Thu Oct 01 1998 08:42: Ah, October.

Thu Oct 01 1998 13:16: OK, I finally got the source viewer up, if you go to programs.shtml you can see it in action. that's a dynamically generated list, by the way, generated by the source viewer itself, and all I have to do is add new script names to a file to have them show up. I'll probably put in facilities for putting in descriptions as well.

I also need to write a script that updates pokey.pl with new numbers of panels. I may do that this afternoon.

Thu Oct 01 1998 14:20: Uh-oh. Jake...

Your account on the NetSpace server has expired.  If you wish to continue
using your NetSpace account please email reg@netspace.org immediately.
If you fail to renew your account it will be deleted according to the
NetSpace user agreement.

The source viewer now has descriptions. split makes it all possible. Most of it, at any rate.

Thu Oct 01 1998 15:18: There is now a script which uses wget to download the finest in Pokey fashions, automatically creating a Dada Pokey script for the young scientist in the family.

Unfortunately, it's not up yet, as sampo does not have wget. But I've tested it on rubberfish and it works. Yippee die-ai-aye!

Thu Oct 01 1998 15:34: I don't always do what mama said, but I do always make things more complicated than they need to be. Rather than use the new (see last entry) Pokey perl script which generates another perl script as output, I have simplified it by turning it into two perl scripts that do different jobs. One will get run as a nightly cron job and write its findings to a file. The other will be the standard pokey.pl we know and love, but instead of the numbers of panels being fixed as they are now, it will read from the file that the other script writes to. And both scripts will live happily ever after. The end.

Thu Oct 01 1998 20:26: Now that I have an address at which I will be for a while, I have decided to start subscribing to a couple of things. I just now got a student subscription to KUSC for $25. And it'll come to me. For the past year I've always been on the verge of moving out and now I don't have to worry about moving out and stuff not getting to me. It just blows my mind. I think I'll subscribe to Scientific American or something, if it's not too expensive. I used to like reading that.

I need to sleep, but I can't get to sleep. Oh well.

Fri Oct 02 1998 14:19: Turns out fire got cracked. Darn. I went and changed my .forwards so that mail gets to me on SEASnet. Hopefully I'll all the mail sent to me since Monday will come flooding into there now.

Sat Oct 03 1998 08:57: Woohoo! Dada Pokey should now be updated with new dada data every night at midnight my time. Thanks to Andy for wgetting wget. Man, I'm Mr. Alliteration today.

Sat Oct 03 1998 11:30: You know what? I just washed a load of laundry and forgot to put in any detergent, and my clothes are just fine. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Let's see what Heartland America has to say about this:

Never Buy Laundry Soap Again!
Reusable Bion laundry disks are chemical-free, detergent-free and gentle enough for washing baby clothing. These disks clean better than detergent and each disk is good for at least 60 loads. Activated ceramics break up water molecules, enhancing their ability to penetrate fabric and lift away dirt, grease, and ground-in s tains. Safe for all fabrics. 3 disk pack.
WAS $29.99 NOW ONLY! $19.99

I think somebody is getting taken.

Sat Oct 03 1998 13:16: I was tired of not having kitchen neccessities like a rubber scraper and a decent spatula and Hamburger Helper, so I went through all my kitchen boxes. And I made what is probably the single text file with the least putting-onto-the-Web value. So of course I put it on the Web. Behold the contents of my "kitchen stuff" boxes file! Plus, I found my ancient Vonsclub card, so I can cash in on the cheap stuff at the Vons that's just around the corner.

Sun Oct 04 1998 12:02: How emberasske.

Sun Oct 04 1998 12:05: Glitter. Big hair. And power chords. It's all part of my rock 'n' roll fantasy. And here come the jesters. One. Two. Three. On Real Stories of the Blues, Part I: Miss Carbon Monoxide.

Mon Oct 05 1998 13:15: Hm, I thought that didn't look right. An inaccuracy in my schedule made things look worse than they actually are. I now only have to wait 3 hours until CSM151B on Mondays and Wednesdays (I am engaged in such a wait right now) and 1 hour on Fridays. This means I can go home earlier. Whee.

Mon Oct 05 1998 19:06: This is an interesting development. Adam can't perform at Coffee Junction on the 22nd so I am going to have to play the entire 2-hour (well, 45-minute 15-minute break 45-minute) set by myself. Truly that day will live in infamy, one way or the other. I'd better start practicing.

Mon Oct 05 1998 20:30: Woohoo, I just sent off for a bunch of catalogs. Cheap thrills. I have decided to get a student membership in the ACM and to subscribe to the Annals of Improbably Research. That should dampen my enthusiasm for sending off for stuff some.

Thu Oct 08 1998 08:04: Booo, unauthorized changes to my schedule have taken place. The lab is now two hours on Tuesday and Thursday, making it difficult for me to work on Thursday. I moved my Classics discussion back so that I don't have a two-hour wait on Thursday but only a half-hour wait. But now I don't know what room that's in so I have to look it up. And I have to go to a lab safety class on Friday. Bleah.

Fri Oct 09 1998 08:30: I updated my schedule so that I could make a new printout. The old printout was getting crowded with additions and corrections. This once was lost but now it's found: How to tie a necktie.

Sun Oct 11 1998 09:51: Behold my latest masterpiece, Monty Hall's Hall Of Doors! The interactive component of my mathematics popularization paper on the Monty Hall Paradox. Plays the Monty Hall game thousands of times on end, switching doors as you tell it to, and tallies the results for you to see.

Mon Oct 12 1998 09:36: Oh, ooga booga. I figured I might as well put up this message I got back on the 8th, pertaining as it does to this page.

Mon Oct 12 1998 12:14: Apparantly, I'VE WON a cool Pepsi Backpack To claim my prize, I must present my sticker at the UCLA dining Services Office, located at the Housing Administration Building. (310) 825-1943. Sticker subject to verification. Prize must be claimed by 11/15/98. See official rules for details.

All I wanted was a Mountain Dew. Now I have to go through all this crap and get a cool Pepsi Backpack too.

Mon Oct 12 1998 12:16: By the way, I am officially engaging in the first skipped class of the year. I'm skipping statistics. I need to do homework.

Mon Oct 12 1998 13:32: What is Microsoft URL Control? Whatever it is, it sounds sinister. A search of Microsoft's Web site turns up nothing, but an Altavista shows it to have something of a past. As long as I'm linking to pages like that, here's another.

Aha. Mystery solved. Microsoft URL Control is the user-agent given to applications that use the MSInet API under Visual C++. I hope I don't have to put in a spam spoofing device again.

Mon Oct 12 1998 13:44: Also, what is Xenu's Galactic Link Sleuth? Obviously something Scientology-related.

And... I'm wrong. Kind of. It's not Scientology-related, but the name was clearly Scientology-inspired. Xenu's Link Sleuth is a standard link checker that runs on Windows. And check out this righteous place, even like unto a gnarly wave in its tubularosity.

I don't know why I'm posting so many URLs today. Numerous things have conspired to put me in that kind of a mood.

Tue Oct 13 1998 07:12: I fixed the problem with Dada Pokey. It was getting its panels from the wrong strips. SMILE!!! IT'S A GAY DAY!!!

I should be sending off two OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO tapes to Jake today.

Tue Oct 13 1998 08:00: Room temperature:

OOOOO OOOOO OOOOO
O               O
OOOOO OOOOO OOOOO
    O     O     O
OOOOO OOOOO OOOOO

I don't know either. Probably a Y2K bug.

Tue Oct 13 1998 12:43: FDR
Leading this country to greatness
FDR
Leading this country to me
FDR, FDR, FDR, FDR

Tue Oct 13 1998 13:26: Mr. Nutty and Red Hat: The moderately shocking connection!

Fri Oct 16 1998 06:53: Watched The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi last night.

Man, what a weird dream I just woke up from.

Those two things are not related at all.

The dream was sort of text-adventurey, but live action, and there were numerous other people in the game whom I was playing against. There was a large house and its premises which appeared to be the bounds of the game. There was a very strange thing inside the house which I can imagine but I can't explain. But most of the house was quite banal; I was frustrated because we were looking for something really great, presumably, and mostly all there was lying aroun d was stickers and little hard candies. When I started to wake up I was in the garden with someone else (a competitor) sifting through the dirt with seives. Weird dream, but fun.

Fri Oct 16 1998 13:55: You know what? Admiral Akbar never says "No craft can penetrate it." in ROTJ. They must have cut that line.

Fri Oct 16 1998 17:38: Today is the anniversiary of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. I think about that a lot. ("A lot" meaning a disproportionately large percentage of the time I give to thinking about specific historical events)

Sat Oct 17 1998 10:55: OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO is approaching a non-vaporware state. I have sent two of the master tapes off to Jake for processing. I need to find a copy of the original Bastard Squad! radio drama so that I can finally record my lines. I need to get Adam's hog so that I can record my needing-Adam's-hog songs and also so I can practice for Coffee Junction on Thursday. And I need to get Kris to draw a good cover over the chicken-scratch I drew as a guide for him. Whee.

Sat Oct 17 1998 19:17: Behold the sweet smell of napalm and The Best of Dada Pokey. I wrote two Perl scripts which save me the drudgery of saving a bunch of nearly-identical HTML files and linking to them all: Best of Dada Pokey Viewer and Best Of Dada Pokey List Generator. Remember, if you get a good Dada Pokey, send me the file (or just the image data).

Sun Oct 18 1998 08:10: Today is major laundry day. I've been wearing already-worn socks for the past week. Laundry-doing is so expensive here. It costs nearly two dollars to do a load of laundry. Two dollars in quarters, mind you, which I need for bus fare. Agh.

La de da, just publishing a couple Segfault articles.

Sun Oct 18 1998 09:04: Ah, clean socks. Tom, consider the sock. So decadent, so firm...

It has occured to me that the method I use to store The Best of Dada Pokey could also be used to do Pokey collage, by picking Pokey panels by some non-random process and arranging them to form a new story. As with TBODP, all that would need to be stored would be an ordered list of panels and title and author information. Any takers for Pokey collage?

Mon Oct 19 1998 07:20: Could it really be the Pokey folky using my notebook script? Mine, I tell you? At the very least they wrote one that approximates the function of mine. Oh, happy day. Callooh, Calais. I finished the Joyce biography today at 4 in the morning. My eyes hurt now. I never realized what a freak Joyce was. Super freak, super freak, he was super freaky. I am James and you are my brother Stanislaus!

I just sent Garrett a rambling note telling him about the OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO cover and asking him for an image alteration job. I won't tell Jake about the cover, though, just because he got me to do a real cover in the first place. Yeah, that'll teach him.

Jake got my tapes. I shall reprint the note in question. Here it be. Caution: Contains OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO spoilers. Caution. Caution. May contain explosive material. Do not eat. Caution. May contain Mike. Do not shave head.

Mon Oct 19 1998 11:54: Boy, I tell you, skipping Stats on Mondays could get to be a regular thing with me. Man, I'm hungry. Fortunately I brought sandwich material.

Fri Oct 23 1998 21:20:

Woo-hoo!

Sat Oct 24 1998 07:40: Another mighty innovation has come to the land of Dada Pokey. Now a ready-made Best of Dada Pokey link is provided at the bottom of each comic. All you have to do to send me a good run of Dada Pokey is to send me that link.

Sat Oct 24 1998 07:43: Oh yeah, they finally fixed the "Room Temperature" LED billboard I see going home from school on the bus every day.

Sat Oct 24 1998 10:04: My sinus infection and sore throat has gone away and been replaced with an industry-standard cold.

My first draft of my Plautus paper is almost done. Peer review will come tomorrow and it will be done by Monday. Not too hard, once I figured out exactly what I wanted to do.

Mon Oct 26 1998 06:29: This sucks.

Tue Oct 27 1998 08:33: The room temperature LED billboard is broken again. I think there's something wrong with their logic expressions.

Tue Oct 27 1998 13:05: Here are some updates for you: I added a features directory, and moved Dada Pokey into there. There's also a new feature which very few people will care about. I'm hosting the web page for a mailing list I created yesterday which has people from the old Prodigy Hitchhiker's Guide boards on it. No, you don't care, but we do.

You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry, you'd better not pout, I'm telling you why. Alleged comedy Very Bad Things is coming to town. The ads say "TELL NO ONE." (I think that's what they say, it's in tiny letters and I only get to see the posters from the bus). I don't know what exactly we're not supposed to tell, but anything that is a bee in the collective bonnet of the people behind Very Bad Things is okay by me, so I point you to Kris' scathing preview review, endorsed by yours truly. If asked for my own assessment, I'd say that Very Bad Things is about as bad as Armageddon, but in a not-as-fun-to-make-fun-of way.

Wed Oct 28 1998 14:18: I feel it is time for me to once again shill for a consumer product. I have only done this once before, in the case of Pasta Roni Shells and White Cheddar. I shall now officially shill for Maruchan Hot And Sour Wonton Soup. It is good booze, I say. And, at 5 for a dollar, I can get 6 of them for the cost of a single box of Pasta Roni. Jake enjoys them too.

In the meantime, I urge all of you to Ask Murray.

Wed Oct 28 1998 20:37: Unto us this day a gag is born:

Kris: That's right. It's never your fault. It's always the other guy's fault. Let's go! Kill them! Kill them now!

Leonard: I hear the voice, but... your lips are moving!

Oh, what a great gag. I predict big things in store for that gag. Look for it.

Woohoo, fire is back up. I just have to get my account reactivated. Soon I'll be able to get my email from a real machine that can take orders instead of always trying to be the boss. I'll also be able to get about four days of month-old email containing I know not what.

Fri Oct 30 1998 06:47: fire is back up. Oops, I already used that one. But wait, now I'm using it for email. Which means I need to change the thing up there. Oh, the pain. I'll just wait until November and rewrite the whole thing.

I am doing CS151B homework and it is actually kind of fun. I came up with an way of implementing the PointerAdd operation which is either brilliantly innovative or incredibly wrong, as the way in which the subquestions are phrased does not anticipate that method of implementation at all. But I can't see anything wrong with it, and it allows you to implement all possible pointer operations for the price of PointerAdd.

A quote from me is in Kris' hacky client-side random quote thing which pales in comparison with my mighty SSI random quote thing. Go to Kris' site and look for my quote in the source if you don't get it on the page. The quote is shamefully ripped out of a context in which it makes perfect sense, in the manner of the dada country song assembled from things we said over the course of the day which sounded like they could be lines in a country song." Why did I think that was part of a quote?