My brain works really weird. I go through 3 or 4 phases a year where I focus real intently on something. It's usually something technical, or something creative (I write a good bit). I can focus real hardcore, learn a lot, get a whole lot accomplished for about 1 to 2 months. Then something happens, my brain gives out. I can't seem to absorb anything, or crank anything out. Damn it, I'm in that phase right now. The part that sucks is I feel worthless when I'm in this phase. It''s real tough for me to accomplish anything intellectually. The best thing for me to do during this time (hopefully won't last for more than a month) is to just sit back, read, watch simpsons, movies i rent, listen to music, and focus on my other hobbies. I also happen to play guitar, and I need to spend this time doing that. The LAST thing I need to do is get caught up in a zombie like state of watching hours of braindead tv (friends reruns, etc). So far I've been pretty good about that.

Here are some things I've been doing lately.

I've been reading Dune, by Frank Herbert. Finally . A good friend let me borrow the book. I should of read this years ago!. I'm only about 100 pages into it, but so far so good!

I play on two competition pool teams. This hones up my 8 ball skills (I'm a sandbaggin 3, should be a 4 or 5 in APA). Hopefully one of my teams will make it to vegas this year. Last session we got into the 4th round in the city tournament.

I'm out of the job IT wise, so im the asst. manager at a deli right now. Mindless work, but it's a job and I'll take it right now.

I'm getting ready to move to a 3 bedroom townhome with 2 really good friends. I'll soon be looking for work in that area of town. I'm prayin hard that I do.

Still trying to write, just hard right now. Got major case of writers block.

What should I do? I have 89 hours that I don't have to be at work. Hmmm.. I'm heading for the SPRINGFIELD RIVER!!!

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I hate this feeling. I can't seem to come up with anything creative so of course I revert to plan B and check out slashdot. I'm writing two books right now (co-authoring one of them with a good friend/extremely talented writer). One is mostly essays and short stories that are true. The other is a scifi type novel. That's whats getting me writers block. I'm not even writing the actual story, right now just back ground info, developing the plot, researching various things, etc. The boring but necessary and critical stuff. I want to make sure there are no plot holes in this. Did I mention this is the first one I've ever written? I don't expect to start writing the actual story until 2004, Yes I do expect it to take that long to get prepared for it. My co=author will probably start helping then. I can come up with a plot, but he can deliver dialogue, and descriptive writing much better than I. Lets just say I'm drinking lots of coffee right now. ahhhhhhh. I have a newfound respect for writers.

Mozilla will not for the life of me let me cut and paste from an open office document I was working on earlier. The sad part is this is a kickass document I've been working on. It's about conspiracy theory type shit yo. for real b? word.
I think I just found a glitch in the open source matrix. Oh well. I'm up in arms as to how I should configure my home network. First I'll lay down the equipment I have.
1 compaq 333 mhz Pentium 2 with 3 gig harddrive, 128 meg ram currently running windows 2000 (this is what my parents, little sister use)
1 custom 233 mhz Pentium MMX with 256 meg ram 3 gig harddrive (currently running red hat 8.0, not configured for anything)
1 custom amd athlon xp 1600, 512 meg ram, 30 gig harddrive (about to get an 80 gig), all the works (this is my main system) currently running Mandrake 8.2
1 233 pentium mmx laptop, 64 meg ram, 3 gig harddrive, currently running windows 98

occasionaly (used by father) dell laptop 750 mhz, 256 meg ram, 20 gig harddrive running windows 2000

With this equipment
1 5 port switch
1 4 port dell truemobile wireless broadband router
several pci 10/100 network cards, 1 pcimcia network card, 1 usb wireless card, 1 pcmcia wireless card
plenty of cable

proposed setup:
-setup compaq 333 mhz with redhat 8.0, run as router/fileserver (samba and nfs)/print server/and whatever else. put 30 gig harddrive in there to store simpsons episodes and mp3s, connect to my 5 port switch
-upgrade my athlon 1600 to mandrake 9.0, put 80 gig harddrive in there, use that as my general purpose pc
-leave my 233 mhz laptop alone

I will have the first 3 on one subnet, used only by me

connect dell wireless router to switch, create second subnet for the rest of my family

upgrade 233 to either mandrake 8.2, or downgrade to windows 98 (2000 really slows it down) my 15 year old sister uses this for AIM and email and thats bout it.

Or connect everthing to the dell router, use linux box as file/print server but not router, have basic peer-to-peer setup. but wheres the fun in that? However there are several other different options for me at the current time. Hmm, or i could change the setup every two weeks and spend my weekends doing that. this is my dillemma....

1 day till two towers comes out. fucking gravy.
1 week and 1 day till christmas. november and december turned out to be pretty good months this year with AOTC, LOTR SE, and now TTT. enough initials for ya?

for the 1 person that might actually be reading this:
messing around with embeddable OS's (can't spell-tired and hungry), mainly with qnx, but experimenting with knoppix as well (can convert most of it's own programs to nowrite, single thread apps).

Get the geek shit out of the way. and there's nothing left, go figure.