a half of juice. Hmm... that would be about $20 worth of minimum-wage labor for about $2.50 of grapefruit juice. And, considering how much our family drinks it, it's probably not even worth the $2.50 (and don't tell me home-squeezed tastes better, these sat outside in that 10-gallon barrel for 3 months).

Wow, this entry takes up almost an entire page on Micropolis's monitor. I haven't written a log this long since February. The fact that it's only one log entry ago is beside the point. Anyone heard from Brock lately? He said he was going to California like a week ago and then he suddenly disappeared. However, the existance of California is still suspect.

Have any of you looked at todays Arizona Republic? Scary stuff. It seems that about three square miles of Peoria were destroyed in a small nuclear blast that originated from Adam's house. Here's an excerpt from the news article. "Friends said the fan seemed unusually depressed in the days preceeding the incident. An expert linguist present at the scene reports that the fan may have been trying to communicate with police just moments before the explosion." You can read about the background of Adam's cieling fan here.

That is all for today. Don't forget to listen to the rubber ducky song before going to bed! Good night. Oh, whoops, better change all my deepthought links from 'http://deepthought/whatever' to 'http://www.auk.cx/whatever'. One DNS's fine for me and not for all of you. The other DNS's fine for all of you and not me. (I have no idea why, so it must have something to do with AOL. Either way it's annoying. Perhaps AOL's DNS admin is running in circles trying to make whirlpools.)

04/15/2001+01 06:39.42 PM MST [7446:19]

Computers are fun. Here's why.

How It All Began:

About a week ago, I was sitting on IRC, and suddenly someone sent me a message (and a file). The message was that spaceheater is insecure and the file was a security report on spaceheater. Well, there were lots of problems in that file, but the only one that I wasn't already aware of (and, in most cases, had already fixed) was a bug in my FTP server. Seems that it has a security flaw that would allow someone with a lot of free time on their hands to get administrative access on spaceheater. This is bad of course. I would probably have left it at that and just said darn and gone on with my life except that there was a really nice convenient link to more information. So I followed that link. I had no idea the Pandora's box I was opening...

If It Aint Broke, Don't Mess With It:

I followed the link to the bugtraq page. They gave an explanation of the problem, and a link to the places to go to find out more about fixing it. So I found my system on the list and followed the link. Sure enough, the page for my system said, "Yup, if you've got Slackware 7.1, you've got a problem." And, conveniently, a little farther down on the page was the fix and exact detailed instructions on how to install it. Great. So I downloaded it, followed the instructions to the letter, and rebooted. When the FTP server tried to start up, it gave an error saying that my glibc is too old. See, apparently, they made this patch for Slackware 7.1 by taking the non-broken FTP server out of the new version. Well, they aren't exactly compatible. So, I went and got the new version of glibc (which turned out to be exactly the version the new FTP server was asking for, hence my above conclusion). And I installed the new version of glibc. And I rebooted. Good news. The FTP server didn't give any errors. It didn't start up either. And, upon further inspection, the HTTP server software (the one that sent you this log) wasn't running either. Doh. And then there was day and then there was night, the first day.

The More You Struggle, The Faster You Sink:

So, went back to the Slackware site and downloaded ALL the upgrades. And I upgraded EVERYTHING. Well, that did a lot of nothing. The FTP server was still broken. The HTTP server was still broken. And now other random things were breaking too. I decided to concentrate on fixing the HTTP server. So, I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, and rebooted. Guess what? It didn't fix it. Tried again, nope. Tried a third time, and noticed it was still there after me removing it! So, I uninstalled it, DELETED it, and reinstalled it. Guess what? It stayed deleted! Repeated attempts at reinstalling did nothing. Empty directory... This was annnoying. So, I went out to seek professional opinion. And I found some. See, apparently there's a little detail I neglected to learn. You're supposed to, before upgrading any of the packages, remove the ones you're about to upgrade. NOBODY TOLD ME THIS!!! It definitely didn't say that on the instructions for installing the patch. It didn't say this on the download pages either. And the installer didn't say this anywhere! And then there was day and then there was night, the second day.

Abandon Ship (But Save The Captain):

The professional opinion was that I was done for, time to start over. So, I backed up the necessary files (including of course this log), downloaded the newest version of Slackware, and tried to reinstall. NFS was the necessary method, which means I needed an NFS server. Well, spaceheater was my NFS server! So I had to fix linux on undead (and I use the term fix quite loosely, more along the lines of make temporarily functional). Actually, this went quite smoothly considering how badly it's gone in the past. Once I figured out undead's exports was messed up too, I was in business. Did a very nice install of Slackware on spaceheater and rebooted. Installation went great, but after the reboot, oops, no fstab! Dead in the water. Tried again, nope. Took me a few hours to realize that my rootdisk was the one from Slackware 7.1. Made a new rootdisk, and sure enough, that fixed it, back in business! Well, now I needed to recompile the kernel to support my various hardware of course. I decided this would be a good time to upgrade to kernel 2.4.3. But it wouldn't even unzip! And then there was day and then there was night, the third day.

Things Don't Last Forever:

Well, I woke up the next morning, after having left the computer off all night (after all, it's kernel was broken, no sense in leaving it on). It's important to note that up until this time, I had only been resetting it (not shutting it off). Which means this computer was last shut off nearly a year ago. Guess what? I pushed the power button. Nothing happened. Pushed it again, nothing happened. Pushed it lotsa times. Nope. Fiddled with cables. Kicked it. Nope, nope. Took spaceheater out of it's niche, grabbed a power cable, and changed outlets. Nope. Took off the cover, got rid of excess dust, checked all power connectors. Nope. Kicked it. Nope. Removed, cleaned, and replaced all connectors. Still dead. Removed the power supply and checked it manually. No response. So, time to disassemble the power supply and check fuses/fans. Chances are I'm at a dead end, but there's nothing better to do.

Watch It, They Bite:

Well, one of the power supply screws was stuck. REALLY stuck. The screwdriver slipped out of my right hand and landed in my left, making a nice deep gouge in the palm of my left hand. I got to wear a bandage around my left hand for the rest of the night (actually, it was a hand towel, I couldn't find any bandages). Any of you who know me in real life feel free to request to see this gouge as proof that this story actually happened. ;) Well, after getting over the shock of my injury, I got back to business. Got that pesky screw out (a bit more carefully). Cleaned out all the excess dust and checked the fan. Fan was good. Checked the fuses. Couldn't find any. Doh. That means I probably took a beating for nothing. Put the power supply back in, hooked everything up, and tried it again. Doh. Nothing. Then I realized that it may not be the power supply but the switch. It's a proprietary Dell ATX-like thing. Overrode the switch panel. On everthing came.

Fresh Apple, Rotten Kernel:

Downloaded the kernel again. Keep in mind, I'm having to do most of this downloading with modems; any other method would involve rewiring my room, since all wires lead to spaceheater. Unzipped it, configured it, and compiled it. Error. Compiled it again. Error. Reconfigured it, compiled it again. Error. Again. Error. Downloaded it again, reconfigured it, compiled it, error. Error. Got into the source, found the line number, started fiddling with things. Got past that error, new error farther down. And below that. Gave up, searched for professional assistance. "Oh, yes, kernel 2.4.3 breaks whenever you try to compile it with IPX." Uh...okay... Removed IPX. Worked. I thought I was finally back in business. Guess what? There's still three days I haven't covered. And then there was day and then there was night, the fourth day.

What Goes Up, Must Come Down:

Tons of things were still broken. DNS (the zone files somehow got restored one directory too deep). SMB (forgot to update the config). Modules were a bit messed up. The little things went by quickly, and are not very noteworthy. Finally, just as I was sure I was done, the computer locked up. Ctrl+alt+del did nothing. Not even num lock worked. Reset. Continued what I was doing. Locked up again. I then realized that the lockups were corresponding to an eggdrop being run every five minutes. I was confused, but I figured the eggdrops, which were compiled for the old system, are somehow locking up the new one. Recompiled my eggdrop (was not the problem eggdrop) and tried it. Locked up the computer. That breaks that theory. So, I got back in the kernel config and started fiddling with things. Recompiling kernel after kernel AGAIN trying to get these lockups to stop. No luck. And then there was day and then there was night, the fifth day.

SMC, IBM, And Tulip, Oh My!:

The lockups seemed to happen even when the eggdrops weren't running, after a few hours. But I did determine that I could stop them by unplugging the cable that goes up to the microwave transmitter. Now everything worked great for me, but nothing worked on the net... Gave up on the lockup problem and decided to pursue a (later to be discovered related) token ring problem. The IBM card wouldn't work when the Tulip was enabled. And configuring the IBM card locked up the console (not the whole computer luckily) when the Tulip had already been configured. Two hours of testing and that's pretty much as far as I got. Went on to the third problem. The firewall. With all this new software, the old configuration wasn't going to work anymore (ipchains to iptables). Well, I've never considered the howto's on those exactly easy reading. But the new one seems especially hard. I guess it's just because they did a poor job of defining their buzzwords before using them. (Like the similarities and differences between "target" and "policy".) What did I get accomplished today? Well, nothing actually. And then there was day and then there was night, the fifth day.

WHAAAZZZZUUUUP, And Other Things That Get Old Quickly:

Well, by now, this lockup problem has been plaguing me for over two days. The longest single problem so far. I'm rapidly running out of ideas, and I'm not too happy about it. So, finally, I'm basically down to my last idea. When I unplug the cable to the SMC adapter, everything works. So either the SMC card is broken (in which case I need to replace it), kernel support for the card is broken (in which case I again need to replace the card), or there's a problem with my current setup. So, let's start by testing the setup. If the Tulip and IBM work without the SMC, maybe the SMC will work without the Tulip and IBM. So, I removed the Tulip and IBM cards. Success! No more lockups. Okay, now, to put back the Tulip. Still, no lockups! SMC works alone. SMC+Tulip works. IBM+Tulip works. SMC+Tulip+IBM does not. There's only one test left. SMC+IBM. Sure enough, that one didn't work either. So, when the SMC and IBM cards are both together, things don't work. This contradicts the experiment of the day before, which seemed to think it was Tulip+IBM. But anyways... Then I remembered I had the computer slightly overclocked. So I brought the processing speed back to spec. Didn't fix anything. So we're down to these possible problems. First, either the SMC or IBM card is broken. The solution would be to replace one or the other. Second, for some reason, the kernel doesn't support both simultaneously. The solution would be to replace the SMC with a different brand. Or third, there's some sort of hardware resource conflict. And then there was day and then there was night, the sixth day.

Follow The Blinky Light:

Now I have already checked all the different resources very thoroughly and am very confident there are no conflicts in any of the major types of resources (IE IRQ). But Adam once mentioned a problem with the IBMTR cards not supporting 64K of shared RAM. And my card was set to 64 megs. So I turned it all the way down to 8 and tried it. Still locked up with the SMC. Next on the adgenda is to eliminate the possibility that the IBM card is broken. Swapped it out with an identical spare. Same problem. Okay, I'm at my absolute last option. It's time to swap out the SMC card with a card of a different make. Got out my box of ethernet cards. I was searching for a card that, first, was not ISAPnP (those are more trouble to configure). Then, if possible, was ISA. No need to waste a more expensive PCI card on a 10Mbps network segment. Then, was a clearly discernable chipset, which would make recompiling the kernel easier. And, lastly, as a tie breaker, the one with the most blinky lights on the back. The winner was a NetWorth UTP16A. Time to find jumper settings so I could configure it.

My Luck Finally Changes:

On to Compaq's web site. Found the NetWorth page. Found the NetWorth UTP jumper settings page. UTP16B, UTP16C, hey, there's no UTP16A! Spent an hour on Yahoo. Nobody seems to know the jumper settings. Doh. Back in the box. Just then, I noticed another card that looked almost identical. It was a UTP16B! But it was ISAPnP. Doh. Oh well, I'm already at the Compaq page. And maybe there's a way to use software to configure it and disable the PnP. (And who can resist a card with no less than SIX blinky lights?!) Sure enough, Compaq's page had such software. So I put the card in lyagushka (after downloading the software) and rebooted. Oops, the computer crashed. Oh, that's right, the default configuration of the card probably conflicts with something. Booted to DOS. Ran the config program. Configured it to the available resources, took it out of lyagushka, put it in spaceheater, took out the SMC. Recompiled the kernel with NE2000 support instead of SMC support. Rebooted spaceheater. THE LOCKUP PROBLEM WAS FIXED!!

One Final Hurdle:

I returned the computer to it's orignal state of overclocedness without any adverse effects. An hour or so in #linuxhelp gave me the clarifications I needed to get the firewall back online (the target they wanted was "SNAT", not "ACCEPT"). My network was for the first time in six days FINALLY back up. I looked upon what I had fixed and I saw that it was good. And on the seventh day I rested (and wrote a log entry).