I've been slaving now for a few hours to finish a few art projects that I've got due tomorrow in photography. I needed to take a break for a minute, so I've decided to save off some jpegs of what I'm farting around with and upload them. One is a picture of nate happily shooting a pistol at the firing range from a few weeks back. The other is a picture of my little brother (little in the age sense- he's a good 6 inches taller then me, but I'm 3 years older and a much faster typer *grin*). So I do call this crap art? Yeah- depressing, isn't it?

Following up on all the fun I had with my new scanner yesterday is a challange, but I'm up for it. This time I scanned in a half a roll of pictures of me and my roommates. As with yesterdays post, this probably won't interest you in the slightest, but what the hell. It amuses me to death to do this. Hopefully this weekend I'll scan in some of my photography projects too. Don't bother clicking on unless you want to see a bunch of jpegs of geeks.

I'm face with a terrible dilema: I acquired a new scanner, PCMCIA SCSI controller, configured SANE, and wrote code to handle automated image uploading and attaching to Slash stories. All of these need testing. And I have this stack of pictures that we took of our old house before we moved last July. So click the link below to view a truckload of jpegs, plus my descriptions, of the place affectionately known as GH1.0. Really, this won't be of any interest whatsoever except to the handful of you who visited the place, but some of you may want to come along for the ride.

I bought a patch cable today. I bought it. I've never been at a point in my life where I wasn't working at an office that I couldn't just "borrow" a patch cable. So I had to go to the local racket place and pay an arm and a leg for the damn thing. It ought to be illegal to charge for patch cables. Networking should be free. Bandwidth should be free. Hardware should cost money, but the network should be free. It should be built into every house like cable and electricity. When can I live in that world? I drove most of the way to the store behind a car with a bumper sticker stating 'I don't call 911, I call .357'. I'm not sure, but I think that might have something to do with it.

I put gas in my car again today. For first time since the end of august. Since I quit my old job I just don't drive any more. I walk to classes (usually) and seem to only drive on sundays when I go visit whichever parent's turn it is to feed me food that isn't microwavable. I hate driving, so I normally ride with other people when I go somewhere. Course I don't usually go anywhere so I don't really think it matters. I think I need either a bigger gas tank, a more efficient car, or I need to drive less. I think it is important that I can fill up my gas tank quarterly simply so that I can track my gas usage in terms of my "4th Quarter Gas Tank". Maybe I should go outside more. Or maybe I'm environmentally minded. Naaah.

I've crossed a major threshold in my life: for the first time in history the hair on my chin is longer than then the hair on my head. This doesn't mean I've somehow became more masculane lately, its just that I haven't really trimmed my goat in 3 months, and I've been shaving my head fairly short. Frankly, there were girls in my high school that could grow better facial hair then me. I'm sure they still can.

So today I fired guns. I'd never done it before. Once, when I was a Cadet, in perhaps 4th grade, we went to the Police Station as a Cadre and watched a cop shoot his pistol as part of our Tour of the dept. Definately not worth my entertainment dollar. Not compared to this...

So I have nothing to say. But I need to test some new code, so I have to submit a story. Maybe I'll sing. Or hum. Or play a kazoo. Naah.

So my x key is still screwed up. But thats the least of my concerns, as I've learned to compensate by hitting the key three or four times really hard. But now I have even more fun in my life: This morning in my design class, I was cutting a sketch out with an exacto knife, and (those of you who have ever seen these knives know where this is headed) decided that it would be fun to slice off a nice chunk of my left forefinger. So now, not only to I have a key that doesn't work, but I'm down to only 3 working fingers on my left hand. And since I don't typically type with my left pinky, I have only 2 2 usable digits to type with. At least I have tons of homework to do. Ugh.

So we've played Civilization. We've played Sim City. We've played WarCraft, WarCraft II, StarCraft, Command & Conquer, Rebellion, Xcom, Diablo, and Grand Theft Auto. And finally now I realize what we need: SimHood. It fakes an inner city neighborhood. With an interface somewhere around WarCraft II meets Grand Theft Auto, you can choose to play the Cops, The Gangstas or the Mafia. You can train the boyz in your hood to deal drugs (more points for selling to children!) as the Mafia you can extort "Protection" in your neighborhood while controlling lucrative monopolies in various industries. And as the cops you can embezzle from the state, while raising a corrupt army of boys in blue, specially trained to do your will. It's all about creating environments populated with cheezy stereotypes anyway. Just imagine head to head gameplay! After watching several room mates lose their lives to playing Grand Theft Auto, I figure its either going to be SimHood, or else they'll wait until when GTA2 comes out, supporting exciting new features like 'Rape' and 'Dismember'. What ever happened to tetris?

So what is life like without the X key? Lets be honest, you don't use it much. But who knew I used it as often as I did. I've got a 1 in 3 success rate with the X key now. That isn't so bad, but its pretty annoying when I need to type 'Linu' or 'Uni' or '11'. Ever trying sending a message in pine? Ctrl-X! Wanna delete a charachter in vi? You guessed it. X! How about doing a 'cut' in netscape? meta-X it is! I can't log out of telnets because like it or not, 'eit' is != 'exit'. I could alias it, but it just seems dirty. I can't run xterms, xcalc, rxvt, xon, but this matters very little since I also can't run startx.

I wrote this awhile ago. It's a little thing about call screening. Maybe it's funny. Maybe it isn't. What do you want from me? I'm tired. I've been going to class, doing homework, and trying to fixed screwed up hardware since 7 this morning and now Jeff is going to try to get me drunk and trick me into watching Spiceworld. I think I like the redhead the best. I hope we can turn the sound off and play some Who songs instead.

It's just one of those days. First thing this morning I decide to shave my head. It sounded like a fun idea. It wasn't totally spontaneous (why are there so many vowels in words?) as I bought a clipper yesterday, but after my first round of email, I bit the bullet and shaved it off. A nice, fairly close brushcut except for the parts that are all crooked and deformed. I've crossed a whole new threshold:I cut my own hair. No longer am I reliant on the hair cut mafia. No longer will I need to pay their $8 to have a really crappy hair cut. I no longer will need to wear those strange bibs, sit on their spinny chair, make small talk with the nice woman, or listen to the dang country music station that always seems to be playing in every hair cut place I ever visit. Now I can gives myself a really crappy hair cut in the comfort of my own home. I love this universe.

The geekhouse has returned to the addiction known as Diablo. At least once before this evil has threatened the sanity of our modest establishment. The last time wasn't pretty, I suspect this one will be no more attractive. So anyway, being the good little sheep that I am, I decided I wanted to play Diablo too. So I bit the bullet and reformated the other partition on my laptop...

Last night I wrote this. It was really really late. I guess that I really can't do much beyond apologize. I started writing at around 1:30am after grabbing a Pop Tart and a glass of milk. It's strange what follows when you type 'vi poptarts.txt' hit the carriage return, and just start typing whatever comes to your mind.

Welcome to Taco Hell. Don't mind me, I'm just testing. At some point in the not-so-distant-future, I'm considering using this space to post non-slashdot appropriate stuff. Shorts stories or cartoons or whatever it is I'm babbling about at the moment. For now however, it's merely a test zone to work out any kinks with Slash's new section configurability code. At least it doesn't look like the rest of the site... there are bugs, but I'll get around to fixing them eventually.