Category: tech

Talk about software, hardware, electronics, and a myriad of other sex-repellent topics.

Posted on

upgrade

We're #1!
I know you can’t really see it – but last night I upgraded to the newest version of WordPress, v1.5. The upgrade went, for the most part, smoothly, with only a few stylesheet related errors I had to clear up. Scrubbing the stylesheet is good housekeeping anyway, and it even inspired me to test with Firefox and Opera to make sure everything renders kosher. So far, I’m really digging the 1.5 backend… although it may take me a while get used to where things are now. Looks like they’ve built-in some comment-spam moderation, which is nice… and in general there are more comment moderation features. I did a quick spot-check of most crucial blog-features, and they all seem to be intact and working, so I declare the upgrade a success. The only thing that bummed me out was how nice the Kubrick template looked compared to my same-old green… but… it’s comfortable.

Tomorrow folks, tomorrow I’ll be airborne. A little flying city, me included, all jetting our way to Taipei over an interminably long ~24hr travel time. I’m ready, mentally; physically, I still have to pack and haven’t even started planning for the actual work I’ll be doing while in town. I am excited, though, about hooking up with a buddy while in town and visiting the local custom shirt and slacks places. Tailor-made shirts and dress slacks for $20, you can’t beat it. And man, I’d pay twice that to get something that fits around my childbearing thighs. The right fit can make all the difference, not binding my junk while I walk, not cutting off circulation to my legs, etc. Until I can get less fat, it’s the only way to go. Plus, I’ll be interested to see if the puny Taiwanese measuring tapes can encircle the girth of my legs anyway… mighty American redwoods to their toy saplings.

I saw the chief of the CIA came out and said something about North Korea having more nukes than we thought they had, or something. We gotta get these bastards people. We gotta reach out the long arm of American justice and give them a little preemptive shot off the bow. This is America; we flex you flinch. I mean, how can we be expected to stay our trigger-fingers when we’re being mocked outright!? This is the USofA you commie dickheads. Remember those letters, they’ll be the last thing you see on the side of the ICBM that screams into your village. Here in America we have little love for axes, and we hate evil ones with a passion. So shape up, because cowboys don’t take insults lightly:

The Americans swagger like a tiger around the world, but they whimper before our Republic as the tiger does before the porcupine. That’s because we have our Great Leader Kim Jong Il, who is undefeatable.

Pyongyang Radio, North Korea

OK. For real. I can remember, as far back as a few years ago, hearing members of Radiohead wax on about how underappreciated the 70s group Can was. I downloaded their two most well-regarded albums long ago, and gave them each a little listening to. Since then, they’ve been waiting on my hard drive as quiet ones and zeros… needing only my pointing and clicking to transform them into membrane-vibrating analog pulses of air. Today at work, I pointed and I clicked – and I was taken by surprise at how much I immediately dug what I heard. Some of the longer, more experimental, tracks are pure avant-crap… but the tiny little slice songs are really enjoyable.

And before I go, I strongly encourage everyone to go and download a copy of the excellent OpenCD project. Then, the next time your friends and relatives ask you for copies of programs (because you work at a high-tech company and you must have access to free warez copies of all the latest appz), you can instead send them this great disc of OpenSource programs to replace the payware they’ve been duped into thinking is superior.

Goodnight.

Posted on

asleepawake

Vintage fresco porn.
Sunday night of what was one of the shortest weekends I can remember.

Maybe my post last week about locking spamferres out of my blog stats database pissed someone off, because on Sunday alone I got nearly 300 spam comments. Right now, as I write, they are coming in at an average rate of one every two minutes. It’s frustrating… not because they actually make it through to the main pages (Kitten’s plugin stops that), but because they are getting recorded in my database and just taking up space. I’ve managed to create a rough hack script that takes the blocked IPs from spam comments and deletes matching rows from the visitor stats database. Deleting comment spambot IPs resulted in over a thousand rows deleted from the stats table… the only thing is that they’re coming in faster than I can get rid of them. Spam bastards.

One night last week I had a dream that I cheated on my wife with some unnamed dream-girl. You know how you can wake up from a dream feeling the consequences of what happened as if it were completely real? I woke up feeling pitiful, shamed, and guilty. For a split-second, I couldn’t believe I’d thrown so much away in a single instance of indiscretion. Almost instantly I realized it was just a dream, and that I was still as faithful as ever. But the feelings I felt in those first cobwebby waking moments were totally real. As I drove to work that morning, the Arcade Fire was in the player (I’ve been listening to that album lately as if it just came out, it’s even better rediscovered as it was discovered). And because I think the rest of this story qualifies as a separate thought, I’ll make a new paragraph now.

Anyway, the memory of my REM-tryst and faux-guilt still fresh in my mind actually served to enhance my listening pleasure. The Fire have a cut on Funeral that is perfectly suited for the guilty lover. “Crown of Love” is kinda hard to figure out. It could be a heartfelt plea to recover a lost love (as it sounded to me that morning), or maybe even some twisted tale of an adolescent stalker’s obsession. Regardless, the raw emotion the Fire manage to communicate in the words and music are incredible. There’s pain here, a deep longing, a last clutch at a hope that things can be worked out. My dream mood made the song sound better than it ever had before… almost made me wanna hook up with some hussy just so I could create something equally as honest and plaintive. Are any hussies out there willing to be my muse?

And, as I often like to do, here’s a really cool link I stumbled across one time or another. BugMeNot.com is a site that lets generates logins for webpages that make you register to read content. The NY Times site comes to mind, but there are plenty other news/media sites that require “free” registration to enter. Use this portal and register no-more. And, one more before I go – cockeyed.com’s new feature on mysterious “Levitra couches” had me laughing, and also had me amazed (make sure you read all the updates). I’m gonna keep my eyes peeled, maybe I can help solve the mystery.

Lately, I’ve been using the “random entry” feature I added to the sidebar to hop onto old posts and spot-check them for WordPress conversion errors (a lot of my commas and semicolons mysteriously turned into question marks when I went through the complicated process of switching over from my old blogging software). The conversion process was extremely manual: extracting database entries from the old software’s crazy format, using word to clean them up, hand-populating the WP MySQL database with custom INSERT statements, ugh… don’t remind me. I’m just glad I got it all transferred, hopefully I’ll eventually clean up all the artifacts too – and it will be perfect.

Goodnight.

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put your hands up!

Drop that hammer! We're haulin' you in son.
Hey guys, welcome back. Sorry if any of you encountered a 404 error while checking sounds familiar yesterday, I was mucking with the .htaccess file in an attempt to block the glut of referrer spam I’ve been getting lately. Long story short, it didn’t work quite as I’d wished… since it effectively took my site offline. But now I’m back, by the shack of a soul boss most turnin’, stormin’, sound o’soul!!

Tonight when I got home, I fired up Thunderbird to check my oft-neglected “primary” e-mail address. Among the usual spam messages and “FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW:” prefixed messages from my uncle, I saw something potentially interesting. The mail was titled: http://www.pharaohweb.com/pacman/files/pacman_repro_underlay.zip, which I recognized as the URL to a file hosted on my Pac Man pages. Some background: some time ago, a visitor to my Pac Man site used his Adobe Illustrator skills to create a reproduction of the Pac Man cocktail cabinet underlay artwork. The reproduction was outstanding, a dead ringer for the NAMCO original. The kind artist offered to let me host the file on my server, and asked for nothing in return. He figured, as I did, that we were doing the MAME community a favor by offering the file freely. Now, onto the e-mail that flickered back at me from my monitor:

Dear Dave,

While I appreciate the plug on your page at:

http://www.pharaohweb.com/pacman/itemized.html

there is a link to your page at:

http://www.pharaohweb.com/pacman/hardware.html

where you are offering a free copy of our copyright artwork:

http://www.pharaohweb.com/pacman/files/pacman_repro_underlay.zip

Please remove the link as soon as possible to avoid further action. For your info, we sell the MsPac-man CT underlay pre-cut for a Pac-man table.

Don’t take this as an attack on you or your great website; I get people referencing it to me all the time and I see that you haven’t done anything with your pac page in a while, It’s just that we pay the rent off graphics sales and NAMCO gets their pound of flesh on every piece. The ONLY thing we get from them is protection from counterfeiters.

Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.

Bob

PS Please don’t blog our correspondence; it’s for your eyes only.

Read more about the current NAMCO lawsuit.
http://www.TWOBITS.com/sued/

I was kinda caught off gaurd, but I’m not going to say that I haven’t wondered before if I’d eventually get a “cease and desist” letter regarding the copyrighted artwork. I always figured that if there was a letter, it would have come from NAMCO directly. A quick check of the TWOBITS.com website shows they do indeed proclaim that their “officially licensed graphics” are “Manufactured by TWOBITS.com under license from NAMCO Ltd.” Taking a minute to re-read and digest the note, I realized that it wasn’t really threatening at all… and seemed more like one man appealing to another to stop doing something that was impacting his bottom line. I immediately called Ben to tell him I was famous… and he agreed with my position, which is summed up in my response:

Hey Bob,

No hard feelings… to be honest I wasn’t really aware you guys were paying any royalties on the artwork. Not to be accusing, but I figured you were in the same boat as the rest of us – using the graphics without permission. I mean, everyone and his brother says their graphics are “licensed,” even the guys at the booth in the flea market. As much as I like being able to offer the file as a service to the MAME community, I’d hate to take money from the pocket of someone who went to the trouble of getting permission and is paying to do it right.

So, to sum it up – the file is gone. I didn’t mean any harm by posting it.

However, there is one part of your message I find haaaard to abide… how can I not blog about my encounter with big brother? Seeing how we see each other eye-to-eye here, would you still deny me the retelling of this story?

Thanks, take care.

dave
www.pharaohweb.com

So, that’s that. I took the file down tonight, and have replaced it with a link to this entry. In the end though, I guess my rebellious side had to make a concession to my empathetic side… because while I managed to comply with the request to remove the file, I simply couldn’t resist documenting the exchange on this page. In the end, I’d still recommend taking your business to twobits, for underlay artwork or any other of the rad DIY arcade accessories they offer. I can’t ding a guy for working to protect his income. And even though the file I hosted was in no-way pilfered from their graphic (it was painstakingly re-created from scratch), I don’t think that’d hold up in court. And yeah, I do feel kinda bad for writing about it against Bob’s wishes, but I’m hoping that since the whole thing was settled amicably he’ll be willing to shrug it off as “what I do.”

One last oddity that came from tonight’s events, the mail I got from twobits was addressed to myself, and Sharaun, and had our last name to boot. Not that big of a deal maybe, but I pay fee to “mask” my personal info from the prying eyes of WHOIS. I asked twobits about how they got the info, which I’m assuming was obtained by querying my WHOIS proxy service, but I thought it was interesting. I guess if you have a legit need to contact the registered owner of a domain (such as that owner is using something you hold the rights to without your permission), the proxy service is bound to cough up.

Pac Man talk over, website admin nerd-talk coming.

Migrating to WordPress as my blogging tool of choice was a great move, the system is easy and works great. The only drawback is the fact that because WordPress is so popular as a blogging system, it’s become a huge target for all kinds of spamming. Comment spam is the number one problem, where bots scour the web for the PHP submit methods of WordPress and input spam comments with links to poker websites and whatnot. Luckily, there are some killer plugins for WordPress which block comment spam based on keywords and IP addresses, all the while becoming “smarter” with each piece of spam identified. Each “holdem” ridden stream of consciousness, each “viagra” peppered extract from rare philosophical texts, each “low mortgage” and “weight loss” laden nonsensical rambling… they all work to make my comments even more spam-free.

Lately though, I’ve noticed an interesting comment spam phenomenon – an increasing amount of “benign” comment spam. I made up the term “benign spam,” but it seems to fit here. These are comments that usually say something like, I like your website I will share this with friends, or, Wow, this is a great web site. I am so glad I found it, thank you. It is funny, I was just talking to my friend about their web site, and they said they like your site too! And that’s all they say. They contain no links to porn or gambling sites, and usually list no author other than “Anonymous.” Being that they’re not linking to any websites, not pitching any product, or redirecting traffic – I have no idea what their goal might be. A simple Google search shows that these are not just a sincere comments from some English-as-a-second-language reader, but some kind of template comment spam.

I can only guess at their intent, but I’d say they are probably testing the “strictness” of my spam filter; seeing just how innocuous the structure of the comment has to be before it gets through the filter. Once they do this a thousand times on a thousand blogs, they’d have a pretty good idea of what most filters qualify as “spam.” Then they can restructure their spam messages most like the comments that didn’t get filtered. Otherwise, I have no idea what they’re all about… unless they’re just scouring the web for open and spammable commenting scripts. Maybe there is no motive, maybe these are just pure evil people wanting to pollute my database with inane comments about nothing. Stupid spammers, scourge of the internet.

I guess I’m an extremist – who thinks we should ban all mention of penis-enlargement, low interest rates, texas holdem, and xxx-teen from the ‘net. OK, we may need some of those xxx-teen sites… to… keep the teens from being exploited and all. Poor teens.

Website admin nerd-talk over.

And that’s it folks, enough for tonight. Before I leave you, you should check out this site. It’s totally amazing… you can play every video game for NES, Genesis, Gameboy, and MAME (arcade) online via Java applets.As for me, I’m going to bed… and hoping I don’t awake in the morning to some kinda slander lawsuit or something. I mean, it’s late… and this new Radio Dept. EP isn’t doing a whole heck of a lot to keep me awake. Plus, it’s lonely back here in the “data center.” G’night, until tomorrow.

Posted on

poor horatio

Let's go down to Myer's Lake for a picnic.
Dear reader, a varied post lies ahead… written at different times throughout the weekend. I make no claims about its contents being interesting, or even cohesive for that matter. I only offer what I write, and I tend to write a lot of crap. Please bear with us here as we strive for some decent content, but for today – we’ll take what we can get. And now onto the stuff.

If you know me, or have been reading this wordy webpage for a while, you know that The Andy Griffith Show is “pretty much my favorite” television show. As much as I like it for it’s bumpkin humor or Aesopesque underlying messages, I like it more because it’s a glimpse at some kind of utopia… at least, a utopian vision that closely aligns with my own. Simpler times; a close-knit community of friends; a rural existence based firmly on morals, a desire for peaceful clean-living, and a common-sense respect for others. A place where people are still close to the things that make them happy: the land they work, the friends they have, and the beliefs they share. No… the show never really goes into any of that, those are just my extrapolations. That’s my Mayberry, as stupid as it sounds.

In the tradition of last weekend’s “what I’m listening to” sidebar addition, I spent 10min Saturday adding a “random post” link at the bottom of the “archives” sidebar section. Used a nifty little WordPress plugin to get the job done, pretty cool. Even I get a kick out of clicking it sometimes, I write some stupid stuff. So check it out, and remember – if you see some whack formatted posts that got messed up in the WordPress transfer, lemme know so I can fix ’em. Yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Sunday, I got what I thought was a great idea. I’ve had this 120GB external hard drive sitting around for a while, not really doing much with it but copying the occasional thing over to it as an extra backup. Double-checking the current size of my digital music library and finding it to be 106GB, I decided to copy the entire thing over to the external drive. Then, I setup a script that can compare the two drives and keep them in sync, always ensuring that the external drive is up-to-date. I plan to take the drive to work with me. Now, instead of having to sift through piles of DVDs to find something to listen to at work, I’ve got it all on-hand. I’ll bring it home every few days to sync it with the master collection on my RAID array. Now… if I could only find a way to plug it into the car stereo and be able to take it on the road…

When technology really gets smart, here’s how I see it going down: I’ll have a central repository for digital media in my house, it will be large capacity, redundant, and fault-tolerant (RAID5). I’ll have a small iPod like device, but based on flash memory, which will also be large-capacity, enough to hold a mirror image of my entire collection. Vehicles will support the standard interface to this portable device, a plug-in interface that supplies power and signal-out and will be as ubiquitous as the 2.5mm headphone jack is today. The portable device will have built-in wireless capability, and will use my sleeping hours to keep in sync with the central collection. Physical size is important, the current iPod form-factor and weight being the largest that’s acceptable. Storage size must always seem to be overkill, 500GB-1TB if it this thing were real right now. As a rule of thumb, it should always be about 30% larger than what’s thought of as “big,” because if you just aim for “big,” it’ll without a doubt be too small within a year. The advantage of flash vs. moving spinning disks is essential, and when unplugged from a power source, the battery on this device will last 24 hours.

In addition, if I’m in a music store with the device, I can “purchase” an album and zap it through the ether onto my drive; same deal at the video rental store. If I’m at a show, I can purchase a board recording of the event at the end and beam it on. The device will support a “friendly” mode, where it will wirelessly seek fellow devices with similar tastes and enable file-sharing between them, integrated GPS will even allow two “friendly” enabled device owners to meet in real life if they wish. DJs at clubs will be able to offer their entire sets to be immediately “beamed” to paying customers. It will interface with PVR devices to take the kids’ favorite TV shows on the road. If you like a song you hear while in a store, you’ll be able to purchase and beam it to the device.

I spent a good bit of my weekend freetime reading Beside Still Waters, a book Pat loaned me thinking I’d be interested, mostly based on my writing from the other day. It’s a good book, if a little wordy. In fact, it’s a great book… seemingly targeted to what I’ve been thinking about lately. I wanted to write more about it, but I’ve not finished it yet – and wanted to reserve judgment until I was done. If you’re at all curious about that kinda stuff, I’d recommend checking out the book. And, I’m sure I’ll have more uninteresting stuff to say about it when I’ve finished reading it.

Goodnight.

Posted on

i know because i know

Creation of man.
Working from home, always an iffy premise… the “working” part, at least. Today though, I’m trying to do my best, as there is a lot of “working” to be done. One thing I’ve always wanted to be able to do while “working from home” is use my desktop PC to remote desktop into my laptop. That way, I can access all my work stuff while sitting in my comfy chair, using my big monitor, a regular keyboard and mouse, and tucked away in a quiet room away from the TV. It’s much easier to do work while sitting at a “real” PC rather than being hunched over a 15″ screen on the couch. For some reason though, every time I tried to use XP’s remote desktop from desktop-to-laptop, I’d manage to connect and then the laptop would immediately drop the wireless connection, which in turn dropped the remote desktop connection. I tried tweaking all kinds of settings, but I got the same behavior every time. Out of frustration, I decided to try good ol’ VNC, and lo and behold it works like a charm. It seems to be a little “laggier” than XP’s native remote desktop, but it’s permissible simply because it works. Now the laptop can sit in the living room while I work in the comfort and isolation of the “data center.” Dang I’m a nerd.

I’m sorry… I’m gonna talk God.

Saw a report on the national news tonight that sparked a question in me, but I’ll frame it with a story… to set the backstory, if you will. Back in high school I started regularly attending church with Sharaun. I’ve long been fascinated by religion. History mingled with faith, unquestioning love mingled with elitism; something about the mystery and power of religion has always been attractive to me. I would attend with an open ear and open mind, taking in every lecture, every sermon, every study, trying at all times to learn for myself. On one occasion, I guest preacher was visiting from out of state. Known for giving very passionate (remember, this is a non-denominational congregation of the Protestant, back-to-the-Bible ilk), and engaging sermons. His sermon on that day was about Jesus’ time in the desert after being baptized by John the Baptist.

For those of you who were absent that day in Sunday school, after being baptized, Jesus was called by God to wander the desert for forty days… all the while being tempted by the devil. The Gospel of Luke recounts one moment of Jesus’ temptation: And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, “All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.” For some reason, this statement struck me. I thought about it for the rest of the lecture, and afterward found the preacher to ask the question I’d formed: “By what authority does Satan offer Jesus this? Who gave it all to him? How can he offer it?” The preacher responded that Satan must be lying; he is, after all, the devil. Still, I always wondered why Jesus just didn’t call him on it: “You have not the authority to offer this Satan! Only my Father owns all, and only He can do with it as he sees fit.” But he didn’t, and the explanation would have to stand.

Anyway, back to my story. On the news they were talking about the tsunami and how it has rocked the faith of many living in the regions hardest hit. “How can God allow this to happen?,” they asked. “Why’s it have to be God,” I thought, “Why couldn’t it be the Devil’s doing? Wouldn’t that make it easier to swallow?” Then it hit me, it couldn’t be the Devil’s doing… because… when you get right down to it, just what can the Devil do? The concept of the Devil is kinda flawed, because God is omnipotent. So blaming bad things on the Devil really doesn’t work… because they were first run by the proxy filter that is God’s divine will, right? So, in essence, God let the Devil’s evil happen, right? What real power does the Devil have then? If he can’t affect anything without God letting it happen, he may as well be powerless. In fact, the Devil is only a powerful force if God allows him to be… right?

If you take it one step further, you run into the whole omniscience of God vs. human free will problem. That is, how can God both grant us the free will do make choices between good and evil, yet already know the result of every choice we’ll make. If God already knows how we’re going to live our life, and whether or not we’ll end up in Heaven or Hell, why even make us live? If he knew all along that Adam would accept the apple from Eve, did Adam every really have a choice at all? So, I dunno y’all. The simple explanation is that God is not, in fact, omniscient, or that he has some kind of limited-omniscience. I just dunno. But luckily, I don’t have to figure it out anytime soon… or ever, for that matter. So, keep on believin’ what you believe, ’cause I don’t have the answers.

Whew… that’s it. Did all the heathens come through OK? Good.

Another mystery of the universe that’s always perplexed me, although not quite on as high a level, is why TVs sometimes “buzz” when certain things come on the screen. I know I’m not the only one who’s seen this, right? Something like a telephone number or some words are flashed on the bottom and an audible buzz comes from the speakers? Sometimes, it seems like the reds are “too high” or something, and only red portions of the image get all staticy, and are accompanied by the buzzing. It’s almost like the colors get so bright that they bleed over into the sound. Anyway, I always wondered what makes that happen. Turns out, that’s pretty much what’s happening. The scientific explanation? The “overmodulation of the video carrier (higher video content equals brighter picture) on a television transmitter results in loss of carrier such that the TV demodulation circuits cannot demodulate the sound carrier properly.” Thank you, today’s lesson is over.

Man, what a dismal entry thus far. I gotta pick up the pace or something.

You know what’s interesting to me? Snuff. Not like the modern stuff you put under your lip, but real honest-to-goodness old school snuff. I’m almost interested enough to get some and try it… how exotic would it be to carry around a snuffbox and paisley handkerchief for the brown snots that would result. I could feel so stuffy and British, snorting milled tobacco for the nicotine high. How very Elizabethan I should be! The most foppish dandy, not to mention the dandiest fop, of them all.

I found this site the other day and really dug it. I bet Colin Meloy has consulted it a time or two when writing his songs.

Well, believe it or not… I have like six more paragraphs written. I figure I’ll save them for tomorrow, or next week, or never… because, for now, I’m done. Goodnight.

Posted on

b-a-n-a-n-a-s

Dag yo, messy.
A cool and sunny Sunday afternoon; “crisp” even, although I’m unsure how that adjective relates to weather. The heat has been on now for almost a month, keeping the house a comfortable 70° for us warm-blooded folks. The sensation of being warm and “safe” inside a house while still being able to see the potentially unfriendly elements outside has always appealed to me. Like being in a tent in the rain, or sitting in a screened-in porch in Florida while a thunderstorm rages around you. Shelter; caves, Gilligan’s Island huts, Abe Lincoln log-cabins, whatever… it’s a known obsession of mine.

Today I finally broke down and installed SuSE Linux 9.2 as a dual-boot on my home machine. My thought was, since I’ve abandoned most of my non-freeware software on Windows, maybe this time the big “switch” would be easier. I’ve tried Linux before, but haven’t ever been able to stick with it. I always get frustrated and got back to Windows because I can’t do some ridiculously simple thing like change the screen resolution. This time though, I’m hoping the dual-boot scenario might help “ease” me into the switch. Ideally I’d love to run a completely no-cost system, but I guess time will tell. Right now, I’m happy because I’m trying it out, but I’m still not sure if I’ll stick with it. I mean, as it is now… it won’t see my RAID array and despite recognizing my sound card, I got no sound. Whatever.

Foggy this morning, the ground’s wet with it and the Christmas lights on the house won’t stay on for 30sec before tripping the GFCI circuit. This weekend was ultimate low-key for me, although we did host a meal and gift-exchange thing on Saturday night, which involved beers and champagne (toasting Suzy’s new job) and darts. I put on the Charlie Brown Christmas Special CD, what I consider to be the penultimate embodiment of Christmas music, jazzy and warm. Then we all played “adult” and sat around to open presents from each other. The rest of the weekend though, I sat around and did absolutely nothing. I practiced my dart throwing for a bout an hour on Sunday, watched some old Twilight Zone episodes, and did the dishes. The shit is bananas people, b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

Wednesday we set out on our trek to Oregon, I need to get the tires rotated and oil changed in prep for the journey. Checking this awesome page, the I5 pass into Oregon looks like it’s snow-free (click the little cameras for live shots of the road… the internet rocks). That’s not to say it may not snow between now and then, but at least we know it’s not snowed under now. I’m kinda looking forward to the drive, even thought it’ll be looong… but I kinda enjoy road-tripping, especially w/friends and an ample supply of good tunes.

That’s all for today, Dave out.

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if Good Morning America is any indication

No idea.
Guys, I don’t know what happened… I thought I missed one day of writing this week, but it turns out I completely missed two, count ’em, two days. Really, something happened to me, because I don’t even remember not writing on Monday night. I remember not writing last night (Tuesday), but that’s about it. Contrary to what my lack of posts may indicate, I have been writing this week – fragments of stuff not good enough to fill out an entire post… so I’m gonna do one of those “flush” entries where I get rid of a backlog of stuff.

7am on Wednesday morning, somehow ended up on the plus-side of time this morning… I dunno, got ready fast today or something. So I sat down and flipped on Good Morning America to see what’s happening in the world. Apparently, Laci Peterson is happening in the world… and is maybe the only thing happening in the world, if Good Morning America is any indication.

For the past couple days, I’ve been coming home for lunch and playing darts with friends. Anthony and I broke in the new dartboard and dart sets on Monday, which involved me playing my first ever “real” game of darts (y’know, not just the “hit the bullseye” version). While playing, I realized darts could be a pretty fun way to kill some time. Get some people over, have some beers, listen to some tunes, and play some darts. In fact, maybe coming home for lunch and drinking some beers and playing darts would be awesome too. Whatever.

Looks like I’ll be spending nearly a month in Taiwan come late February. I have mixed feelings about an extended stay… my longest trip so far has been two weeks, and I was more than ready to head home near the end. I think this stay will be somewhere between three weeks and a month. The only good part about it is getting to stay in that swank high-roller hotel for that long. I can look forward to an entire month of late-night bloody marys at the bar and lonely nights on fluffy sheets. Other people I work with will be coming and going over the time I’ll be there, so at least I’ll have that. So if anyone wants to make their way to Taipei in March, you can have the floor in the hotel room.

Saw a post on /. the other day about open-source GPL schematic capture and board layout software. It may seem nerdy, but it’s what I do. It’s so awesome that you can get free software to do most everything… even the things you do every day at work… bleh.

I noticed from my referrer logs that Suzy linked me on her “friends” page, many thanks. And now it’s time to head to bed, I’m up early to deliver friends to the airport. Sorry for the crap entry. Goodnight.