News You Can Bruise for 1998 July

Wed Jul 01 1998 12:00: Man, Leonard Richardson Month is not off to a very good start. Two of the classes I am supposed to be taking next quarter are not being offered next quarter, and a third will probably be full up before tomorrow when my pass starts. I'm going to have to cannibalize winter quarter for classes. That means CS181, CS141, or CSM151B. CS141 is "Basic Methods of Data Organization", which does not make me horny. CSM151B is more circuit crap. CS181 is supposed to be a creampuff class. It's formal languages and stuff, allegedly a SQL to CS180. I'll probably save that for later, the way one might save an actual creampuff for later. No grade in CS180 yet, by the way.

I was napping just now, and I was dreaming about these two programming projects I have for work, and the first one I'm just about done with (I just need to add some reports), but I was combining features of the second project, which I haven't started yet, with the first project, so that I was dreaming I was going to have to change the first project. In particular, there's some amount field for the second project that needs to be summed, and I was confusing it with an amount field in the first project which is just entered in from a form. No big deal, but I was annoyed in my dream about having to change it. I wasn't dreaming about changing it, it was just as though I were thinking about the project and I realized I'd have to change it.

I don't generally have acne problems anymore, but my face just broke out really bad, just yesterday. I don't understand it.

Woo-hoo, just 8 days til my birthday, when I will recieve my edition of The Art Of Computer Programming. Actually, that's not true. I probably won't recieve the books proper until the 10th or the 11th, most likely. But still. And Jake's birthday is a week after that. I don't have anything to give him, oh well. And my Coffee Junction gig is a week after that (for those who haven't been paying attention, that's the 23rd).

It's 10:17. I don't know when I'll go back to sleep. I feel okay right now but I know if I stay up all night I'll be tired at work. OK, enough of this.

Thu Jul 02 1998 12:00: I am now, enrolled (UCLA people will get that) in CSM151B, CSM152A, and Stats 154A. I may change CSM151B for CS131, which is the programming languages class. Or maybe not. CSM151B is the follow-up to the summer blockbuster that is CS51A, and promises to be very boring.

Cha-ching! I got an A in CS180! All I can say is, Gafni rocks.

Later: I stole this "Heartland America" catalog from Zasky Tse. It's really weird. The items in it have nothing to do with each other. There are a lot of cigar-related products, though. "Nothing's more aggravating than reaching for your favorite smoke and discovering it's been accidentally crushed or broken" -- ain't it the truth?

Fri Jul 03 1998 12:00: Thanks to Need To Know, I know (nyuk nyuk nyuk) that Unix turns 900 million seconds old on my birthday.

I saw about half of a Marx Brothers movie on the cable I get through my rabbit ears and don't pay for. It was Room Service. Not very good, actually. My cable is really preternatural. I don't understand where it's coming from. My leading hypothesis is electromagnetic leakage from the cable of the people who live in the apartment above mine. But at least I get the Sci-Fi Channel. MST3K today.

Later: Correction. MST3K tomorrow. I keep forgetting it's Friday (It's Friday!).

I figured out what the Heartland America catalog is for. It's for middle-class people who don't have enough money to be upper-class but who have enough money to buy stuff that lets them pretend to be upper-class. I was going to say "middle-class white people" but I don't see any reason why other races can't join in the shame.

I'm going to work on getting more of the site up now.

Sat Jul 04 1998 12:00: I was mentioned on fire's automsg by ilyah for bringing the 900 million seconds thing to light over on this continent. omarr adds: date "+%s" will let you know when to celebrate. And it certainly will. It happens at about 11 AM Nowhere Daylight Time, if I remember my GMT->NDT conversion correctly.

MST3K today. X-day tomorrow.

Oi! Yesterday on TCM they showed The Lost World, which I remember seeing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (aka "the place in the Sheryl Crow video") when I was about five. I couldn't get enough of the tyrannosaur fight where one of the tyrannosaurs pushes the other one off the cliff. It's still a great movie, modulo the shameful 1920s parts. For the confused, I am referring not to the 1997 sequel to Jurassic Park, but to a 1925 silent film with dialogue on note cards and annoying organ music playing throughout, which is based on a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle and in which we see "mighty prehistoric monsters clashing with modern lovers". Willis O'Brien, father of the stop-motion photography technique and mentor to Ray Harryhausen, did the effects. After that they showed King Kong, which I hadn't seen before, but which I fell asleep in the middle of.

On a somewhat related note, according to my physics lab TA, part of the movie Scream II was filmed in Kinsey 51, a large lecture hall in which I took Physics 8C, among other classes. I find this hilarious. I may have to actually watch that movie, or at least that part of the movie.

Note: I am not someone who finds the inclusion of any place I know in a movie to be funny. Life is too short for that. Kinsey 51 is a special case, just because of the bizarre memories I have of that room. The other example I can think of is the filming of a Mentos commercial on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

From the "Songwriters Not Thinking Out The Consequences Of Their Lyrics" category: "Every heart beats true 'neath the red, white, and blue/Where there's never a boast nor a brag". --You're a Grand Old Flag

Later:Excellent, Smithers. In honor of the Fourth, I present the first article to go up on the new Crummy, a rhetorical analysis of the Star-Spangled Banner entitled You Let A LAWYER Write the National Anthem?. By Frances Whitney, who happens to be my mother. Now you know where I get it.

Curses, no MST3K today. It was preempted by some dumb Twilight Zone marathon. The Sci-Fi channel presents, Inside the Twilight Zone.

Later still: Interestingly enough, Zappa will soon be played on KUSC. I'm going to record it. I don't know what piece it is. The Twilight Zone marathon is still going on. The Zappa pieces are not being played by Zappa or any organization under his direction, they're being played by some arts ensemble. The tape is rolling.

Sun Jul 05 1998 12:00: This is a test of Advogado whiipp

Mon Jul 06 1998 12:00: Armageddon sucked. See Kris' writeup. I stole Kris' Steve Buscemi tagline for my leonardr page's title because I notiched that my newfound obsession with models of things (analogous perhaps to Jake's obsession with robots) was beginning to monopolize my page titles.

I also updated my projects page.

I had a reason for putting that in a separate paragraph, but it had to do with text after the last part of "titles." which I deleted as unworthy of this page.

Later: Leonard Richardson Month presents famous Leonards in history. Today, Leonard Sly, aka Roy Rogers.

Tue Jul 07 1998 12:00: La de da.

Wed Jul 08 1998 12:00: Tomorrow is my birthday and Unix 900 million day. 1 billion day is 3 years down the road. 1 trillion day is about 21,000 years down the road.

Thu Jul 09 1998 12:00: I'm just hanging out on groucho here counting down the last few minutes until S-Second.

Woo! And there it is! Here is a copy of the countdown for you poor schmoes who missed it.

My GPA for last quarter was 3.35 or thereabouts. This bring my cumulative GPA up to 3.101.

Later: Ah, happy birthday to me. Adam Kaplan and Peter Hodgson are among those who sent me birthday greetings the electronic way. Actually, they're it. But Adam made quite a show, making a banner appear on my screen when I was logged onto fire.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I watched part of the The Twilight Zone marathon (attack of The The Twilight Zone Marathons) a few days ago, and some of them were actually pretty good. There was a really funny part in one where this guy could create people by describing them into a tape recorder, and destroy them by burning the appropriate length of tape. At the end Rod Serling came on the set and was talking about how implausible the bit was, and the guy got mad and burned some tape and Rod Serling disappeared. I thought that was hilarious.

Fri Jul 10 1998 12:00: I thought it was Kris' doing, but it was actually John Hazlett, who I've talked to before but I can't remember what about, who sent me a Jurassic Park: The Lost World (not The Lost World) multimedia birthday card experience. He said that he would have preferred to send an Armageddon birthday card but they didn't have any, and that he hoped my birthday had better acting than either movie. I'm paraphrasing here. John, who are you? I've forgotten.

In the FaultNIC source code the phrase "big ugly alien" occurs in a comment. The occurance of that phrase triggered a bad Alien dream for me last night. Man, those dreams are scary.

Tue Jul 14 1998 12:00: Here we go, Bastille Day. Here is the building in which I work being turned into a gigantic ad for Armageddon. The city made them take it down, it was causing traffic jams on the 405. Strangely enough, there are still traffic jams on the 405.

Wed Jul 15 1998 12:00: Attention everyone. It's birthday day in the lunchroom. Birthday day in the lunchroom.

Thu Jul 16 1998 12:00: Man, I hope Peter is okay. I haven't heard from him in a week.

Sorry about all the tiny entries lately. I've been busy.

For instance, on the 14th Adam and I went to install Red Hat on Kris' computer. Except it's not his computer, it's his laptop. We all know about the hazards of installing Linux on laptops (cough cough proprietary hardware), and Kris' laptop is the cheapest, lousiest, most Taiwanese-clonish laptop in existance. He bought a new hard drive to put Linux on, but the BIOS would halfway recognize it and the installation wouldn't recognize it at all. And I ask him if it's a SCSI drive and he says "Oh yeah, it is." So we try SCSI autoprobing and it doesn't work (for reasons we will soon discover), and we try some drivers and none of those work, so we decide to put the W95 hard drive back in and see what SCSI driver that's using. And as Kris unplugs the hard drive I see that it's not a SCSI hard drive but a PCMCIA hard drive. Geez. ~~Stupid Kris.~~ So we try it with PCMCIA but it still doesn't work and so I try to get the BIOS to recognize the hard drive in the first place, and at that point I had to leave so I don't know how it went. Adam was there too, he took over for me.

Speaking of Adam, Coffee Junction is a week from today.

Speaking of today, it's Jake's birthday. Happy birthday Jake. I have written a birthday extravaganza for Jake which will go on a tape, hopefully tonight, and over mail to Jake. I will post the lowdown on the tape after Jake hears it, as it may be of general interest. Also tonight Darius is coming over and he wants me to look at some Web thing he's doing. I also have to get my landlord's W95 to recognize his modem. I think the modem may be broken.

And also I have physics lab today. So I'm busy. I'm going to miss a physics lab on Thursday because Coffee Junction interferes with it.

I don't have a setlist for Coffee Junction. Adam, you already have about 20 messages from me in your mailbox so I'll just ask you this on the Web: if we don't get my guitar fixed in time for the gig, can I borrow your electric for songs like Asia Carrera and Arbitron that require the use of a top string?

Fri Jul 17 1998 12:00: Agh. I just got suckered into looking at the first page of that "teens to lose virginity on Web" page. Omar made a mirror of it and mentioned the URL in the fire automsg. I foolishly did not associate the domain name with the subject matter of the site. I'm normally not that naive, but my mind is not doing too well this morning.

I have now spent three solid days preparing Jake's birthday tape. It is now done and ready to go. I just need for Jake to send me the address he wants it sent to so I can send it out.

Later: Okay, now you can lose your virginity on the Web. And you are literally losing your virginity on the Web, unlike those bums I mentioned above. It even works in Lynx!

Attention: I hereby apologize for and retract my statement "Stupid Kris." in today's entry. It was a mistake anyone could have made, except for people who know what a PCMCIA socket looks like. Uh, but my point is, I overreacted, and I'm sorry. However, I stand by my statement "Geez."

Sat Jul 18 1998 12:00: www.ourfirsttime.com is a pathetic sham, but Crummy's online defloration offer still stands!

Tue Jul 21 1998 12:00: I have decided to start calling Rynna Poulson "Macarynna", as in "heeey, Macarynna!". I have not seen Rynna Poulson recently, nor do I plan to see her in the immediate future, but when I do see her I will call her "Macarynna" and see how she reacts.

Jake has received his birthday tape and says that it's "easily the best birthday present i've ever gotten", so now the details can be unleashed upon an unsuspecting Web. Look for them soon.

Wed Jul 22 1998 12:00: The Coffee Junction tracklist for tomorrow has been finalized. Woo-hoo. Now I have to rest.

Later: At Kris' rather halfhearted insistance, I put up my page of problems with Armageddon to complement his. Enjoy.

Mon Jul 27 1998 12:00: I find it interesting that Crummy only gets updated when I don't have anything else to do. I have stuff to do right now, but I'm doing some Crummy updates anyway. Here is info on Jake's Birthday Party.

The Coffee Junction gig went pretty well. We'll have bootlegs out reasonably soon.

Tue Jul 28 1998 12:00: "Due to public demand the Segfault Team have been rounded up and shot." -- segfault.org

Wed Jul 29 1998 12:00: I thought Powerball was like paintball.

Man, what a lot of crap I have to do. I have to fix my landlord's modem, I have to start looking for a new place to live, I have to do Darius' online store, I have to do Segfault stuff, and I have to do physics stuff. Bleah I say.

Actually I guess the Segfault stuff doesn't count as "crap". I'd be nice to Darius and say his store doesn't count as crap either, but quite frankly I don't really care about online gaming stores. I'm just doing it because he's my friend, and also he's paying me.