I'm not gonna even bring up the World Trade Center.

With that tautology out of the way, things are settled, albeit falsely. There are kids that no longer have parents (both worked in the WTC...damn, second time). At the same time, I need to purchase sneakers for gym; I got into AP Comp/Lang; I have to write up some papers for Physics...everything is normal, but it isn't. I may go into NYC this weekend and volunteer with some friends from SIG (Jeff and his friends) at a hospital, serving food or something. I'm sure we can find something to do.

So...yeah. I'm switching to OpenBSD. A kid, Josh, is going to give me a bootdisk and a CD (at some point). So yeah...right.

School started today. CHS (Columbia High School) isn't that bad; it's livable. Today was really just surreal, I suppose. I was looking for the lunch room and some guy from my math class asked me what I was looking for. He had lunch 7th period as well, so I went with him. One of the first things he said to me was, "Hey, you look Indie. Do you play guitar? You play guitar, right?" To which I responded, with a chuckle, "No, bass; I haven't played it in a long time." It got weirder: we went to lunch, and I sat down at his table. This guy -- Jack -- is crazy. There's some chick at the table -- Laura, I think -- who recognizes me as the Rabbi's "son." (Grandson, really, but who the hell's counting?) I met one reasonably sane person: Ryan. Tall, lanky, and a DJ. On the walk home -- we live about a block from each other -- he assaulted my musical tastes with extreme vigor; it was crazy. We went to his house and I saw his punk setup (kinda crappy but with a nice PA/mixer/reel recorder [isn't that so retro?]) and then his DJ setup; the latter was great. He's got an SP-202 like I do, so we bonded on its inability to resample. I never told him that I hadn't touched mine in years. *smiles*

So school isn't hell, but it also isn't Indiana. I wanted to go to the first day of school with Rachel, walk in with her, trying not to smile. I like school; I like being around people. It's not the same here...not bad, but not the same. I don't really care where I am, I'd just rather be with Rachel. I'll get by; I have to admit that CHS is livable. Very...livable. The AP is nice.

I miss Bloomington, but I'll do fine here for the next year; I have to.

I got so tired of Windows ME and its crashing, so I set-up a dual-boot Win 98SE and Win 2k. It works; I like Win 2k. If I had any skill or patience, I'd use FreeBSD, but...it's hard to get into, I guess. I still haven't touched the server...

I kinda lied about the asparagus in the title; sorry.

Things are getting better with Rachel. It's still really hard, but I'm doing better. I cannot wait until November, when I get to visit. (I miss you, kid.)

I wrote more code, this time on the UI aspect. It's going to be controlled by a simple prompt. It's not bad, but I'm running into buffer problems. I can't think of an effective solution that isn't too extensive for overflowing a finite char * array. STL strings are an option, but I don't like it. (Well sir, I don't like it. Ren and Stimpy!) I'll work on it.

I PKed on the MUD! It was crazy; a group of us Red Robes (Neutral Mages, see Dragonlance) ganged up on a guy, and I got the kill. Unfortunately, I also got the wanted flag. Oof. The MUD is good.

Things with Rachel are settling down...I still hate being in New Jersey, but I'm starting to accept it. I've put up a countdown to my visit on my webpage. There doesn't seem to be much else...

The Guggenheim bit; Lloyd Wright's design is kind of...ill thought out. There's no fucking level ground in the damn place! Add on top of that the meaningless Postmodernism of Frank Gehry and you've got a pretty crappy experience. Coffee and lunch was nice, though.

I think I'm going to advance in rank in the Red Tower on DSL. I spent a good amount of time on my report on the city of Arkane. I know it's really dorky, but I feel good; without Rachel around, I need something to keep me from killing myself, and the MUD works.

Speaking of Rachel, things are hard being a part. I miss her, and I'm afraid we're slowly separating. It's painful, and I want nothing more than to be back in Bloomington with her; I'll have to wait till November. (Sorry, kid. I love you.)

I hate Connecticut. I hate Rhode Island. I hate I-95. I'm not a huge fan of my brother nor of Brown University. I drove for about seven or eight hours today.

Last night I coded up a good portion of CController and have begun work on an exception system. I've considered writing a whole exception library for try/catch/throw in C++, but it's not worth it. (All exceptions below CException are unique to an application.) So there's that.

I'm tired, and my phone call with Rachel was too short. Petra, my new dad's sister, called in the middle of our conversation, and I'm not sure that I have the energy to talk to Rachel. I feel bad. (Sorry, kid.)

Today was a long day.

Er...the week, really. But not until Thursday. Right now my schedule has one class on it: US History AP. I had to turn in a writing sample, and the guy (Mr. Gavitt, the head of the department) says, "Your introduction is horrible," and just keeps on talking. After a lull I asked him why, and he explained: it's not that it was nonsensical or poorly written, it was simply unsuited for an AP essay. AP examiners have only a minute to a minute and a half to look over an essay; the introduction must be a microcosm of the entire paper, or the reader will never read what you have to say. Well, let's just say it was a scare. Also, he said quite nonchalantly that I had some 260 pages to read by Thursday, not including the packets I have to read and respond to. Ugh.

More coding; CController might get written tonight...that or I might read. School permeates my life, and I only have one class, which hasn't even started yet! Oof.

So yeah. It's gonna be a long week. Friday'll be relaxing.

Well, getting my story posted to /. was vindicating. Three karma, eh? Not bad. I feel famous.

I coded more today; I made the system more elaborate, and, against my better judgement, gave Hubs ID numbers. I know that sort of redundant information (array items knowing their location in the array) is bad form, but otherwise I'd have a nasty lookup function. Until I write CUniverse to replace CHub[], it'll work fine. (I know, I know -- I shouldn't buckle and use the MS Hungarian prefixes. I just...I'm used to it, and I'm coding on a PC anyway. [Coding without MFC, thank you. VC++ 6.0's raw C++.]) The code looks good.

I spent all day on the MUD and playing Civ II. Once Stars! Supernova Genesis comes out, I'll have something new to do. Until then...eh. Whatever.

Rachel is fantastic. (Hey, kid. *smiles*) I hate New Jersey. It may have something to do with seeing no one other than my family members for the past two weeks. I'm going with Caryn, Manoah, and Miranda (a friend of Caryn's) to the Guggenheim on Friday and taking tests tomorrow. Oof. I want to be back in Bloomington. A lot.

Hmm...for one, the entry I posted last night doesn't show up. That pisses me off. (I forget what I wrote!) Ugh. Whatever.

I didn't code last night as I had anticipated. Go figure; I'm not sure whether to write a suite of functions to simulate the economy or to use a single class. I think using the class would be the blob AntiPattern, because the class wouldn't represent anything other than the simulator in ipse. I'll probably go with a local array of (CHub *)'s and an Update(CHub *hubs[], int numHubs) sort of thing. Whatever.

My side hurts and I'm irritated. I tried to change my e-mail away from mikeg@geek.com (because that one no longer exists!) and slashdot messed up. (Presumably, mikeg@geek.com got sent the re-registration message and my new email got the notification of e-mail change. Blargh.) So I'm not gonna write any more. (Ah, who am I kidding? I'll write more later. For now: MUDding.)

Everything has gone out the window. Well...not everything. Does an RJ-11 cord count? Two things learned today:

1. NJI rocks.
2. Verizon sucks. For money. Lots of money.

Why? Well, read on, kiddies, and find out!

In a cruel bait-and-switch tactic, I will talk about my server first. Why? Beats me, I didn't touch it today. After not setting up X on the first try, I have become huffy and won't touch the server until sometime tomorrow afternoon when I tire of playing Civ II and various FPS games. (By various I mean Unreal Tournament.)

This morning was hectic. First I tried plugging into the handy RJ-11 (4-pin [red/green + yellow/black] telephone for the uninitiated) wall jack. Ah, what a fool am I to believe things to function at face value. No dice, if by dice you mean dial-tone. I hooked up the jack to a phone and heard TV snippets and a conversation about dry-cleaning. (Bob's gonna pick up his suit in the morning, in case you were wondering. [As an aside, I kid you not about the guy's name being Bob. My belief is that the conversation was taken from some TV show, because the quality was amazing.]) First I called Verizon -- they think it's a wiring problem. The only accurate response I could think of was "doiy," but a wiring problem is my problem. In other words, I got to say "doiy" while they shoved an invoice for eighty dollars up my ass. So with Verizon being no help, I did the only thing within reason: I threw it out the window. An RJ-11 cord, that is. I went to Gio-Tech (their web-page isn't working, but I would link) and picked up a 50-footer and a 25-splitter just for good measure. I threw the 50 out the window, hooked up an in-jack splitter (the 25 was overkill, it turned out) and plugged in the 50. Voila. Viola. Double bass. Hello Internet.

Finally, why does NJI rock? Because I connected at 52kbps, and I'm on at 50.6kbps. 56K-Flex ain't bad, but it also ain't cable.

When I said "finally," I meant "with more to follow." I rewrote the code for the economy simulator, and everything works fine. I'd rather have a single structure representing routes, but I'm farther ahead than I was yesterday in that:

1. The code works.
2. I've put in some test-bed commodities. (Clothing, electronics, food, and ore. Everything a girl'd ever need, right? Beats me, I'm not a girl.)

So today was a good day for coding. Would've been a good day for Codine, too, but there was no time.

Well, I've moved into my new house and my server is up and running a fresh, GENERIC FreeBSD-4.3-RELEASE, straight off of the ISO. Kind of. That will be subject number one.

X won't set up right. I'm using an old NVIDIA Vanta (8MB AGP, not accelerated) I picked up when I worked at PC-Max. The odd thing is, it all worked fine when I was running 4.1-RELEASE. Even when I have it set to probe all settings on my card and my monitor down to the most standard settings, X won't start up. I'm going to try doing it from outside /stand/sysinstall so I can see what's keeping the X server from starting. I also need to build the latest mysql (or wait for FreeBSD to come out with a package -- pkg_add makes things too easy) and throw on Apache with PHP. That settles the server, I suppose, though I have yet to find anything useful to do with it. Yerg.

I just got access from NJI, or New Jersey Internet. I sadly return to the realm of dial-up and hold fond thoughts of my cable modem. (Bloomington -- my former midwestern residence -- was home to IU, which has an OC-88, and Insight/@home cable ran an OC-3 under our streets. We were very lucky in the Internet department.) That solves a problem, but I need a phone cord -- who uses phone cords any more?

A final worry -- coding. I decided to code up a simple economy simulator, which I hoped to evolve into something similar to Galactic Trader. If there's anything I've learned, I've learned that one should always have a design document. Classes that reference each other are simply not gonna happen for me, it seems, and writing a master class to control them would be overkill. (And who needs a class of which there will only be a single instance?) I've switched to controlling it through global functions, but it's incredibly messy. I'm going to recode today.

So...yes. Jersey has brought about a host of problems. Eww. I wanna go back to Indiana. (Who saw that coming?)