Hello, all

My life is currently in something of a ridiculous miniature turmoil. Too chaotic, stressed, and busy to take the time to even begin to journal all of it. Will be seriously off of Slashdot until further notice (expect something like 2 months or so, I really don't know).

Take care, all of you. Thanks for your time.

Using up the recent deluge of mod points (thrice in about a week! All from being to busy with Jabber to spend more than a minute or 2 here...), I did a few mods that I figured would be likely to get M2'd unfair*. One was an AC reply to some flamebait which I modded funny, because well, it was, I don't give a flying fuck if it was OT.

(*-no, not because I wanted to be M2'd down, but because I thought they weren't unfair)

Another was this little gem. Now, my understanding of the term "Troll" is that "trolling" is a variation on "trauling", and originally referred to a sort of fishing, eg: "trolling one's hands through the water". It refers to (more or less) a comment designed purely to get a significant angry response- specifically a response in the form of replies, rather than somebody merely getting quietly offended.

Some others had modded it up as "insightful" and "interesting", but it seemed clear to me it had it all. It was:

• Contentious
• Offensively worded
• Able to generate at least 10 direct replies (I didn't try to count the total replies under those)
• Wrong

Anyway, no, this is not a reply to that. This is a reply to the M2ers who can't smell a troll when they're shown one. Yeah, I often m2 downmods as unfair, but if there's any doubt I prefer to leave them "dont' know". And it was a troll, I don't care if you agreed with him or not. People here often refer to "groupthink" on the site, but I still suspect this works both ways...

Any comments welcome, but bear in mind I'm still finding myself not spending much time here nowadays, so apologies if I don't respond (either soon or at all). OTOH, I've got a bunch of other things to journal about too, so... :P

[Addendum: Oh yeah, and if you were one of the people that M2'd me down, don't be afraid to say. I won't foe you or beat you over the head with a blunt instrument or anything, I'll probably just scowl at you a bit and tell you that it was a troll so ner]

I wasn't expecting This!

After my last JE (and a couple of comments following it), I've found myself not on Slashdot much the past week. Not just because of the whole GMail epidemic getting my goat, but also because of copious IMing with my nice shiny new Jabber account (and not so nice Jabber client- unfortunately the only one I could find that I could use >:( ).

As such, I was rather surprised last night when I logged in briefly out of habit...
...and saw "You have 5 moderator points! Use 'em or lose 'em!"

I'd been quite sure from the way I'd not had them for the past 2 or 3 months or so, that I must have got RTBLed when I started regularly M2ing, due to my maybe slightly idiosyncratic fairness criteria (I put a much higher fairness requirement on downmods than upmods, and am not very tolerant of "redundant", for example). But apparently not!

Now, although I often look through people's old JEs and comments, I don't comment half as much as many of you. But that bit in the FAQ about picking people who're somewhere in the middle of the bell curve... well if my usage was so high that it took a week of reading little and posting *nothing* to get back to "normal", then most of you lot must be completely off the scale.

Just a bit of food for thought for others who've not seen mod points for aeons (but yeah, I'm aware of the whole "Great Slashdot Troll Post Investigation" fiasco, and how the people involved literally haven't had points for years). Eh, and now I have to find someplace to spend these things. Their shelf-life seems a bit longer than it used to be, interestingly- perhaps they realised that if people have to use them all at once, they'll be less likely to moderate thoughtfully.

(apologies to Btlzu2, BTW, for leaving that last comment to go unreplied to for so long- and to other people whose comments I left unreplied too, for that matter)

[Update: and then a couple days later... I got them again. And then yet again a couple of days after that!!! I wonder how much commenting affects the usage statistics as far as selecting moderators goes]

[or, "Tomble goes Apeshit"]

You can all take your GMail, and stick it. And the donkey you rode in on (but not the donkey's donkey, of course, because as we all know, donkeys aren't commutative).

Pretty much all of you are jumping on GMail, and it sucks. It's pretty much everywhere I turn. Even people who don't see the point of GMail want it, even people who don't intend to use it want it, and I think it was the last straw for me when I spotted Sol of all people, who has quite vocally pointed out how she doesn't like Google, has got a GMail account too!

Am I really the only one who couldn't give a flying fuck about stinking GMail? Yeah, gape in amazement at threaded comments. It's like you can see the course of a conversation, wooo! I don't think even my shittest mail client can't cope with that!! Spam blocking? I get a handful of spam in a bad week. I mostly have to worry that people's legitimate emails can get eaten by the uptight filters. Don't have to delete mails? I've not had that problem for a LONG time, using POP3.

When I recently asked WTF it was that made everybody so excited about a souped up webmail system, I at least got some answers that hadn't occured to me. Apparently it's useful to be able to access it from anywhere. But it seems to me that using such a thing as a PDA with some sort of wireless shit (802xqpfns.3232 or whatever the fuck the latest wireless shit is), you could access decent POP3 email from almost literally anywhere anyways. I don't have a PDA because I can't afford one and don't really have much need for one, but I'm sure most of you lot could on both counts.

Is it really so terrible to not be able to access your email for a little while? If you want to get it from your office (where applicable), can you not set up an extra account in your mail client there? Meh, I know nothing about offices, don't ask me.

Apparently the other advantage of webmail is that it's so easy to set up, which is great for people who don't know how to use computers. Um, hold on, what site am I on again?...

No, this isn't sour grapes for not having an invite- if I wanted one, I'd ask for one- there's no shame in doing such a thing when everyone else does. But I like the way many of you wave the word "groupthink" at the people on the front page...

Hey, at least not everybody wants it. Now, if you'll all excuse me, I'm off to my concrete bunker of POP3ness, to don my tinfoil hat and write some Perl scripts to mix pineapple flavoured booze with pizza, and fling the whole mixture out the window at God's SUV. Despite being perl scripts, these scripts will be released under GPL as I am a stinking commie hippie godless heathen zealot. Oh, and I think I need to lie down and maybe get some sleep, goodnight...

(yeah, you can have the crack pipe back, I'm done with it for now)

A says it's avocado,
B says it's clementines.
C says it's pineapple, and he always knows.
He was brought up in Hawaii, yeah, Hawaii.

--Pineapple (Jah Wobble)

One of my favourite basslines, and rather nice with ham, or gammon. Even if that ham is sitting upon a pizza.

PS- Tomato is a fruit, yes it is. Suck it up.

OK, this one's driving me fucking mad.

My first clues that something was going wrong started several months ago. Our ISP always disconnects us after 120 minutes without fail, as a matter of policy. Very occasionally, when reconnecting, I'd find the new connection didn't seem to work right somehow, but I wasn't sure what was going on. I assumed it was the p2p client I was using at the time, not always being able to deal with the change in IP address.

Since then, early this year, I realised when using more conventional internet stuff, that I wasn't able to resolve any domain names. I looked further into it, and found the problem seemed to be that I was getting connections that somehow didn't have any routes defined. It was working such that when I gave the "route" command, it'd just sit there indefinitely until I killed it! The routeless state remained until I disconnected. Reconnecting again, it seemed to work. But I soon found that the screw ups became more and more frequent.

Now, I'm inclined to blame Freeserve (hock-ptui!) as they clearly changed something that made shit break, but my parent's Windows machines don't seem affected, and it's pretty obvious the route command shouldn't be acting that way. If there's no route, it should be less shit about it. Although of course the route command is just a symptom. Probably.

Well, I'm getting a bit desparate now, because just now when I tried to get online it took me about TEN TIMES of "connect, test route, disconnect, wait a few minutes, start again" before I got a working connection, and I don't see it getting any better. A few weeks ago I tried upgrading the ppp packages to the ones from Debian/Testing, figuring there might have been a fix, but it made no difference. Does anybody know where this comes from?

(apologies for unanswered posts, I've not slept since, uh, some time yesterday, I don't know when, and I just had to rake the lawn this afternoon in the baking heat, and then I ended up stupidly double-posting what was meant to be a quick message in e2.com, and embarrasing the crap out of myself, then getting incredibly confused with opening too many browser windows trying to do I don't know what. What am I saying? Don't know... I'm saying I'm worn out and I'll be back tomorrow probably when I'm capable of writing more, and thinking, yes that's handy. I'm only writing this because, well, what I said before. Must sleep now. Bye)

(PS Apology for lack of coherence too. I'm sure you get the picture)

Beetles, under my carpet, under my feet...

Well, not quite. For the past 3 hours or so (well again, not quite, because another hour's passed now) I've been dabbing away at my Dad's crassula plant with a tiny little paintbrush soaked in meths. The thing was covered in Mealy Bugs, which are officially Teh Suck. Apparently the usual treatment is Malathion, but apparently crassula are allergic to it (as my dad put it). As he was busy with other stuff, he got me to do the job instead.

I'm only glad it wasn't a bigger plant, it took so long to get them all -and due to the way the leaves are, many were very well hidden. I'm not certain I got them all, there would likely have been 2 or 3 left, but maybe I'll be able to see any survivors tomorrow. We're also probably going to repot the thing, especially because there's a chance the little bastards will have got into the roots. DIE, YOU DIRTY LITTLE FUCKSTICKS

For any mealy bugs reading this, sorry, it isn't anything personal.

Philhasomething

I can't decide whether this woman is a troll or has some sort of personality disorder. She seems to have been "doing the rounds" in everybody's JEs recently. Really not sure what to make of her, much of what she says seems entirely random, or sounds like she's making some sort of joke or trying to be artsy or whatever, then every now and again she seems to come out with something pretty vitriolic for no obvious reason.

Reminds me of some of the GNAA stuff at times, or those Markov bots (you know, the ones that randomly generate vaguely meaningful looking text based on Markov chains. There was a "Markov Blogger" too IIRC). She also seems to produce JEs of a similar style at a phenomenal rate, and then delete them again (ATM the earliest is from the 11th, but I'd seen earlier ones before). Very odd.

Yeah yeah, "don't feed the trolls", but I never bought in to that philosophy 100%. If someone says or does something that's way out of line, I prefer to bring attention to the fact.

Other

I had another JE I was going to do, but I can't be arsed now. My feet are soggy from having to water the garden, and I'm kind of tired, and I'm watching a spider possibly going to catch a clothes-moth that's on the window, although that's not relevant in any way shape or form. Fucking clothes moths. Hate them. Oh yeah, and I've still got more repotting to do, but I at least seem to have found a halfway decent soil mixture (although the proof of this will probably not be seen for a while).

[there doesn't seem to be a /. topic for health, fitness, or exercise. Funny, that]

After a few weeks of extra slackness (mostly due to a flurry of emails between Interrobang and myself taking up much of my time), I figured I'd try taking Creatine for a bit to try to catch up on my weights again. For those that don't know, creatine is a supplement for helping your muscles recover quickly from exercise, giving them more energy, whatever. It's produced by your liver, and you get a little from meat, but both in small amounts. Creatine isn't steroids*, and I wouldn't take those: I don't think that getting bigger muscles would be worth getting smaller elsewhere, do you?

(*-I know, there's different types of steroids)

Anyway, obvious effects I've found from taking creatine this past week or 2:

• I got a splitting headache on the first or second day of taking them. I rarely get headaches. I think it must have been dehydration (creatine needs a lot of water to absorb, and you're supposed to load up with extra creatine the first 3 or 4 days). I've not had the headaches since though.
• I seem maybe able to last a bit longer with the weights, but unfortunately I'm still unfit (bad cardiovascular fitness), so I get exhausted about as quickly.
• I'm about 7 quid poorer (I was lucky I found some reduced at Holland & Barrett after shopping about; unfortunately they're in capsule form, which is apparently not so good)
• Every so often I seem able to smell creatine. This may be because (according to an article I read from the BBC a few months back) people who take creatine start to smell. Oh dear.

FWIW, Creatine has a bit of an earthy flavour. Not earthy like black bean sauce (yum!), but earthy like, well, earth. Hmmph. Well, I've tasted worse, and it's quite tolerable. It's also worth knowing that (according to most articles I've read about the stuff) creatine should not be taken with fruit juice, because this apparently turns it into "creatinine", which is the waste product, which does you no good. Water is the thing to take it with.

I think I might have done better if I were able to eat much more. I'm not too good at that. Being able to exercise harder is all very well and good, but if your body doesn't have the means or the opportunity* to actually build the muscles, it's not quite so useful.

(*-contrary to popular belief, muscles only grow whilst you sleep, not whilst you exercise)

(Later): that was initially written as part of my previous JE, but the whole thing got too big, so it's here instead. It's now been more like 4 weeks, which is slightly longer than is generally recommended, but OTOH I've been taking less than the recommended dosage and I missed a couple days this week, back when I was trying to sort out the various upgrades and installing the Jabber client(s). There's only about a day's worth or so of the stuff left now.

Meanwhile, I got a bag of red lentils, and a bag of soy mince. Not because I'm a vegetarian (I'm not), just because it seemed a relatively cheap source of protein, that's not going to go off, and that's decently filling. I'll probably try to make something edible out of that tonight, other than Soylent Red (for which I don't have the recipe). Rice will most likely be involved.

Is any of this of interest to anyone? Probably not, but meh, there you go. It seemed worth writing about, anyway.

(or so it seems)
Miscellany for all the family; batteries not included

You cannot post to this page
It happened again today, twice! WTF is it all about? Is this what GMHowell would call "a clusterfuck"? Pah. I'm supposing the URLs for the comments are going wrong after a few previews. Or perhaps it's due to having my IP change between clicking "reply" and clicking "preview" or "submit". Who knows. Obviously you buggers don't! :P

(Since writing that, it's just happened again. Don't think it's the IP address. And happened again, so I don't think it's getting the URLs screwed up. But other people are commenting in other JEs and the front page, so...)

What can I say. Leviramsey recently revived that idea of the JE circle migrating from /. to some new site of our own (perhaps one where we can shut out all the stupid ACs). The idea has more and more appeal every day, I think. Meanwhile, I have various comments and replies I can't post. How frustrating.

Creatine
(deferred for future JE)

I think you are a plant
Recently got around to repotting one of my tiny bristlecone pine seedlings. It had been in one of those little plastic film cases (with holes punched in the bottom, of course!) for about 3 years, but wasn't looking too well. It seems to be doing well now, which is nice. Often things I repot drop dead pretty quickly. I'll have to get around to doing the other one, and put those photos I took on my website. Speaking of which,

MMSS
My lame website management thingy (I've never been 100% sure WTF it actually is, my best guess is it's a "CMS"), MMSS has turned into a massive PITA. After I finished completing the changes I needed to make so it could take page layout info files in the form of configuration data (which could be written and edited by scripts) rather than m4 macros, I found that although it finally worked as I wanted it to in functional terms, it did so so slowly that my old ZX Spectrum could probably have done the job faster. My Linux box is old, but not that old!

So I came to the conclusion that doing the page generation in m4 rather than Perl was in fact a humungous mistake. The plan is now to get Perl to parse the config files, and use m4 purely to extract inline commands from the included blocks of text, which it should at least manage to do at a reasonable speed (it did OK whilst the tast was trivial, and I think this is trivial enough for it!)

Unfortunately, untill I finish that (and I've kind of lapsed in the past few weeks), I can only update my site using the older version of MMSS (which worked but wasn't so slow). Unfortunately, I've mostly forgotten how that worked...

Good thing I didn't suggest to Sol that she ran her new website with it! :D OK, I mentioned it, but in the context of not using it. That's OK, isn't it? Isn't it? Pah. Speaking of which, perhaps Sol could use her domain to hang a new email address off of. That's probably be handy for spam, but I don't think I know any more on the subject than she does unfortunately.

Something
Insert interesting content here

With friends like these...
Was discussing with JtS (well failing to, thanks to the stupid /. bugs) criteria for friending. FWIW, I tend to friend a lot of semi-random people who I spot on the front page who strike me as like-minded, and usually (not always!) I friend my fans*. Either way, I normally check up what sort of person they are, looking at any JEs they might have, and most of their still-visible comments, to see if they're who I think they are. I occasionally friend FOAFs, but there's so many of them, and my (mild) synaesthesia makes a lot of people's names look the same to me. EG: GMontag accuses CyranoVR and DaytonCIM (IIRC) of being the same person, but I confuse DaytonCIM with DubiousDave. I also used to confuse JtS with StB. There are others.

(*-Speaking of which, I have some new fans. Hello new fans!)

But most of all, I'm more than a little hesitant to friending FOAFs because frankly you lot, SOME OF YOUR MATES ARE BLOODY BARKING! OTOH, I can't complain too much. For instance, one person I friended (not telling who, ha!) has a link that resolves to tubgirl.com in their signature. AFAICT tubgirl.com is no longer available, so perhaps he made the link knowingly, just to tease people- "Haha, just imagine if that had worked" kind of thing. Speaking of which:

Terminology
The term "Troll" is used for people who say things they probably don't mean to trick people into making angry responses. It's also been used around here for such things as people who trick people into connecting to goatse.cx and other such horrors. I propose that such things don't really count as trolls as such, as the tricks are with obfuscated/unknown URLs etc rather than what a traditional troll uses.

So, in the same way as we have words Virus, Trojan, Worm, for concepts that are fairly similar but somewhat different, I propose that for people who give links to Goatse, Tubgirl, etc, we use the name "Grue". As in the creatures that you get eaten by in certain games if you wander around in the dark. How about it?

What am I doing?
Hmm, I knew I had stuff to talk about, but my brain's a bit futzed ATM. Did I mention I slept for 14 hours? I did. I must have been quite tired (see previous JE! Yes, I'm such a muppet sometimes).

Things I have been up to, apart from recently trying to break Insanecarbonbasedlif's cypher (groan) and emailing Interrobang:

• Hoping to either install a Jabber client, or write my own. Unfortunately, most existing Jabber clients are either not runnable due to their requirements, or strike me as yik. And most GUI toolkits clash with my sensibilities or requirements. I'm considering XForms (the recently GPLd GUI toolkit, not the stupidly misnamed XML forms thing) at the moment. Still, I don't know much about the Jabber protocol- it's documented, but that spec's HUGE.
• Making Interrobang a Mix CD. Apparently arrived today! Or yesterday. Hooray!
• Thinking about changing my Atoms clone (SDL-Toms) to be a client-server game, rather than hotseat (you play, then they play, etc). This could have allowed for chatting, etc, which would have been a nice feature. Unfortunately I got a headache trying to figure out some of the details, and got sidelined designed a neat new authentification system. I might go back to that later
• Taking photos- did I mention I got a neat little cheap camera for my birthday? I did. One of them 10-quid keyring cameras. The plan had been to try to write a Linux driver for it, and if I couldn't it'd be so cheap it wouldn't matter. As it happened, there's already drivers for them. Numerous cameras (as I suspected) have exactly the same cheap chipset as this, which Gphoto supports as an "Argus DC-1510", and there's a kernel driver to get the webcam functionality! Sadly doesn't seem to last long on the battery, and I couldn't get new AAA ni-cads (everything seems to be NiMH nowadays).
• Trying to create a replacement bookmarks server for the Dillo browser. Got some done, and got positive feedback from the alternative Dillo mailing list, but had some points I was uncertain about, and I don't know how to make Perl modules (I don't have anything more advanced than the Llama book, and I'm a bit short of funds to buy more). I might get something from the library.
• Still trying to cut back on my Slashdot usage. Managed for a couple of weeks after I switched off the JE notification (which is still off ATM, the barrage of messages had been driving me mental). But then it started creeping back, more and more... I had a few days a week or so back when I didn't really post anything. But soon, I'll be cutting back big time! More on this later!
• Trying to upgrade stuff. Debian/Stoneage has XFree4.1, which seems to be very BUGGY. I eventually got around to upgrading the Xserver to the 4.3 version from Debian/Testing ("Sarge"), and I've not had it crash since (that got to be a MASSIVE PITA, I'd usually lose something important in the process). But I still have to upgrade the X libraries too, and there's lots of old programs that still needs "xlib6g", which is from years back. I've got most of them uninstalled or upgraded now. Some of the remaining packages include various crappy versions of crappy Java. Perhaps somebody can enlighten me a moment: If I install either Mozilla or Firehamster (whatever that spinoff is called this week), to cut out having to use Konqueror (which I had originally thought was stable, HAH!!), will it come with its own Java implementation, or will I have to have one of my own installed? Hmm, actually, now I think of it, I don't have Java switched on now anyways. But sometimes I'd like to. Anybody?
• Thinking of writing a TODO list manager. I could really do with something like that.
• Probably something I've forgotten. Isn't there always.

Interesting news 'bout me
(now also deferred for future JE, where it belongs! You'll keep...)

Passing shots

• If gay marriage is outlawed, only gay outlaws will marry.
• Um...
• There were many more, but the dog ate them.
• Bugger.

Hmph. I'd been feeling like doing a JE, but then a day or 2 back, around the time the comments suddenly fell off, I spotted Insanecarbonbasedlif's new sig and bio... Unfortunately, I can't resist certain kinds of challenges, and ones like these are very good examples.

Result? I'm now badly sleep deprived (yet again) without any great progress in cracking the code, with a suspicion that the thing isn't doable (even supposing it's genuinely encrypted text...), and without much capacity left for journaling (due to the tiredness). This JE excepted, of course.

Cack. There's another day I won't be seeing again. OTOH, I do now have some nice scripts for creating big dictionaries and creating lots of useful word frequency data, which I'd actually wanted before for other stuff but had originally given up on out of boredom. So it wasn't a total waste of time.

What? What're you all looking at me like that for? Waddya mean, too much time on my hands? Pah. Well anyways, maybe t'other JE will drop out of my head tomorrow (although you probably shouldn't hold your breath to be honest).

[Update: about half an hour later]
Completely random?! Wow, it's a good thing I asked for clues before going any further... :D

*sigh* Well, I suppose this sort of thing is to be expected. After all, I was born with The Gullibility Gene - or so I'm told.

For Em Emalb's Meme Of The Day:

I sat and listened to each story
Deep profound evocatory
And then it was my turn
I took my lyric sheet outside to burn
'cause I had nothing to say

Being song lyrics, it's a bit uncertain, but I presume that'd be all one sentence, and I'm pretty sure it's the 4th one on the page. I'm not sure which bits of the webpage definitely count as sentences, so I'll asume it's just most of the body of the page.

I was going to do a JE anyways, but maybe I'll do one tomorrow instead. Still doing much upgradey stuff ATM, so my time's a bit pressed. *sigh*

Oh, and I bookmarked the Google page in question to link later, as I'll probably forget what I used.

Temporarily breaking my JE silence due to this weirdness.

Was reading this story today, saw somebody's ill-thought-out comment, and clicked on "Reply to this".

Having written my short-but-to-the-point response, I clicked "Preview". Scrolled about a bit (tiiiiny monitor nowadays, and Dillo still doesn't get on too well with /. so even tiny pages tend to span several screenfuls) to find where it had been displayed, and finally found:

You can't post to this page.

Anybody have a clue WTF that is all about? I don't believe I've seen that before. I was still logged in, and Dillo is configured to accept cookies from all of .slashdot.org. In short, I am flummoxed.

Hello! This JE today is a mixed bag.

I quite like Haikus. Having heard how they work, they struck me as quite neat. I suppose the idea of them being defined by the syllables in each line is sort of like the way latin poetry apparently worked (Iambic pentameter and all that). Also like the idea I read recently (somewhere on /. but I forget who said it) that songs used to be written to templates of sorts, and that if you take any traditional ballad's words, you can successfully fit them to any other traditional ballad's tune. It's a matter of rythm, I like it.

But then I read one day that strictly speaking, Haikus have to have a nature theme. So, I present this little Haiku of mine:

The 2.6 haiku
Great ALSA drivers,
Low latency kernel patch...
-Ooh, look! A penguin.

(Hmm, shame I can't centre that, it'd look more right). But of course, what is nature? I've long contended that the concept of "nature" is an empty one. All things that are natural? How can anything that exists not be natural? Things created by man are ultimately part of nature, as unnatural things clearly couldn't come from natural ones.

OTOH, perhaps its possible to use the term in other contexts. For example, you could suppose that various universal laws are nature, or that certain environments are more "natural" for a particular creature (eg- it's reasonable IMHO to say that it's unnatural for human beings to live in an environment with an excess of food and no predators). Hence my next Haiku, which I have named:

Sexual Frustration Pt 1
Nice arse on that bird!
But now I feel too randy-
Need a cold shower.

No, you don't want to hear "Sexual Frustration Pt 2". But I'd quite like to hear your haikus. Go on, you know you want to.

In a still naughty theme, I found this the other day in our cupboard and felt the need to share it with the /. world. Of course, he isn't currently on my fans list so prolly won't see this, but everybody else can have a laugh all the same ;) Well, supposing you get it.
BTW, (without wanting to sound like a broken record) If you found that amusing, you can do me a favour and give me a comment here (or by email) about my site in general. Anybody who does so wins a snazzy virtual paper hat and my gratitude. (And anybody who manages to successfully name my recent program wins a mention in the credits for it and in its manpage)

(snips out description of disturbing dream I had last night that would make other male readers' wince, and might have people going all freudian on me)

In other news, I deleted all my old JEs going back to the first in May 2002 (when I re-registered). I was getting embarrassed by them. Was considering stopping altogether as it was getting depressing and boring, but I think I'll just change the style (like here) and continue to keep them mostly few-and-far-between. Your're not missing much, this is just by way of explanation, in case you suddenly see this being my first JE (it's just my earliest existing one now).

Ooh! Last minute addition from when I was making myself a snack just now:

Tomble's theory of sandwich orientation haiku
Sandwich with layers-
It tastes diff'rent upside-down.
(Or so I suspect)

(based on a hypothesis I formulated at university that nobody else believed). Food counts as nature, no?

[9/2/2004-Update]: Yes, as I've said elsewhere in the past few days, I've now turned off JE notification messages so I won't hear from y'all, except where you're replying to me. More and more, I was finding my time getting consumed by Slashdot. I didn't make a new JE about the fact because I didn't want to go like some big drama queen proclaiming "Look at me! I'm going! You won't hear from me ever again!" and such. I'm only writing this in case other users I know didn't spot me mentioning it. How would they know where else to look for where I'd gone? So anyway. Bye all for a while.

PS- I take it I was the only one who found anything funny about "Jaws Baps" then? Oh well.