December 16, 2000

Returned today to Everything2. Everything's pretty much the same, except for that fact that there are a hell lot of new nodes, and the main page says something about sensei's illness. Haven't read it about till yet, and am going to it the first thing I finish writing this node. Also, since I've now started writing Daily Diary at the journal, perhaps e2 will not recieve any more that frequently. But the facts will flow, if any.

Welcome to me again, Everything2!

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Users Online (54): [dannye] [Sylvar] [tregoweth] [General Wesc] [Electricsound] [perdedor] [--OutpostMir--] [bob the cow] [kamamer] [kaytay] [m_turner] [Gorgonzola] [proj2501] [melodrame] [narzos] [xunker] [briiiiian] [Shoegazer] [Inyo] [r4v5] [Zeolite] [cha0s] [Geekachu] [brainwave] [lillianvalencia] [Infinity] [qousqous] [v3rgez] [jes04] [shrimpo] [backlash] [taschenrechner] [Space Butler] [kyberuserid] [Aresds] [Sirius] [Broccolist] [Ratoslov Lenev] [Filthy Ike] [FCLymond] [karrenlouise] [GirlsDontLikeMe] [gish] [Azure Monk] [Amadeo] [xmatt] [dilvie] [Juuichiketajin] [Helter] [GuPH] [tin-of-whoopass] [PoptartMartyr] [sethdiablo] [Goatish]

JeffMagnus node count: 4075 (3 new since December 15, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience: 10103 (4 more since December 15, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience to node ratio: 2.479 XP per node
JeffMagnus nodeshare: 0.524% (Via alternate method: 0.941%)
JeffMagnus node of the day: Everything 2 Civil War

I just got a Spanish video from Maryland signed by the FAMOUS bob the cow and Queequeg!

A little anecdote to follow Jet-Poop's I just got a Spanish video from Maryland signed by the FAMOUS bob the cow and Queequeg! daylog:

School's out and I can't go home. Roommate and I discovered that although we'd really like to like each other, we probably don't. Usual mess in here. Running on no sleep, involuntarily. Can't play the guitar anymore. Phoenix is a terrible place to live.

Flipped through the Japanese books, thinking I'd node in honor of sensei. He congratulated me on Japanese Verbs once upon a time. I miss him, although I'm trying not to be afraid.

Nothing to say and no way to say it. I'll have my German teacher's head. Mouse fails to work in dosemu, but I guess it doesn't matter, because I couldn't help noticing KQ6 was less fun the tenth time around, four years later.

Only 14 dumb poems later and I want to give up.

I have been unable to get warm today, even though Arizona is pointedly known for its lame winters. Maybe I'm getting sick (it's been about the right amount of time since I was last sick), but to admit it is to invite it.

I really don't have anything to complain about, but then again, there is.

No work and no play makes Jeeves a dull boy...

The only problem with getting plastered today was that we had to attend my youngest daughter's karate awards ceremony. Imagine a gymnasium filled with uptight yuppies with single kids, and I stroll in with a completely drunk wife. She's giggling and doing the hiccup thing with deft precision. She tries to clap a few times, but always when there's no reason to clap. Luckily she couldn't line up her hands to make any noise.

Little Pickles advanced three stripes to Blue Belt, 3rd Degree. I'm very proud of her, she has really worked hard for this.

Yurei says hello to all of his pals here on E2. He's still floating around in the Persian Gulf, cursing The Man all the while in multiple languages.

Have a great weekend, y'all. I'll be spending the first part helping Ms Pickle through her monster hangover.

Today I dedicated home-server day.

Since the ADSL 512K connection went in on Thursday, our little home network has been in a state of shock, with no means for simultaneous connection to the glorious internet possible for all our silicon-based lifeforms. So, today was the day to master ipchains and IP masquerading to allow everyone online again. From 8am through 4pm I was kinda suffering with galaga (our home-server) unhappy at the prospect of masquerading for tonto, badtz, oliver, fruitbat, and evilsupergenius, but by 4:30 we were all up and happy, after the addition of eth1 (duh...). tonto and oliver are happily wireless again, and those bastards at Telstra can fondle my salty chocolate balls.

/me misses sensei.

13:05

I'm starting to understand why, during my whole education, the tests and such have always been in the morning.

Some teachers say that "if I wake you up in the middle of the night and ask, you should be able to answer this question". Well, just what happened this morning: I was drowsy, but I hope I could answer most of the questions nicely enough... =)

I read about the Chernobyl stuff from Slashdot - really scary pictures, too. So, where were you when the reactor 4 blew up?

I was in Kuhmo, I guess. I don't remember much, but I heard the Lukio students wanted to see what the Geiger counter might say about the rain pipes...

17:52

Okay, today's stuff: I read of the RBMK reactors (still mind in Chernobyl, I guess) from the web, and found a nice page that had information about it - in Russian. Since my Russian is admittedly a bit rusted, I wanted to print the page and translate it that way (Yeah, XEmacs handles mixed Latin-1 and Cyrillic charsets, but still)...

Printing was problematic - a2ps discriminated against Russian (allowed me to specify that the document was in ISO-8859-5, but said "that's binary garbage to me, boy"), and Mozilla still thinks it's Latin-1 for the purposes of printing...

22:17

I played some Magic: The Gathering (against computer)... I need to try NetMage (or something similiar) soon.

23:43

So I tried NetMage (a Java app). Not impressive. Needed to enter 80% of the card data by hand... =)

Well, umm, I guess I'll go play some games before the night shall become too dark. Bye, 'til tomorrow...

Other day logs o' mine...

Noded today by y.t.: nuclear handgrenade

Updated:

I have just woken up from a drunken sulmber after a really good evening of drinking with a mate i have not seen in about a year! we first started off at a local pub and from then on we stopped at 4 or 5 pubs drinking large amounts of alcohol (including barcardi, southern comfort and whiskey and beer)we finally stumbled home at about 1:00am and fell into bed (not the same one i might add!)

i am now taking a couple of pills that i hope will get rid of the stinking headache i have. But it is good to see a mate which i have not seen quite a long time. He has been telling me about his latest problem. One of his best mates girlfriend is flirting with my mate and my mate (phil) is wondering what to do about it, on one side he feels he should go for it but on the other side he might reck a good friendship with a mate he has known a long time.

My advice is to leave well alone, sometimes women (no offence to any women that read this node) can be right evil people that just dont care!!!

after my triumph of lovecraftian pastry at etana's gingerbread house-making meet (suffice it to say the involvement of many gummi worms as facial tentacles were involved) we cross the lane to a friend's house wherein we anticipate intercepting a van to deliver us to a skytrain station...

excepting that of course since it had started snowing, one of the parents had taken it into the next municipality to pick up a sibling at eleven o' clock at night. this granted me the opportunity, in hanging around their house awaiting its return, to make use of the piano music I'd lugged over and not had a chance to use at the gingerbread meet.

I felt Debussy's The Snow is Dancing was a fitting choice. The rest I was merely glad to find I could still mostly bang out, the gropings on the ivory more the reflex of an itch being scratched than the intentful placings of a lucid mind.

The vehicle is recovered and its use, following heavier snowfall, is forbidden. If you want to toboggan down the hill, go and do it with garbage bags, but you're not going to use this van for it. So we are shuttled, two by two, to the station in the vehicle which had rolled in similar weather in years yore and had a crushed-shut passenger door to prove it.

The journey home was less eventful - a gang of 13 drunk Santas prowling the Downtown Eastside, making me recall the (Ho, Ho, Ho) Santa-cap-bearing prostitute of a few nights earlier.

The hat is getting sheepy, but it is finding rare use (and is being used well.) Peeling off my garments upon garments I turn to the mirror and smile in finding that there is to be found a single drop at the end of every hair on my face; a multitude of dewmotes in a forest of follicles.

I mention them for the sake of accountability; if I abruptly disappear from the community, by all means grill them. Where'd you hide the body, Billy? Once I get on the bus no one knows what to expect.

in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...

Today, I verified that my Creative CDRW8432 works fine with rewritable CDs. I burned about 500MB of mp3s on one Verbatim RW disc, erased it, and wrote a different bunch of other mp3s on it. In fact, the track I'm now listening to is The Last Night Of The World from the Miss Saigon soundtrack playing off the CD from my other/normal CD-ROM drive, so I figure it works. Incidentally, in a case of extreme paranoia, I also compared a 5.3MB mp3 file of one rendition of Axel F from Beverly Hills Cop and compared it byte for byte against the the original mp3 file on my hard disk. Perfect.

Previously, I had verified that the CD-R burning on the same drive went on reasonably well. Despite having mucked up the first couple of discs (making them unreadable), I have since ripped the tracks I like from about 50 CDs that I own, encoded to mp3 and burnt to CD-R.

The other thing that kept me occupied today was sorting out stamps. I found, to my surprise, that my mother had been collecting stamps for me in my absence. Faced with a BIG bunch of stamps to go through, I started soaking used stamps in water for the first time in several years. There are hundreds of these things. Quite a lot of which I did not have before. Going through my old stamp albums and rearranging things was a nostalgic experience. :-)

Also took the time to gather some of the stamps I have too many copies of and packaged them as gifts ... Australian stamps for my cousin in Melaka, Malaysian stamps for an old friend back in Sydney.

I'm happy today. Happy my CD-RW drive is working well, happy my stamps are mostly in order (mostly ... I discovered I missed half the stamps my mother left so I will have to come back for them) and happy that I've finally completed the forms that Liverpool Hospital sent me. I can now send them back post-haste on Monday.

I don't know if I should be looking forward to working life or not. hmm...

08.00 gmt

Home. Brief chat with mum. Go to bed. Sleep

Get up, have a cheese toastie, watch some tv.

Go to bed. Sleep

Oh, and for all the Edinburgh e2 posse: tomorrow from 10 till 6 (excluding when I'm out for my lunch), I can be found in PC World in Corphostine, by the iMacs, in a black Apple polo shirt with iTeam on the sleeve. Stop by and say hi, if I'm awake..

No, I am not going to DEUM. This is because I am a dork.

Last night I had never seen such a dark and low sky. It seemed to be closing in on me, so I drove home as fast as I could. Last night was a night full of mistakes and such. I annoy people and I really do not mean to. Sometimes, with the people that I am closest to, I just blurt out things that do not go through the brain filter and end up sounding really dumb. And then trying to fix it only makes it worse. By the way, that is a great nodeshell, anyone want to fill it?

But this is a day log, not a night log. Time to talk about the day.

But I am not bitter, oh no, I am not...

The rest of the day has been spent reading other nodes on Everything and wanting to write something. I have almost enough XP to reach level three, but I am about 40 writeups away. This is an example of the disparity between the points needed and the writeups required to gain levels. I like it. It means that no matter how many people like my writing I still have to persevere and continue writing. And the more I write the more I improve.

One day there will be a picture on my home node.

Creativity has been lacking recently. I have heard that it is good to node what you know. While showering this morning, I realized that noding what I know is going to be virtually impossible. I don't know much. I know a little about a lot, but not a lot about anything. So I will have to make stuff up and hope that people like the things that come out of my head. I am a creator, not an informer. It's that damn right brain again.

Today, I will strive to be patient.

At around 11:00, Sara came by my apartment to take me and Chris down to the flea market to look for some specific items. By this time we were getting quite delierious with lack of sleep, but it was quite entertaining. It's probably as close to drunk as I can get since I don't drink alcohol.

We planned to go down to the flea market, but didn't expect to be up all night. Pete was hungry and tired so he skipped the flea market and went home. The rest of us went and probably only spent about an hour there. When we got back, we packed up the computer stuff and everyone departed. Sara said she was working on painting her parent's laundry closet this weekend while they were getting a new washer and dryer.

I went back in, tried a few single-player training rounds of Worms, got frustrated and decided it was time to go to sleep.

I was woke up at about 9:00 tonight by my boss who decided that we would do our maintenance at 7:00 am tomorrow. No big deal, it was either going to be 7:00 am or 8:00 pm. The earlier I get it out of the way, the better I can feel like the few remaining hours of the weekend are all mine.

Since I only got about 5 hours sleep after 30 hours of awake, I think I'm going to go rest a bit more.

Funny Things That Happened:

• 4:15pm: while eating sushi with my best friend, I noticed a picture of a school of koi fish up on the wall. It seemed about as funny as seeing a picture of a cow up on the wall at McDonald's. At least pointing it out made my friend laugh.
• 4:30pm: to describe how thin this one girl I know happens to be to my best friend, I said: "she's so thin that she's beyond crackwhore thin, and is more like Krakow thin at this point."
• 9:30pm: while sitting outside, Jenna said "Ooh! it's a cute little squirrel!" I declared that no species of squirrels that I'm familiar with is nocturnal; and she probably saw a rat. Within 5 seconds all the girls jumped onto the picnic tables, were screaming, and were begging me to open the door so they could quickly run inside for safety.

Bad Things That Happened:

• After getting buzzed from some beer, I drank a whole fifth of low quality scotch by myself. I am surprised I'm still alive. And we won't even get into how I drove home.
• I actually awoke in a puddle of my own vomit!
• I made my friends laugh, I piqued their interest, I built them up if they put themselves down, and they picked me up when I put myself down. And it was the worst conversation I ever had.

Things I Learned:

• Don't get so drunk ever again.
• Don't drink multiple kinds of liquor at the same time. It produces horrible hangovers. But I already knew that.
• I need to start using the knowledge that I've already gained. I learned nothing knew from the topics I conversed about, so I shouldn't have brought them up. They're just a waste of time. I have already concluded this before, though. I'll just never learn I suppose. I also knew not to drink different types of things before, but somehow failed to apply that knowledge.
• I have absolutely no need to interact with the friends I partied with. I really don't like them, I don't care about them, and I am just going to make the same mistakes over and over again if I bother with them again.
• I only care about a handful of people. And of those people, I really only care a great deal about two of them. None of these people are my parents, which doesn't really bother me. And only one of these people actually cares about me in return. The rest are probably only one or two conversations away from leaving me like I'm leaving the friends I partied with today; and for the same reasons.