I am now using emacs under Linux to edit my home page. I suggest you do the same. Bow down before its GPLed might! BOW DOWN! Crummy will be making the transition shortly. Note to vi people: bite me. Ha ha, I love holy wars!

I just redid the IRS page, it's now 100% Microsoft-free. Enjoy it. Buy my tapes, dammit.

     I'm gradually going through all the Crummy articles and changing them from evil Microsoft-created files into friendly Linux files. I'm taking the opportunity to do some minor updates and change links. Eventually all the Crummy links will work. Help me out by sending me dead links.

     If you have to send me mail on Saturday, send it to leonardr@sampo.st.hmc.edu. The UCLA mailserver is going down for maintenance on that day, and I won't be able to get mail from leonardr@ucla.edu until Sunday [Sunday Sunday!] or Monday.

    But that's not really our story. And I've forgotten what was. So I'm just going to sit here until I think of it. Oh yeah, my mom sent me some penguin stickers. I stuck some on my computer case. Linux Inside! Goddess, I sound like Dave Winer. I bet you wish your mother was as cool as mine.

I didn't mention this in a news thing Saturday, but if you go down to my bio page you can see some additional pages I did about the computers that have graced my life. I also moved the link to my pictures onto the bio page. Now all the stuff on the menu fits nicely into two table rows again. Yes, I'm obsessive-compulsive. How did you know?

    Oh yeah, I uploaded the new improved Crummy pages. Bonk bonk on the head for not realizing why both gzip AND tar are usually employed in compressing multiple files. Hey, there was a minor earthquake here today, apparantly an aftershock from a quake over in China earlier. It was pretty cool. Anyway, that's all the yumminess for now, I gotta go fix some links on the computer pages.

Later...

    This is purely for my reference, but if you were going to eat a human body, where would you start? NO! NO! NO! I mean, this is purely for my reference, but I have HTMLified and uploaded my winter 98 schedule, as is the fashion, and it's an old fashion, and I wish I had an Old Fashioned, as Groucho Marx would say. The masses cry out: "Why don't you just get your schedule from URSA Online if you're on campus and need information about a class but forgot your printout at home?" Well, because the URSA Online schedule only displays the list of classes, and not a time grid, which is the way I visualize my classes. Hmm, this calls for a Perl script.

Still later...

     Woo-hoo! I have a roommate! Unfortunately, he appears to be an evangelical Christian. Oh well, it should be interesting. Anyway, Severino is an evangelical Christian, and he's pretty cool. His [my roommate's] name is James Yoo. I guess I should ask someone else to sing backup on "Swim Free", my tirade against putting Christian fish on the back of cars. Actually he has a car. I wonder if it's got a fish on it.

Talkin' End of the World Blues

     In other opinionated news, I got some old books of Christian prophecy at the Goodwill in Bakersfield. They are "The Late Great Planet Earth" by Hal Lindsey, who appears to be a fundie, and "This Apocalyptic Age" by Robert Bergen, who appears to be Catholic. Both published in 1970, both convinced that the Bible is speaking of their time, both bearing certain ever-so-slight resemblances to books of Christian prophecy published today, 28 years later. I'm going to present my analysis of what went wrong. I also got a 45 of Lindsey's "The 1980's: Countdown to Armageddon". He's like a dog with an old sock, that guy. I also also got a more recent book, "Silicon Snake Oil" by Cliff "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Egg" Stoll, which, being about the Internet and published three years ago, I can analyze in much the same light, although a lot of what he says is still a big problem and at least he doesn't put on his pompous hat and march around singing showtunes, so to speak, like the authors of certain other books I got at the Goodwill. But my biggest thrift-shop prizes were several old computer manuals: Atari Basic, Fortran for Business People, and a manual for Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program ever. Now if I only had my homework done.

I just completed a parody FSF response to the Netscape fiasco, which I am somewhat proud of. Check it out.

     I really shouldn't be doing this, as I have a midterm in a few hours. But my mind steadfastly insists that it's an easy midterm, but it's not, but my mind controls my body so what can I do? I'm here hitting keys instead of cramming. When I fail my midterm my mind's really going to get what's coming to it.

     It's raining [], hallelujiah, it's raining [], hey-ey-ey. Get off my land, ya smoochers!

    Kristofer "pwd" Straub and I have discovered a new elementary particle, the Durion. Now at last science can unite the electroweak force and the wacky force!

I feel as though some sort of disclaimer were neccessary for that last item, but I'm not sure what.

Later: Actually, that midterm was pretty easy. I guess my brain knows something after all. But that's what's the deal we're dealing in.

In other news, I finally started work on Da Da Warren Memorial Memorial. Enjoy it, suckers.

     Go to http://www.linuxos.org/page1.jpg for scanned-magazine-page wackyness. "Or, if you do know about Linux, perhaps you envision a typical user as an 18-year-old, socially-challenged male college student with unkempt hair and a collection of Mountain Dew cans." You heer that new Yackoff Smeernof al-bum?

     I guess I should put that up as a quote. Dammit! I need server-side includes to do random quotes with! This has gone too far by half! (where are you going, general?) I'm going up to Harvey Mudd to personally shoot that paper-hanging son of a bitch!

    You know what? When I'm doing FTP or telnet in an X window it actually does those ^Hs when I hit backspace and it's ANNOYING! I know there's a way to fix it, but I'm too lazy.

    I got a 78 on my Math 33A midterm. Pretty good.

    SSI is still nonfunctional, despite a prolonged one-on-one with Andy. Various Apache crap has to be done. My many years of setting up BBS doors acquainted me with big text file configurations, but I guess it's not something everybody is used to. Step aside, Andy, and let a real man configure your server! Oh, I talk big, but can I back it up? You bet I can! At least I don't type periods instead of dashes-^H.

    I am working on some pages, which may become part of Crummy or part of LYH, depending on which hand I write them with. Among these pages are a plea to the book publishing company employees who roam the Web in search of people to gift with juicy publishing contracts, some lectures on user interface design, musings on some KUSC broadcasting quirks, and a ramble (like a rant, but not angry) on seeing thought as software. I have added the following pages as of now: My page of things I fear, my woefully incomplete list of software packages on rubberfish, and a page explaining my usage of the word "chick". I have also uploaded updates to some of my computer pages.

    xly, where x is the number I would put before "ly" if I were keeping track, I rearranged the Leonard Literature page so it's now a directory and features stuff written by me as well as stuff written by others about me. So, uh, there, I guess. No new new content, but the two old stories about the Bug Bash and about Angie Hernandez are back up again, if you want to read those again [for the first time].

    I have a copy of the poison that is Microsoft Visual J++, which copy I won in a trivia contest at the CSUA meeting. if you're in desperate need of this software package, I could be persuaded to exchange it for some item of value. Hey, look, I'm just like those guys in the text adventures!

    Pack up the station wagon and go over to the Da Warren page, which now features a transcript of the long-not-lost piece of performance art with which Andy and I officially closed the book on Da Warren.

Later: I updated the browser program, and wrote a little source viewer so you can view the source in all its glory. Here is the link.

Later: The amazing Browser Greetings program is now even more amazing. I got an e-mail message generated by a webspider canvassing this page, so I added code to log the visits of spiders and such. If the log file existed, it would be here. Check on it periodically, who knows what will turn up. If anyone knows of bots whose HTTP headers do not contain the word "bot" or "spider", or of real browsers whose HTTP headers do contain those words, tell me.

    I just did some minor updates to My bio and my trading page.

    Also, a request, to Michael Yount, yenrab, and anyone else who has applied silly nicknames to me. Please send me a list of said silly nicknames. I'd like to make a compilation. Happy new year! Damn.

    Michael "Tee-hee, Save The Children" Yount mutilated my evil vampire yearbook picture into an evil demon yearbook picture. I didn't put it up because it sucks. If he does a better one I'll put the better one up. At least he used the GIMP.

    I'm making brownies. Actually, I already made the batter. They're in the oven. I guess I'm compiling brownies.

Later: Do PC software consumers benefit now that Microsoft owns everything? Well, here are some price deltas for late 1985 and 1986, inspired by Papa Joe's 1994-1998 comparison. Not very conclusive, but have fun anyway.

Later still: Hey, check out www.mozilla.org. Did you know about the Olympics? They're over now, apparantly.

    My freezer is full of meat. This is not hyperbole. My [laughably small, admittedly] freezer is completely full (so full I had to remove the ice cube trays and the frozen spinach to cram everything in), and it's 80% full of meat. James and I go through Hamburger Helper (and, consequently, hamburger) like a tornado through a trailer park, and David has palletes of pork and entire flocks of chickens which must be frozen. I don't think eating meat is morally wrong or anything, but that's just too much meat in too small a space.

    Mike "Tsk, Tsk, Tsk" Rust, professional Andy's roommate, has successfully pestered me into adding numerous browsers to the browser greeting CGI. Soon I'll have every browser in existance covered and there'll be no need for Arthur Miller's misfits I won't get any more automated emails from the rackem frackem program. ("Hey, you programmed it!") Bite me.

    I just wrote a song (more accurately, I just finished writing a song). It's pretty silly. It will probably go on Ow, My Prostate!: 24,996 Years of Porcelain Puppy Oppression. Here it is: Born to be Dead

    By the way, the Mimic program is GPL. I have funercized my editorial perogie-ative and made it so, in the absence of any response from Mike Rust. Please read and understand the GPL before using or abusing Mimic. Also note that Mimic is a meme, and that by publicly displaying the Mimic program or its output you will be propagating the meme and encouraging others to take it up, effectively shortening the lifespan of the joke. See also Dissociated Press, meme, sliced bread.

    Jake "I'm Huge, I'm Immense" Berendes is redoing the crup tapes web site. He also stole my Emperor Palpatine schtick, but that's fine. The page claims it'll be up Saturday. Whee.

    I had something relevant to say, but I've forgotten it. Isn't that always the way [of the walk]?

    This may or may not be what I was going to say, but I had a vision today of Morn^H^H^H^Ha new web site for my music. I would have a file for each song marked up with <notation> and </notation> tags so that I would be able to have one file to act as both lyric sheet and tab/chord sheet. I could also have <commentary> and </commentary> tags in the same file so the file could contain any notes I had on the song. Then for an album I could just have a page with a bunch of SSI #include directives to include the file for each song. Interesting idea. I'll have to see what happens with the crup tapes site.

Semprini!

    Boy, that felt good [miaiow]. Man, what am I on? Some kind of barbituate, I should think. But I don't remember taking anything. That proves nothing, of course.

    So go to the crup page. It is your friend. That's all I have for this update. Except I added links to a lot of the crup pages on the Leonard Literature page. Now shoo!

    A mini-tract fell into my hot little pagan hands today. My analysis of it is here. I am not one who currently has the time to discuss the issues raised by the tract in any detail. I just wanted to write down my ideas while they were fresh in my mind. After finals if you want to talk, we can talk. If you just want to email me telling me I'm going to hell, go ahead, since there's really no way to respond to that except "We'll find out, won't we?", which is easy enough to type.

    Stream-of-consciousness domain name that actually works of the update: www.scrum.com. This parrot is no more.

Later: I fulfilled my role as hunter/gatherer today by going to a Taos Mountain information meeting, where they gave us pizza and t-shirts and talked about how great it was to work at Taos Mountain. I have two pieces of pepperoni and a Sprite in the fridge (Sprite sez: "Let me out! Ye dare remove me from the land of magical enchantment? The Fairie King will avenge me sure!" Yeah, yeah, show me the way to your pot of gold and we'll talk.). The t-shirt is pretty nifty and joins the ever-increasing stack of techie t-shirts I have. Let's see, I've got a Linux shirt, a Toshiba shirt, a Microsoft Developer Tools shirt, the Taos Mtn. shirt, a freaky Workgroup Switching shirt, and a Symantec Bug Bash shirt. I hope to go to Comdex this year (Comdex Comdex. Comdex '98. Comdex Comdex.) and quadruple that at least. But Comdex shirts will always be inferior in my mind to the shirts I had to earn by hard sitting-in-recruitment-meetings and bug-bashing.

    Coming home, I found a very nice letter in my mailbox from John Farragher, professional OS/2 user. John followed his nose to my page, Toucan Sam style [by Jove, Toucan Sam!], from the Dweebspeak Primer. He made me laugh, he made me cry, he made me update the browser greeting program yet again, here's the letter.

    Oops, I almost let the whole day go by without making the awful once-a-year pun! March Forth!

Article IV, Section 2.3: No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due.

    There's just nothing else to say.

Later: What the...? www.buchanan.org is running Apache! You'd think that Pat would take be the first to take a stand against a communistically-developed software package named after a tribe of savages, but I guess he's just a hypocrite like all the other politicians.

    Oh, I see what it is. buchanan.org is being hosted by advicom.net, which uses Apache. Still, you'd think they would care enough to take their business to a web hosting company that uses all-American Microsoft products.

    Prokofiev [Ha ha! Then Prokofiev showed up!] and Stalin [Ha ha! Then Stalin--no, that doesn't work.] both died on this date in 1934, I think. Today was also the day Winston Churchill coined the phrase "Iron Curtain".

Later Still: My mother writes in with an elegant, nigh-Gordian solution to a question that has been puzzling me: who is less trustworthy, Bill Gates or Orrin Hatch?

    Tomorrow I'm going to see The Big Lebowsky! Everyone but me went to the sneak preview a month ago. Adam says it's the greatest movie ever made, Kris wishes it would go away. These two facts, and the existance of the Cohen Brothers Seal Of Approval (tm), mean I'm going to like it. Already Adam and I are quoting it left and right.

    I put up the Dirty Harry sketches Kris and I wrote today. They're probably going to go on the new album.

    In the tradition of, well, the tradition of something, I'll cast myself and my friends in roles from The Big Lebowski:

• Jeff Lebowski: Adam. Adam is Mr. Slacker. Although you'd have to take Adam and combine him with me to get something that looked and sounded like Jeff Bridges in the movie. Adam quote: "They finally did it. They killed my fucking car."

• Walter Sobcek: Me. Anyone who says "You're about to enter a world of pain. A world of pain." is me. Also me-ish is ""You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me. I'll get you a toe by three this afternoon--with nail polish.""

• Donny: Kris, because he's so annoying. No, just kidding. Actually, I think we all have a little bit of this character inside of us, someone who loves bowling, who as a surfer explores the beaches of southern California from Redondo to Calabassos, even up to Pismo, who loves bowling, who likes to drink orange Slice, who loves bowling.

• Jesus Quintana: LJ, because his last name is Quintana. And he likes to lick bowling balls.

    If I had to complain about The Big Lebowski, I would say that the computer-generated effects were pretty lame, and there were no attractive women in the movie. Adam likes Maude Lebowski, but I say yecch. And Bambi is just a hussy.

    Oh yeah, I failed my physics midterm today.

    To help motivate myself, I am constructing a list of things I have to do, and the dates I have to do them by. Here it is:

Task	Date
Study for Math 61 midterm	Wednesday
Study for Math 33 midterm	Next Monday?
Do slides for Engineering 95 presentation	Thursday
Write words for Engineering 95 presentation	Next Tuesday
Turn Engineering 95 presentation into report	03/23
Study for Physics final
03/23
Study for Math 61 final	03/24
Study for Math 33 final
03/25?
Start work
Thursday 03/26

    All of a sudden, I don't feel so good.

    Here's my revised tasklist:

Task	Date
Math 33 midterm	Monday
Engineering 95 presentation	Tuesday
Engineering 95 report	2 Mondays
Study for Physics final
2 Mondays
Study for Math 61 final	2 Tuesdays
Study for Math 33 final
2 Wednesdays
Start work
2 Thursdays

    A question for you: What is the opposite of "incentive"?

    Yesterday Adam Kaplan wrote an extremely mighty song about me. Here it is: Crummy. He wrote it as part of a deal that he would write a song about me and I would write one about him. I'm gradually chipping away at my end of the bargain. My song is called New Time and is an Adam-saves-the-world type deal.

    Another thing that happened yesterday is that I got new shoes from Robinsons-May, a store I would not normally be caught dead in (actually, I wouldn't be caught dead in any clothing store, unless you count the Salivation Army and Goodwill as clothing stores); but I had a gift certificate, and my old shoes, hand-me-downs from my huge cousin Brian, had been mine for almost two years (and who knows how long he'd had them) and had begun to fall apart (Aah! My shoes are falling apart!), and it's difficult to get shoes that fit me at a thrift store so I figured I'd buy new ones. My goodness, what a long, complicated sentence. That's what I say, for some reason, "My goodness!" and "Oh, dear!" like June Cleaver. I don't normally type them, but I say them a lot in meatspace. Which reminds me, I'm working on a Leonardonics page which will replace the "What the he{ll,ck,pcat}" page down there and which will explain many of the words and phrases I use all the time. It's the least I can do.

    Anyway, the new shoes. They're modeled after hiking boots, but they're not boots, they're shoes. They look watertight. They're kind of difficult to get on but that will change as I break them in. They're quite sturdy. The brand name is "Claybrooke Outdoors" if that means anything to you. I am pleased with my purchase.

    Andy and I are probably going to go see Penn and Teller during spring break. They're appearing at the Wilshire Theatre, which is a few miles from here and next door to the Flynt Building, owned by that kindly old pornographer, Larry Flynt.

    What's this?, you say. No, sorry. What's this, you say? What's this? you say? "What's this?", you say. That'll work. "What's this?", you say. "Leonard actually going to see a live performance?" But the cosmic balance will never be in jeopardy (do do do do do do do), as Adam is going to take me to Pasadena to perform at some open mike nights. Woo-hoo!

    Also, if you don't know this, you should. The five surviving Pythons are going on an anniversiary tour next year, when any partying we do will be, by definition, partying like it's 1999. Haul down the well wall, Hazel, I am there. They're going to be performing new schticks as well as old favorites, and probably doing more sick stuff with Graham's ashes (or ashes claimed to be his, it doesn't really matter) in the style of both previous Python engagements, and, yes, The Big Lebowski. Andy has witnessed the power of The Big Lebowski, have you? Accept the Dude into your life and know that he takes it easy for all us sinners.

    Does anyone know how the V-chip works? Because it seems to me that they're going to have to keep fine-tuning the ratings system, and are they just going to make people keep buying new TVs? Or will the chips be reprogrammable on the fly? In which case the government can control what we watch. In any event, the government controls us all by secretly funding the networks to put crap programming on. My other television conspiracy theory is that the dubba-dubba-WB is run by white supremacists who are trying to keep urban blacks from rising up in revolt by pacifying them with unfunny ethnic comedy. You laugh at me now, but when they start producing The Animated Adventures of Steppen Fetchit, I will be vindicated.

    This is what government is good for. Funding cool and useful stuff that private industry [working for you!] wouldn't touch. $50 million is about 6 cents per American. I'd put in a dollar for a geographical satellite.

    As long as I'm going through the rather sparse [graph] news at newshub, take a look at this. I say get used to moral decay. Moral decay is here to stay. I should do a moral decay page. It's a pretty interesting article, though. The Malaysian government realizes that they can't censor the net, so they're resorting to other tactics.

I'm putting this here for lack of anywhere better to put it. Read it and weep.

China: pornography, dissident political information
France: Information from newsgroups (may be out-of-date)
Singapore: sex, religion, politics, homosexuality, gum-chewing, and HTTP headers

It's very difficult to find this information. You'd think there's be a worldwide censorship watch somewhere, but if there is I can't find it. Help me out on this list.

    You know what I want? I'll tell you what I want. I want to be able to control how HTML tags are processed by my browser. I want to be able to define new tags and control what and how they display by means of a script (eg. I could make the <censor> </censor> tags I did as a joke a while back actually work), which script could be downloaded by others and integrated into their own browsers so that they could see my tags, and see standard tags the same way I see them, if they so desired. I want Netscape to work like emacs, basically. This would solve the problem of nonstandard HTML tags; it would take maybe five seconds to download a script and add it to the browser's library; it could even be automated. Is this what XML does? If so, <annoying commercial lady>I want it!</annoying commercial lady> Hm, I don't know what that tag would do, though.

    It's also the first day of spring. Spring can bite me.

    Chih-Chien "The Cable Guy" Chang sent me his part of our Engineering 95 paper. It is a 3-megabyte Word file. I'm going to have to go into Win95 to read it, but it only took a couple minutes to download in Linux. I don't think I've ever gotten 33.3K out of this modem before.

    OK, I've got to cram for Physics, I've got to assemble the Eng95 report from the pieces I am sent by my teammates, and then I'm okay. The Math 33 final needs some studying for, but that's not until Wednesday and the Math 61 final on Tuesday should be a piece of cake (not literally). This weekend will be the weekend from hell, but I think I can make it. Wish me luck.

    The Old News page is getting big. I'd better split it into its constitutent parts. Later...

Hm, Sampo doesn't seem to be responding. I'll have to call Andy and ask what's up. It wasn't working yesterday either. So you won't read this for a while. No great loss.

    This is not a good sign, as I always get songs stuck in my head while I'm taking midterms and finals. And they're not relaxing songs, either. Once I had the part of the Animaniacs theme song that goes "We are the Warner Brothers and the Warner Sister Dot...now you know the plot" repeating over and over again. AAAAARGH!

     Speaking of finals, here is my revised schedule:

Task	Date
Physics final	20 hours
Engineering 95 report	22 hours
Math 61 final	37 hours
Math 33 final	64 hours

    So the time to panic is now, pretty much. However, in 23 hours I will be mostly free, and in 64 hours I will be completely free, for better or for worse.

    OK, I gotta go study magnetism now. I hope to be able to get at least 4 hours of sleep tonight.

    I don't know why the server was down. I'll find out eventually.

Task	Date
Math 61 final	3 hours
Math 33 final	27 hours

    I updated the bio and the Leonardonics, and put up a contact information page which I will link to on various pages.

    Adam and I were discussing my song Malibu, and I was trying to explain to him why I don't think it's a sad song. He thinks it's the saddest song in the world. And I finally figured it out and I said "I don't think it's a sad song because I don't like the characters in the song. I want to hurt them." and Adam said "You create your characters to live in hell, Leonard." I don't. The characters in Malibu are not living in hell. They are living in Malibu. I'm not even hurting them all that much. They're just stuck in a lousy relationship with each other, and they seem used to it.

    There, I've justified it.

    You know, that's the sort of thing I used to imagine God doing all the time.

    My new shoes are in fact watertight, which means that I can walk in puddles without being soaked, but it also means that when I am attacked by the Mother of All Puddles the way I was today, and water goes in through the top of the shoes, it never comes out. Argh. My feet are wet. Argh. Argh. Ah, Ricky.

    Admittedly, that's a pretty petty thing to be complaining about, especially being done with finals as I am. But it's the principle of the thing.

    There is an annoying dripping sound emenating from outside my bedroom. Oh well. I don't even care [we could have all three].

    What to do over break... well, work, mostly. I need to organize my pages, and put some new stuff on Crummy, and clean out all the crap in my room left over from last quarter.

    This page is like my journal. I was never able to keep a journal before, but this is easy. Cool. This is a good thing. Of course, as Kris points out, there's stuff I could put in a paper journal that I wouldn't want to put up on the Web. But if I kept a paper journal and used it to record all my sordid deeds, revisionist historians would get ahold of it after my death and make me out to me even more of a bastard than I am. Best to cover the whole thing up. [tomato, tomato]

    Do you think I should change the name of Leonard's Yummy Homepage? It doesn't sound as good to me as it did when I thought it up. In fact, I never really thought it up, I just started the first version of it with "This is my yummy homepage" or something like that and it didn't become a name until later. Let me know what you think of the name.

    I have a message from Jake which I guess can go up as a mail thing. Do you know of any things that let you convert mail to Web pages? Ideally I'd like to have a separate directory where I could just stack the mail I recieve on a particular day and then have a CGI that puts the glitz on them for the viewer at home. I know I saw something recently that converts mail to HTML, but I can't remember where I saw it. Argh. I'll check freshmeat.

    Do you think I'm talking to the elves in my head in the last two paragraphs? Well, I am, but I'm also talking to you the person reading my home page. Let me know what your opinion is. Or I'll sic the elves on you.

    Even when at work in the horror of Windows 95, I can take sanctuary in the GNUness of Emacs and edit my homepage. I have this nifty ergonomic keyboard which came with one of the new systems we bought. It hasn't been taken away from me yet, so I'm using it.

    Yummy links: http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt.html, http://egg.microsoft.com/poweredby.gif

Later: I've done some work on the Crummy Cookie Bombardment CGI of Interminate Confusion, as it is now called. Look for it tonight or tomorrow. It will combine every possible silly and subversive use of cookies into a single CGI.

    Microsoft's trade magazine ads lately have been interesting. Though they continue to lay the FUD on thick with "All who will not join us will die" ads, they also are running ads emphasising interoperability, apparantly since it has occured to them that there still exist MIS managers for whom the political cost of implementing a crappy system is greater than the political cost of a non-Microsoft solution. There's a Microsoft ad in the latest Infoworld which talks about their committment to Unix interoperability. And it's a cool ad, I'm not dissing the ad at all. Microsoft does some great ads. But I don't really understand it. It's very Waiting For Godot-ish, it's a B&W photo of three IBM-type old white guys in suits, and two of them are in a rowboat holding oars and the third one is outside the boat turning on a water faucet. And the copy of the ad implies that Microsoft and its new bedfellow HP are committed to working with Unix, at least until such time as it [Unix] goes away. But I don't understand the dynamics of the ad. Who represents the guys in the boat, and who represents the guy with the tap? I don't know. And don't even get me started on the ads with the creepy MSCE.

    Oh, I see. There's another ad in another Infoworld in which the two guys in the boat are seen holding up a giant fish. So it would appear that the guys in the boat represent Microsoft and HP, and the fish represents Unix. Still pretty freaky.

    I've done all the stuff that doesn't require Perl hacking, so I guess I'll get started on that. I've made dinky changes to pages across the board, and added new indexes, so have fun with that if you want to. The only thing I remember is adding "professional" to the Leonardonics page.

Later: OK, the dynamic silly nickname page is up. I wrote code so that it would never duplicate names on a single page, but it didn't work so I gave up. I'd rather work on the cookie bombardment thing. I'll check back later.

    I'm just going to keep gloating here. The lady who owns the coffeehouse thought I was incredible. Adam says I may get invited back to play a whole set (it happened to him the first time he played there). There were old people there who dug my songs as well, proving the width of my demographic. Ah, it feels good to wallow in my success.

    I got a weird spam mail recently. Fairly well targeted to me. Hm, what's this in my mailbox? More spam! Wow, really well targeted. It's forged to look like it came from Kris! Well, into the trash with it!

    The dynamic silly nicknames thing is screwy. I don't know why, but it generates nicknames once per browser. If you reload you don't get different nicknames. Unless you're using lynx. So use lynx if you want that kind of action, that's all I can say. The problem's not on my end. Shoot yourself in the foot, too.

    Here's a cool link: www.idiom.com/free-compilers. I think what I'm going to do on LYH, link-wise, is to have a several pages of links in different categories, with descriptions, and then periodically upload my Netscape bookmark file. By the way, check out Linbot for all your bad-link-finding needs, now in GNUvision.

    I have on my desk a CDROM copy of FreeBSD, which I will soon be installing on one of the old systems we plan to replace today. It is in fact the 2.2.2 version of FreeBSD, which is somewhat old (June 1997), but that's fine. I'll just have to download a new Apache. I think there should be a cage match between the FreeBSD daemon and the Linux penguin to finally determine which one is more sappily cute.

    Oh yeah, yesterday at the open mike a little girl sang Hanson's Mmmmbop. It actually doesn't sound so bad when a real XX person sings it. It's like those whalesong tapes.

Later: Of all the things I hate about Visual Basic, this is the thing I hate the most: To display a form on the screen you say Formname.Show. To get the form out of memory you say Unload Formname. Show is a method of the form, but Unload is a statement. AAAARGH!

    And the thing is, this makes sense according to the internal logic of Visual Basic. There is a Hide method which stops displaying it but doesn't remove it from memory, and there is a Load statement that loads the form into memory but doesn't show it. But if you're doing actual programming, nine times out of ten you want programs on the screen and in memory, or off the screen and out of memory, and so you only want to use Show and Unload, and it looks inconsistent.

    In case you're wondering, Load and Unload can't be made methods of the form because they're also used to create and destroy new controls on the screen at runtime. Like Internet Explorer and Windows, these two features have been welded together into the same entity.

    Man, my elbows hurt. Why are my bones so brittle? I always drink plenty of... "malk"?

    My grades are trickling in: Physics: C+, Math 33A: C. Math 61: B+. It's just not fair. I am so much more competent in the Math 33A arena than in the physics arena. No word on my Engineering grade yet. I hope I get an A. A, dammit! A!

    Also, today in California marks the beginning of electricity deregulation, the subject of my Engineering 95 report, which class I still have no grade in. What does this mean? Well, various sundry things. I don't want to go into it. I'm sick of discussing it.

    Thirdly, today is Haydn's birthday. I pay tribute to him by spelling his name right.

    Today's link: Li-Cheng "Andy" Tai's "Software Wars" drawing. Also check out Today's Space Weather, which I hit every day even though I don't really have any way to apply the information. Cool pictures of the sun, though.

Later: I just got an official email from the Chancellor (oooh) regarding the new crop of freshmen coming in next year. A lot of it is dedicated to discussing the effects of Proposition 209 on admissions. The following excerpt caught my eye:

Data also show a dramatic increase in the number of applicants who chose not to state their race or ethnicity. The number in this category nearly tripled, from 1326 last year to 4,264 for fall 1998. This year, UCLA edmitted 1,463 from this category, compared with 569 in fall 1997.

"The increase of applicants in this group makes it difficult to calculate precisely the ethnic breakdown of admitted students," Siporin said. "However, in the past, most of those who have chosen not to declare their race have been either Caucasian or Asian American."

Hard Questions People Ask Admissions Officers:

• How do you know?
• Doesn't making a guess devalue the purpose of the "undisclosed" option?
• If you found that someone had lied about their race, would you kick them out of school? Would you have done this before Proposition 209?
• Why don't Caucasians get "American" after their name? More importantly, why do African-Americans get a hyphen but Asian Americans get a space? Is this some cockamamie ANSI standard you are following?

    I'm too old and tired to do an April Fool's joke of my own, but there's an interview with Steve Ballmer I did which you can treat as an April Fool's joke if you want.

    Alas, the Cookie Bombardment program may have to be scaled down, as it turns out that you can't set cookies for other people's sites without making arrangement with them. I can still be evil with cookies, but they all have to be sampo.st.hmc.edu cookies. If you know of a way to get around this, let me know.

Error 4/04: Day Not Found

    Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated thirty years ago today. If you listen to classical radio, you may have noticed that the DJs all talk like Garrison Keillor, with lots of pauses. Well, the guy on KUSC was talking about Martin Luther King Jr., and here is that happened:

DJ: A group of his followers are making a... pilgrimage to Memphis today to recreate...

Me: [What kind of sick people are these?]

DJ: King's last march.

Me: [Oh, good.]

    I felt like a character in a sitcom.

    I got my first issue of Unix Review's Performance Computing yesterday. I'm kind of steamed, because when I subscribed to it it was Unix Review, but in between my time of subscription and my receipt of the first issue, they seem to have let NT in. Ick. Still, it's not like I'm paying for the magazine.

    I am psyched about this quarter. Last quarter I couldn't care. I think it's probably the fact that I didn't have any CS classes last quarter. I have a whopping two CS classes this quarter, even though one of them is Logic Design of Digital Systems, which is too EE-ey for my taste.

    Speaking of which, here is my schedule for your viewing enjoyment as well as Adam's and mine.

    Boy, I hope I get into CS180. I have to get a special authorization number for various stupid reasons which I won't go into here.

    James is back from vacation now. I have a class at 4. Budubudubudubudubuduh... oh yeah, check out my computer industry comics. I also have a new episode in the epic adventures of e.

    What is it about chalk graffiti writers and other student protestors that they must exaggerate? Another chalk graffiti tidbit equates Proposition 209 and Chancellor Carnesdale to "The extinction of minorities." No. Just no. Extinction is not the word. Extinction applies to species and refers to death. I cannot believe the arrogance of these people.

    Even though the reverse discrimination it entails has hurt me severely, I am in favor of affirmative action for the time being. I think a better rubric for preferential treatment would be income level, but ethnicity is fine. But please, chalk graffiti people, stop making yourselves look stupid with these lame emotional appeals.

    I realize that this started silly and turned into me bitching, but incompetent chalk graffiti people really, really bug me.

    I got a PTE override number for CS180, so I should be able to enroll despite being a quarter away from being a junior. James is on the phone right now getting his grades so I can't call, or upload this for that matter.

    There, I'm enrolled. That was annoying. Now to upload this, and wait for my philosophy class at 3:30. Why does it start at 3:30? I don't know. It goes from 3:30 to 4:45. I have no idea why. It's three hours of lecture per week, I guess they just decided to start on the half hour. Hey, it's in Kinsey 51, the same room in which I was tormented by Dr. Doug Durian and his Dancing Dipoles of Death last quarter. Yippee.

    I finally found the IP address for the Linux box over at MAP. It is 207.104.228.11. Bang on it, whatever. I'll try and give it a name next time I go in. Hm, doesn't seem to be working. Oh well. JB said it may not be accessible from the outside but I did a telnet into it from Sampo, but who knows.

    K from Australia, upon seeing the new Leonard's Yummy Homepage, remarks:

Bickety bam, your recent web upgrades seem to indicate you've fallen out of your tree. Welcome to the land of those with fucked-up heads.

    As Ed McMahon would say, indeed.

    Read that message, by the way. K has a nice Linux PR site which would be cool even if I hadn't contributed ideas and links to it. I'll add it to my Linux page eventually. Hey, I've done it already. How's that for response time?

Later: Oh man, you've got to check out the latest Ion Technology. Oh man. Oh man. Easily the silliest thing I've written in quite a while. Oh man. I put a "Wah wah wah waaaaah!" trombone in a story and it goes downhill from there.

    I asked Kris today if his use of the phrase "Three quarks for [me]" on his apology page was a Finnegans Wake reference, and he said it was. Cool. Reading Finnegans Wake was my project for most of my junior year in high school. What a great book. I betcha Kris hasn't actually read it, though, since that phrase is where the word "quark" came from. He probably just found that quote reading about the etymology of the word "quark". Not that that makes me any better than him or anything. Well, okay, it does. It does, do you hear me? People who have read Finnegans Wake form a highly elite group superior to all other forms of life! There, you got it out of me!

    My mother is into vitamin and herbal supplements. She has this wacko catalog full of all these wacko health remedies which she gets her vitamins from. The last time we were going to Bakersfield from LA I was quizzing her on what all the herbs listed in the catalog were supposed to do. It was fun.

    Anyway, she's got me on this ginkgo bilboa stuff. I don't remember what it's supposed to do. Make me more alert or something. We got it from Trader Joe's, land of the huge chocolate bars. But the brand name of the pills is "Trader Darwin" and the slogan is "For the Survival of the Fittest", which I found odd. What sort of selection advantage is ginkgo bilboa supposed to confer on me?

    I'm going to try to move into GNOME today. I need to get into GTK programming and the like. Why? Because I feel like it, okay? What are you, my mother? Oh. Hi, mom.

    Hm, that's strange. Writing that sentence triggered something in my mind. I must have had a dream about my father last night because I remember saying "Look, dad...", taking up a point of contention with him, I guess. Weird.

    The Adam-Kris-Leonard morning brainstorming session was particularily productive yesterday. One of the major themes was making fun of Titanic and Titanic director James Cameron. Adam said that Cameron and Steven Spielberg should collaborate on the most expensive movie possible, a movie, in fact, about making a really expensive movie. Kris pointed out that one major way to drive the budget up would be to have the special effects guys show Spielberg and Cameron expensive effect after expensive effect, effects which would have to be actually created, and then Cameron would say "No, go do something else." and they'd have to make another epensive special effect. I pointed out that the budget would also be driven up by the fact that, since it was a movie about making a movie, not only would you have to pay the actors in the movie, you would have to pay the characters.

    I also took umbrage at the ending of The Abyss with the lame preachy use of stock footage. Kris compared it to the A-bomb nightmare in Terminator 2, and we decided that James Cameron is one who speaks out eloquently against evils after the danger has passed. "My God! The Titanic sank! The crew was so incompetent! All these people died!" "James, eighty years have passed." "It's horrible!"

    That's just like a three-minute chunk of the session. We can do this for hours. It's wacky and zany.

Later: Hey, it's Passover. I know this because I remember Adam "Oy Vey" Kaplan talking yesterday about how he had to go do something after class for Passover. I don't remember what he had to do. I must have tuned him out or something. Or maybe he didn't talk about it enough for me to remember it.

    Andy "Enlightenment is a Pain in the Butt" Schile is going to help me set up a window manager today. I'm leaning towards AfterStep. Anything to get rid of this fvwm-95 crap. Try Nathan Hale AfterStep Beer. It's a beer.

Later still: Hey, I'm cookin' in Afterstep. It rocks. The only problem is that my font for emacs is too big. But I can fix that, I think. Eventually.

    When the Russians announced they had sent a man into space, Americans were terrified. Now, it's something to celebrate. Progress.

    You know what? There's a part in my song Land of the Bad Analogy where I say something like "in the Land of the Bad A-nanal-annalogy" and I have no trouble saying it, but I can't write it out to save my life. A-nal-a-na-nal-a-nal-o-gy. A-na-nal-a-na-nal-a-nal-o-gy. I'm pretty sure that's it. And now that I've written it out I see that it is not composed of the start of the word "Analogy" written over and over again. It's like someone stuttering. Oh well. I don't care. Great song, by the way. I recorded it on Saturday. I don't know if I'm going to finish recording OMP!(25K-4YOPPO) on the karaoke or wait and get a 4-track. I'd really prefer to do it on 4-track. I also have an awesome version of Liquid Crystal I did with a thumb-plucking technique and in which the bridge is played by bouncing a spoon off the strings. It rocks, in a quiet folky sort of way. Took me forever to do.

Later: Here are Lyrics and chords for Liquid Crystal. Enjoy. It's basically a bashing of the "different ways of knowing"/"local truth" school of postmodernists.

Later still: Adam is a constant source of joy for my mail page. Here is his latest effort. It helps to know that we have a bit in which Brian Kernighan acts like Santa Claus.

    I have joined the LinDope mailing list. Our goal is to put up a Linux humor site. The mailing list is called LinDope in honor/shamess rip-off of that fabulous Be humor site BeDope, but it will be changed soon. Hi there, LinDope people visiting my home page.

    Why? Because I got an automatically-generated letter from the UCLA Office of Academic Computing chewing me out for wasting computer resources by having, sometime in the recent past, checked my email more often than twenty times in a particular hour.

    I left the letter at work, or I'd put it up. The letter contains no threat, but it does refer to the dreaded Acceptable Use Policy which states that students shall not make it difficult for others to use the computing resources. An attempt to check an account's email more often than twenty times in a particular hour is apparantly seen by the auditing system as a low-scale denial of service attack.

    Note that I do not, nor have I ever made a habit of checking my email more often than once every five minutes. If you were to graph the frequency of my trips to the POP server, they would probably fall squarely in line with anyone else who uses email as their primary form of communication. At some point in the recent past I was probably busy-waiting for an email of prime importance such that I checked my mail more often than I normally do; I don't check my mail all the time for fun.

    I was going to write a big rant about how much OAC sucks, but this is such a pissy little thing that it's not worth it. But it's the pissy little things that get you. So I'm going to set up a .forward file for leonardr@ucla.edu and move over to using my CSUA account, because whatever you may say about CSUA, they don't really care how often you check your email. leonardr@ucla.edu is a nice mneumonic, though, so I'm going to put that down as my actual email address. If for some reason you don't want your email to be processed by the ben2 monster, you can send it to leonardr@csua.ucla.edu when I give the signal.

    On my stack of never-to-be-finished projects I will push a low-volume Web robot which I can run as I surf. If OAC is tracking my email checking patterns, they're probably also logging every URL I visit, and I'd rather not have that information be statistically meaningful.

    Okay, second, there is a girl in my CS51 class who acts like Anabel Fujimura used to (and still does, for all I know), only it's not cute when she does it. It's annoying. Argh. I also drew the CS fairy, who is a stick figure fairy with 80s rock star hair. In the cartoon she is shaking her fairy dust onto the inhabitants of the Village of Gates, the houses of which look like logic gates. The caption reads "The CS Fairy has come to sprinkle her magical dust on the Village of Gates!". The inhabitants of the Village of Gates are lying on the ground crying out in pain, and the CS Fairy is saying "Take that, lousy Village of Gates!" Then the second panel is a close-up of the CS Fairy as she sprinkles from her wand. The caption reads "Uh, CS Fairy, do you have the wrong dust or something? The villagers are dying!" and the CS Fairy says "No, this is the right dust." It's funnier when you actually see the cartoon.

    I have a Jabba the Hutt action figure now. I've had him for about a week now, but I never talked about him on the News You Can Bruise page. It's the younger, trimmer Jabba from the revised edition of Star Wars, and there's a Han Solo guy who came with him. I have no use for Han Solo, but I put Jabba on top of my monitor along with Morn and Rubber Fish. In fact, Jabba is holding Rubber Fish on his shoulder like a grenade launcher. Crashes, look out! I also gave Han Solo's blaster to Morn.

    You can ping groucho now at 207.104.228.11. You can't telnet in or access the Web server yet, though, because it's behind the firewall. Apparantly we have a lousy unconfigurable firewall so the ping-only status will probably last as long as our current firewall does. There is talk of replacing the firewall with something better. It [the firewall] runs on the Sun. I don't know if it's Sun's default firewall or what, but apparantly it sucks.

    I closed my CD today. I now have a total of about $3600 avaliable for check-writing. Unfortunately, that represents all the money I have in the world, and I have to spend $650 of it right away for this month's rent. Oh well. I'm making about $300 a month from MAP. Not that that's enough, but it'll help.

    Man, I have to finish my CS180 homework. I couldn't get to the LyX site yesterday so I'm going to have to go into 95 and type the homework in Word. Bleah.

    A happier song from the same time period: Civil Neurosis.

    I put some new stuff on the Leonardonics page. The standard for the Nathan Hale x Beer joke, and a discussion of the effects of The Big Lebowski on Leonardonics, mainly. Jake wants to see your personal slang dictionary, and so do I. So get to it already! I'd link to Jake's personal slang dictionary, but I don't have the URL. Jake. Help me Jake.

    The release of OMP!(25K-4YOPPO) is probably going to wait until I get a 4-track. Even worse, it will probably wait until I get a 4-track and actually do the recording on it. Then I'll send the tape off to Jake, and we'll have to wait for him to get off his lazy hinder and burn it onto CD. We could be talking about a summer release. In fact, that's probably exactly what we're talking about. But oh will it rock when it is finally done. And for those who crave the great taste of the Open Standards Band now now now, I'll toss the Coffee Junction performance and some other crap onto a tape for the b-side of whatever it was that Jake wanted me to do a b-side for where it wasn't an Indian giver situation, whatever that means. One grep later, I realize that the tape in question is the proposed It's Only Ketchup/It's Only Mountain Dew tape, and it's not a b-side I would be doing but a straight split [rack 'em!]. But this is b-side material we're talking about here.

    This is not some postmodern Douglas Copeland/Jerry Seinfeld glorification-of-the-banal thing I'm trying to pull on you here. Pasta Roni Shells and White Cheddar is booze of the utmost quality.

    James is taking a shower. It is 10:30 at night. Why is my roommate taking a shower at 10:30 at night? I guess I'll never {know,care}.

    On KUSC when I woke up there was this piece of music that sounded just like Stravinsky. Only it wasn't Stravinsky, it was someone else. They were totally ripping off Stravinsky. Of course, as Stravinsky himself said, "Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.". He was a very GPL kind of guy.

    You know what? KUSC is great, but for some reason I miss the public radio station in Bakersfield, KPRX. I don't know why. KPRX has some interesting news shows, but that's not the whole story. KPRX has a slightly different style, one that I like better.

    Jake says "liquid crystal rocks my lame ass.". No faint praise, coming from Jean the Pea Queen. Hey Jake, I heard you shot your woman down. Adam says he'll have the Coffee Junction performance on normal tape for me, for you, soon.

    Speaking of Adam, he transferred into my CS180 class. CS180 is cool. The key is to see everything recursively. I drew a cartoon in the style of those lame educational/safety comic books you sometimes got in grade school for Adam to get him thinking recursively. It features The Amasing Recurso, a Tickle Me Carlo Lombardi-type vaudeville stage magician.

Panel 1:
Recurso: I am The Amazing Recurso!

Panel 2:
Recurso removes his hat, revealing numerous rabbits. He points at the hat with his wand.
Recurso: Behold! n-1 rabbits!
Arrow Pointing to Hat: "black hat" ~ "black box"

Panel 3:
Recurso smiles and holds his wand in a thumbs-up manner.
Recurse: Remember, kids... when you think algorithms, think recursion!

    Simple, yet effective. It's very weird what I am doing this quarter. On the one hand I have CS180, which is a totally mathematical approach to algorithms, very abstract, so abstract that recursion is the key to everything. And on the other hand I have CS51A, way down on the bare metal, in which I must memorize switching expressions of the damned and perform gate analysis. Guess which one I prefer. I should change the lyrics to Sea of Irony to make it Sea of Gates to reveal the new source of pain in my life.

    I was going to reproduce RMS' Free Software Song on OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO. But, inspired by the techno remix, as seen on slashdot and heard at the Mozilla source release party, I have decided to do my own version of it, rather than just cat rms.au > /dev/omp!(25k-4)yoppo, as it were. I have a suitably me-ish version worked out. I have noticed that ever since I broke my top string and have been unable to replace it a few days ago, my solos have gotten a lot better. Mainly because now I can do bends on what used to be the second-top string. When you have six strings it's tough to do a bend on the top string without actually pulling the string out past fretboard territory. I'm going to have to do something with wood glue and get this sucker fixed, though, because I have numerous songs that utilitize the top string.

    Wow. Pretty long entry. I'd better try to go back to sleep for a while. I have to go to work tomorrow.

Later: Thanks to the generousness of Scott James Remnant, I now have a segfault.org email address. leonardr@segfault.org. It just forwards to leonardr@ucla.edu, which as of today forwards to leonard@seas.ucla.edu, but it's pretty cool regardless. I wish they'd given me leonardr@seas.ucla.edu. That always trips me up when I log on.

Need To Know's IMDB entry for The Big Lebowski: (comedy / crime / mystery / thriller / rug / porn-makers / wheelchair / paraplegic / hippies / police-brutality / paedophilia / dreams / bowling / kidnapping / nihilism / artist / vietnam). Wacky wacky life preservers.

Later: Kris sent me a skit which I found funny. This morning Adam had us go out to his car and fill up one of his tires which was flat and leaking. He claimed he didn't know how to work the air compressor. Then he wanted us to fill up his other tire which was a little low. Kris said "Change your oil, sir?". That was the inspiration for the skit I linked to up there.

    It's actually not that bad. I need to get a new version of Afterstep that uses glibc6, and it looks like I need to update my wvdial PPP program. Everything else seems to work fine, and I'm all set to upgrade to the 2.1.88 kernel.

    Also, I have POP mail access again. Cool. Omar made a statement something like "The further off from the main UCLA computing bureaucracy you go, the more options and flexibility you have." I have found this to be true. From the CSUA student machine I can get pop mail, or if I'm not at home I can just telnet in and use pine to read and reply to my new mail. Plus, it's yummy Linux and not the proprietariness of AIX that ben2.ucla and *.seas.ucla depends on.

    Check out all my email addresses. Through judicious application of the .forward files that the Unix-Haters Handbook hates so much (as is, indeed, its job), you can send me mail to any of the following addresses and it'll all get funnelled into my CSUA account.

1. leonardr@ucla.edu
2. leonardr@segfault.org
3. leonard@seas.ucla.edu
4. leonardr@csua.ucla.edu

    You can also send me mail at leonard@mapinc.com, which I check occasionally. I've tested all this and it works.

    There's a hilarious poem about chess on Prarie Home Companion right now. Just thought I'd tell you. I'm getting Afterstep right now.

    I have sent Jake my tape to be the master for the tape he's got a May 1 release date for. Buy the tape. Adam should have sent the other master tape to Jake today. Buy the tape. I can't stress this enough. Chock full of live performances (read: Coffee Junction) and rarities, and that's just our side. Jake's side has all the nutty computer-manipulated goodness you've come to expect from Jake.

    I can't help but notice that a lot of the things said in this BBC story are things that were being said 30 and 40 years ago about what life would be like today. Could we have a steady state situation here?

    My CSUA web page is up. Enjoy it. It's mainly to sucker other CSUA members into coming here.

    Midterms tomorrow. They shouldn't be so tough.

    Just look at all the innovations in Windows 98! Never before seen in any software package, ever!

1. Windows 95 service packages!
2. Internet Explorer 4.0!
3. Your desktop looks like a series of Web pages!
4. Active Desktop allows you to get content from the Web automatically!
5. Automatic Web page downloading and offline browsing!
6. Double clicks become single clicks! Single clicks disappear!
7. Automatic driver updates!
8. The System File Checker makes sure the OS stays in memory!
9. Disk Cleanup Tool removes infrequently used files!
10. Frequently-accessed files are placed on better spots of your hard disk!
11. Incredible speed gains through removing previous two-second "Starting Windows 95" delay!
12. Rather than close open files or drivers, Windows 98 just shuts down!
13. USB support--Microsoft innovation working for you!
14. Integrated digital videodisk player and television reciever!

    What will the geniuses at Microsoft useability labs come up with next? Here's a sneak peek at Windows 2000!

1. Instead of displaying error messages, the system just reboots whenever anything goes wrong to save time!
2. The system can automatically reboot over and over until a problem corrects itself!
3. Mirroring technology allows your entire hard drive to be filled with redundant copies of the Registry, which are deleted on the fly whenever you need more disk space!
4. No more clicking at all! Just wave the mouse over a list of common actions!
5. 20 more keys added to all keyboards, reducing the spacebar to a thin vertical line!
6. Microsoft Office becomes an ActiveX control and can be embedded in other applications!
7. The System Power Checker makes sure the computer's power is on!
8. Unneccessary application splash screens removed to speed up loading time!

    I could go on.

    Check out the amazing Transformer Evolution Debate Page, in which I take Adam's assertion that Transformers reproduce sexually and bonk it on the head repeatedly.

Spam I recieved today:

Did you know that any other company or individual can register the .ORG or .NET equivalent of your domain name, such as crummy.org or crummy.net?

    What is the world coming to? I remember when those who registered .com domains held dominion over the corresponding .orgs and .nets with an iron fist.

    I put a quote from Adam in the quotes file. Today he said "If I were to define my week recursively, I would have to perform O(N) acts of violence." It doesn't really make sense, but it was funny. Recursion and induction have become integral parts of our conversation in the same way that Internet Explorer has not become an integral part of Windows 95. Today I was telling a fish story and I said something to the effect of "I catch fish by induction. I first catch a little tiny fish; I then demonstrate that I can use a smaller fish as bait to catch a slightly larger fish. By this method I have been able to catch fish of arbitrary size." I cleaned it up a lot for writing it down to make it sound snappier, but you get the idea.

    Midterms were pretty easy.

Later: In Atlas Shilled, Charles Atlas mentions that his fitness program works through MUSCLE-TONE TECHNOLOGY^TM. I went to the Charles Atlas web site (guess the URL) just now and it turns out that the real Charles Atlas program works through THE DYNAMIC-TENSION METHOD(R). I must have heard that phrase before because those two phrases are a little too much alike to be just coincidence.

    I know what it is. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in the song I Can Make You A Man (which I referenced in the comic as well), Tim Curry saucily delivers the lyric "I don't want no dissension/just dynamic tension". That's where I heard it. I just used the word "in" three times in a single sentence. And two times in that sentence.

    As long as I'm riding the Charles Atlas train, I always thought the Charles Atlas schtick was that of the "98-pound weakling". The RHPS script backs me up on this. Yet the Charles Atlas web site makes mention of the "97-pound weakling". What's going on? Did they change their schtick? Or did the reference weakling merely lose a pound?

    I'm trying to get some kind of track recorder working under Linux so I don't have to buy a 4-track to do OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO with. It's not going as well as it could be. I may call in Andy to assist, in much the same way that a Confederate general at Gettysburg might call in the cavalry to assist, although that's about where the similarities between Andy and Confederate cavalry end.

    Speaking of which, hey Andy, there's a guy named Matt at UCLA whom I suspect of being another clone of you. He looks just like you, and he's a CS major too.

    Crummy is one year old today. It has, fortunately, not consumed my life, but remained a place to put whatever silly articles I come up with. That's the way [uh-huh, uh-huh] I like it.

    There's a NYTSYN article on Newshub right now headlined "Gates Ditches Nerd Look For More User-Friendly Style". I refuse to read it.

    Well, I'm going to go make some more of my secret Pasta Roni stash. It is the only food left in the house (we have brownie mix, but that requires eggs, which we don't have; I may have to pick some up tomorrow since I'm going to need to eat tomorrow as well, and brownies and nothing is better than nothing). James and his friend drank my last two cans of Mist with a Twist (a Mountain Dew clone), and I am angry. I'm going to have to talk to him about that when he comes back. He didn't even drink all of it. He drank about half of it and left the other half sitting in a glass. Yeez!

Later: Cool, Episkopos Al put up the Expanding Foam Dinosaur award I awarded to Hyperdiscordia as per his "Certainly, HyperDiscordia deserves some kind of award for that." remark of Discord 25, 3164, refering to HyperDiscordia's resemblance to an expanding foam dinosaur (not in those words, obviously). Go to the What's Really New page to see the award in all its glory. I got the dinosaur from some site of dinosaur illustrations in Australia. I lost the URL. I'm really sorry. I would love to credit the illustration site but I can't find it again. Iguanadon is such a great dinosaur, don't you think?

    So I have no idea when OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO will crawl out of the primordial muck into reality. If it looks like it's gonna take a while I'll cook up another low-fi karaoke machine bonanza for a summer release in the style of the It's Only Ketchup/It's Only Mountain Dew Jake side-split. I don't know what the word on IOK/IOMD is; we sent Jake the tapes but I have yet to hear from him.

    So here's what's taking shape. Adam and Kris have expressed interest in being a real part of this album, yea, even being actual members of The Open Standards Band. Adam is going to play guitar on Talking Embrace and Extend Blues and my Metallica-bashfest Gravedigger, which song impressed Adam so much with its relentless satirizing of Metallica's inane lyrics that he voluntarily crawled out of the festering pit of Metallica worship (true story!). I need him to do that because Gravedigger includes an excessively long heavy metal guitar solo, and heavy metal guitar solos are not my forte, but they are Adam's. Adam also wants to collaborate on a song with me, and I want him to play Satan's Son Stole My Girlfriend and Crummy, which will entertwine him even further with the album. Kris has the keyboards for the Mentos parodies, and will probably be doing even more stuff. So what's happening is that OMP!(25-K)YOPPO is turning into a monster beyond my control. With the updated recording hardware (whatever that may be) and the collaboration of other musicians on the album, the threat of it becoming an actual independant album release becomes very real, and we all know which road that leads down (hint: ______ is paved with good intentions).

    I wrote another blues song today. It's more of a grunge-bluegrass thing, actually. It's called Saccharine Hillbilly Bluegrass Blues and so far it just goes "Saccharine Hillbilly Bluegrass Blues, I'm not gonna stand here and watch you lose." I may put in more lyrics, I may not.

    Bluegrass is cool. I dig that whole bluegrass/hillbilly thing. It's hard to be pretentious when your instruments are banjos and mandolins and fiddles. The blues are great, too. They're too corny to be pretentious.

    I've written several blues songs. I wrote Talking Embrace and Extend Blues after being inspired by the talking blues songs on the Bob Dylan bootlegs Mrs. Irby lent me which I need to return, and I want to write some talking blues songs the names of which are lame puns, such as Talking Dirty Blues and Talking About Willis Blues. I improvised a blues song once called The Meta-Blues which went something like "I'm so sick of the blues, baby, so sick I could scream (2x)/I hope tomorrow I wake up and realize it was all a bad dream. I got the meta-blues, baby, and the meta-blues got me (2x)/I want to rock and roll, and lose control, but these blues, they won't set me free." I wrote a blues-ish song called I Got Soul, Dammit which explores the protective attitude of numerous people towards that ephermeal quality known as "soul". The Bourbonwitha Twist and Suckered and Stoned both use a sort of blues progression, although I guess they fall more into the category of swing, and Get Down Or Die was designed to copy the sanitized teen blues-ripoff rock of the 1950s created by record company executives so that the youth of America wouldn't be dancing to music played by black people.

    Anyway, back to the recording discussion. Expect something out in summer, but not neccessarily OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO. OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO will be the high-quality tape that Mrs. Irby has been bugging me about making. I don't know what will be on the interim tape.

    I updated the Transformer Evolution page with emails from Adam and Jake.

     ----
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  ___|_ |
 ----+  |
     |  |
     |  |
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   __+--|__

    DaveNet is strange today. I've never seen the stupid Taco Bell chihuahua, and I'm glad. Dave Winer is pretty cool, but he tends to like things I would never, ever like.

    I'm in the CSUA lab right now typing on one of the SGI machines. It's got a nice big monitor. The desktop is really weird though. Mp3s of the Doors are being played. The Doors bug the heck out of me. I should probably go look at my CS180 and CS51 homework, since it's in postscript format and I can't view postscript at home. I really oughta get my printer set up w/Linux.

    Jake sent me an inspirational [cellular] pep talk the other day. I don't know if I want to put it up on the page or hoard it to myself, though. There's a mail I sent to Mike Rust the other day regarding my plans for LYH and Crummy which I need to reprint or expound on, as well. Anyway, time to think about going to class.

Later: I just had this hilarious image of Dali sending Picasso the same postcard year after year. And Picasso runs out to the mailbox and reads the postcard and thinks "Aw, crap, it's the oysters postcard again.". Then I guess he'd call up Dali on the phone and ask him if he had Prince Albert in a Can or something. You know what? They actually have Prince Albert in a Can at the Thrifty^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HRite Aid. It's chewing tobacco. I never knew what it was.

    We are officially out of food. I should be able to squeak by until Friday on stuff from the SEAS Cafe, then my mother is going to take me home for the weekend and we'll get more food then. James seems to be able to live on Hamburger Helper and soup. I tried an experiment of not getting groceries to see if I could get him to get a whole bunch of stuff, but for three weeks all he's brought home is enough Hamburger Helper and hamburger and soup and milk to make it through another week. The experiment must now end, as there is no more food, and, like Jeff Lynne, I need food to live. The bright side is that when I get food, James doesn't seem to eat much of it. Just the macaroni and cheese and, of course, the Helper. He doesn't touch my cereal or... argh, I'm forgetting what food there even is. Help me, Spock! Help me!

    David has his own food too, in case you were wondering.

    Oh yeah, I have a second job now. I am tutoring Peter Hodgson, a professor of Russian Literature, in the ways of Linux. It's just a couple hours a week, but it's good pocket money. He's got a system which is really cool, in which all his email and all his ideas are kept in a database. When we have our meetings he'll open up an emacs buffer and keep notes of everything. I'd like to have a system like that.

    I bought a copy of Learning GNU Emacs today at the bookstore. I'm going home for the weekend and I want something to read. It looks cool. Plus, chicks dig a guy with a copy of Learning GNU Emacs. That's what Adam says, anyway. Hey, wait a minute! Adam is a vi user! I've ben gypped!

    The Godzilla plot thickens. Kris claims to have seen a television commercial in which Godzilla's foot comes down, Monty Python style, and crushes a full-scale reconstruction of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. He estimates that Godzilla's foot is about 4/3 the length of the skeleton. This would put the foot length at (as a guess) 80 feet, much longer than either a city bus or the ad on such a bus (see the 5/06 entry).

    This constant Godzilla size revisionism must stop. Are moviegoers going to appreciate a Godzilla who fluctuates from being really, really, really big to just really, really big? No! They won't stand for it! The American consumer demands a Godzilla of constant size! It's time to let our voices be heard! Send me an email of support and I'll add your name to the following petition:

THE FOLLOWING PETITION

To the presidents of Toho Co., Ltd. and TriStar Pictures

    The American cinema has a long and honorable tradition. In addition to purely domestic films, many foreign films, remakes of foreign films, and American-made films based on foreign stories have seen success in the bijous of this great country. It is in the interest of mantaining this tradition that we, the movie-goers of this nation, submit this petition to you, regarding Godzilla, star of the upcoming Tri-Star motion picture Godzilla.

    The motto of the movie seems to be "Size Does Matter". And indeed Americans like their heroes to be bigger than life. However, the advertisements for the movie contradict each other unequivocably on the matter of Godzilla's actual size. Our best estimates of Godzilla's height, for instance, place him at being anywhere from 40 to 300 meters tall. This public misinformation campaign must stop. There is a place for suspense and secrecy in the movie business, but when it comes to Godzilla's relative proportions, the public has a right to not be kept in the dark by uninformative and misleading advertising campaigns.

    We request the following:

1. Change all Godzilla promotional advertising to reflect Godzilla's actual (on-screen) size and relative proportions.
2. File a report with the American National Standards Institute detailing a hypothetical (real) Godzilla's size and relative proportions, and pledge not to deviate from them during Godzilla.
3. Don't let Godzilla suck.

    Our demands are few and easily met. We thank you for your attention.

    I also got the soundtrack album to Frank Zappa's 200 Motels. It's really rockin', man.

    Oh, I have a Zappa story to tell. I went to this sidewalk record sale for Rhino Records, which is down on Westwood. And I was hunting around and I found a Zappa album. And I said "All right, Zappa!" cause it was a good find. And this old musician-type guy was next to me, probably about 40, and he looked over at my album and he said "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention." with this sinusoidal intonation that hit its maximum on the syllables "Zap", "Moth", and "vent". And you could tell that this guy knew the score, just by the way he said "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.". You can't fake that kind of thing. I still haven't heard the album, though. I don't have a record player.

    I scanned Atlas Shilled on Saturday, but apparantly I only uploaded the first two scans. Here is Panel 0 and Panel 1. The guy in the cap is Kris and the guy who kicks sand in Kris' face is Adam.

    "A room and a meal and a garbage disposal, a lawn and a hose'll be strictly genteel." -Frank Zappa's Strictly Genteel.

    This is freaky. I want to see the 200 Motels movie. Adam wants to see it too. We're probably going to rent it when he moseys on over today, if he ever does. Now, Adam doesn't live in LA. He lives in the Valley, land of the white-flighters. Furthermore, Adam has not seen 200 Motels. Yet, given the name of a video rental place in Westwood, where I live and where UCLA is, Adam can tell you whether or not that place has 200 Motels. He does not make a guess as to whether or not they are likely to have it, he knows. He says it's because he frequents the cult movie section, where 200 Motels is or is not, and he likes the cover so he notices it when it is there, but I dunno.

    I designed a circuit for CS51A which takes a binary number in the range 0-9 and controls a seven-segment LCD display to display the corresponding decimal digit. It uses 16 NOR gates. It's really cool. I never liked CS51A until I got that circuit to work. I still don't like it, actually. But man, that circuit is cool. I doubt you would think it was cool, though, since you didn't design it.

    The Kris-Adam-Leonard entity is working on a rock opera (not the rock opera mentioned in my bio page, which is a separate animal and a solo project) called His Own Platters. Adam doesn't know about this yet, actually, but he'll find out soon enough. It's about the TGI Friday's concoction called Jack Platters, which we're not even sure what they are, and how they are hyped beyond all reason. It begun, as might be expected, with one of our songwriting compacts, in which each person was required to write a song about Jack Platters. The opera tells of Jack and how he becomes disillusioned with his platters. I'll do a His Own Platters page eventually, but here's the outline:

1. I forgot the name of the first track, but it has a really long name. It's a parody of Hot Blooded by Foreigner, in which "Hot blooded" is replaced with "Jack Platters", among other things. It's meant to be a terribly written advertising jingle. Kris wrote it.
2. Second track is called Jack's Lament, in which Jack bemoans having created the platters. I wrote this.
3. The third track is called Fired or equivelant, and in it Jack is fired by the antagonist of the story, the greedy Boss who wants to sell as many Jack Platters as possible, and damn the consequences. We're going to make Adam write it.
4. The fourth track is Citizens, Heed the Call to Action!, which I am writing. It's a rousing march in which Jack attempts to recruit the local citizenry in his fight against the platters he has created, but gives up when the local citizenry begins trying to turn the song into a forum for their own pet conspiracy theories. Jack is eventually run out of town by angry citizens crying "We don't want people like you marrying out daughters, picking out tomatoes, picking up our slack/You've got what it takes to oppress the indigenous masses, but when it comes to platters, pal, you don't know jack!". There's also an amusing part in which one paranoid citizen calls out "What about the flying Jack Platters that crashed in Roswell in 1951?".
5. In the fifth track, probably called Confronting the Boss, Jack, well, confronts the Boss. Kris will probably do this.
6. And in the final track, Jack Triumphant, the platters are defeated and Jack celebrates. We'll probably do something mean to him at the end, though, like have him get run over by a steamroller or fall victim to salmonella. Either Adam will do this himself or we'll all pitch in on it.

    Another thing that came out of the TGI Friday's discussion pertains to the commercial in which a businessman does dull office work and remarks to the camera, "It's Monday.", then enters a TGI Friday's and declares "It's Friday!", before doing a stupid little dance which Kris' brother has adopted. "It's Tuesday. It's Friday!". And so on. Eventually it's going to come to Friday, and it'll be "It's Friday. It's Friday!". Then it'll show him working in the garden. "It's Saturday. It's Friday!" Then sitting in church. "It's Sunday. It's Friday!" And around we go. It never stops for this poor guy. He and his wife must be terrible cooks.

    For all his faults, he loves his Queen, Adam has correctly pointed out that the Atlas Shilled cartoons are in a pathetic state, to say the least. Neither of the two panels I did upload can be viewed in the totality of their pagan splendor. Complete rescanning will have to be done.

    The people outside my bedroom are having a block party. Loud rap music is being played. Annoyingus maximus.

    Today I represented at Coffee Junction again with Adam. And, amazingly enough, Sharon (the Coffee Junction lady) offered me a gig there. I'll be playing on July 23 I believe. It's actually a two-hour thing with both Adam and I, so we may be appearing as one act. Pretty cool.

    The time has come to once again worry about school stuff. I have two midterms next week and finals loom on the horizon.

    Adam and I rented 200 Motels last night. It was faaaaabulous. The coolest part is this one-second shot during a dance number in which Theodore Bikel aka Rance Muhammitz has a fake hose with fake cardboard water coming out of it and he's twirling it around like he's watering the lawn. The newts (which the lad searches the night for) are awesome, as well. So far I've watched it four times. Already phrases from 200 Motels are appearing in our vocabulary, phrases such as "You took the mystery x! You were in full posession of... the x!"; phrases like "swell", and "So's your old man."

    The theme today was vaudeville. Kris and I did a bit called Addicted to Vaudeville in which I played a man accused of embezzlement and Kris my lawyer.

Kris: Your honor, my client is clearly obsessed with vaudeville. He was in no proper state of mind at the time to have committed the embezzlement.

Leonard [singing]: Ya da da, yadada da da da...

Kris: Even now, he sings those songs of yesteryear.

Leonard: Say Mr. Straub, it seems that that's a new suit you're wearing.

Kris: It certainly is, Mr. Richardson. [Gets hat and cane from briefcase.]

Leonard: How'd you get the money to pay for that suit?

Kris: I sent an innocent man to jail! [rim shot]

Both [singing]: Ya da da, yadada da da da...

    Then I got Kris to draw the mutated lizard who's won the hearts of theatre-goers everwhere, Vaudvilla. His cane is as long as this bus. I'll scan him when and if I go home this weekend. We had lots of fun doing the Godzilla roar while doing the happy little vaudeville dance.

    I read somewhere on the net that the people who did the new Godzilla didn't give him radioactive breath because it was too unrealistic. Excuse me? Radioactive breath is out but sudden size changes are okay? Not to mention that at maximal size Godzilla would collapse under his own weight? Yeesh.

Later: I was bored, and had just done some sprucing up of my system, so I figured I'd get a screen grab of the login-motd-fortune thing I set up. One thing led to another, and I did an around the world thing. Actually, around Los Angeles County, and then only because of Sampo. All the other machines are within a half-mile radius of each other.

    I just got email from Adam saying that his brother saw Godzilla, and that Godzilla does not actually grow during the course of the movie. They just got the proportions consistently and totally wrong. Adam also says that his brother says the movie sucks. In the same fetchmail run, I got this extra-disturbing message from Kris. "See saucy Marla Pennington trip her tongue with Dick Christie!" No. Just no.

    My sendmail daemon doesn't seem to be working. Oh darn. I'm going to have to change the thing I did to it today to make rubberfish boot faster.

    By the way, yesterday Kris wrote an email to KCAL News about how stoplights are not a place at which you have a large amount of personal privacy, and they read it on the air and Kris was commended by Larry Elder, which was pretty cool.

Later still: I'm trying out my start page, which might save me the time I spend typing URLs. I just took mental note of all the URLs I type frequently and put them on one page. We'll see how well it works.

    This week is the 25th anniversiary of Ethernet. Happy birthday Ethernet. Whee.

    Oh my goodness. Check this out. If you do an Altavista search for "microsoft", the Crummy main page is hit #27. That's 27 out of 8476638.

    I didn't Altavista "microsoft" myself to find that out, by the way. I found that in our referer logs.

    Come see Adam at Coffee Junction tomorrow, everybody! Go to Kris' weird Xi Guard page for info.

    Michael was bitching about my .sig, so I made a new one that takes up less bandwidth and is less annoying. Now, my .sig is lightly scented with lemon![1]

[1] Actually, that's a lie.

telnet vicki.fox.com
Trying 143.73.69.48...
Connected to vicki.fox.com
Escape character is '^]'.

Welcome to Vicki
login: rlawson
password:

[rlawson@Vicki rlawson] ls

Vicki: ELL ESS. [begins spinning around]

Spinning around...
[1]+  Stopped                 ls
[rlawson@Vicki rlawson] cat linus.au /dev/audio

Vicki: DEV AUDIO. [begins to heat up]

Heating up...
[1]+  Stopped                 cat linus.au /dev/audio
[rlawson@Vicki rlawson]

    And so on.

    Inevitably the Small Wonder schtick was combined with the vaudeville schtick, and we all performed vaudeville as Vicki. YA TA TA TA TA TA. YA TA TA TA TA TA. So, Vicki, I hear you manage a baseball team. BASEBALL TEAM. They give the players very unusual names these days, or so I hear. YA TA TA TA-- No, not yet!

    Yesterday we went to Coffee Junction yet again to hear Adam play. I made a videotape of the event. Today we're going yet yet again to see Marcella play the piano. Whee.

    Today I took what I believe to be the easiest midterm I have ever taken. Each problem had instructions on how to do it. Yeesh. I finished in half an hour.

Later: We went to see Marcella. Man, she was really rockin'. And what a babe. My, my. Adam, here's the link to Jake's page. I lent Adam my crup tapes to listen to.

    I am sick on account of not cooking my cinnamon rolls enough. It is not good.

    Adam has a website now. It is http://fire.csua.ucla.edu/~kaplan/.

    I wrote a song about CS180. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a song Frank Zappa wrote called Penis Dimension.

    Jake said he'd have tape for me by Friday's Electronics. But it ain't so. His mailserver seems to be down too. Oh darn. You should have seen me earlier. Man, I want those tapes.

    I'm wearing an old shirt my mom gave me. I think she got it from my uncle Leonard. It has a weird acrylic portrait of a man who is allegedly President Clinton. That's why I think she got it from my namesake uncle, because said uncle is some kind of campaign organizer for the Democrats. He's got signed thank-you notes from the prez on his fridge, for his help in the 1992 and 1996 elections. You wouldn't know it was President Clinton on the shirt unless someone told you, though. Most of his face is shadowed.

    I put up a leonardr directory called Strictly Leonard which will contain some LYH functionality. Still thinking about design.

Later: I'm reading a book I borrowed from Omar. It's called Mathematical Recreations And Essays. I'm hoping it'll help me with CS180. But it's weird. It's a British book, published in 1987. But the conventions are not conventions I've ever seen, even in British books. For instance: What is used as the symbol for the decimal point is the symbol for multiplication or ANDing, and vice versa. In large numbers, commas are only placed every five decimal places. And rather than have numeric footnotes like ordinary decent God-fearing books, it has weird shape footnotes that start over on ever page. It is weird weird weird.

Later still: Hehe. The guy from Music From the Hutts of Space (as Andy and I used to call it, and still do, I guess, also use the MST3K-parody name Music From Some Guys In Space) just said something funny. It's too complicated to explain, though. You had to be there. As Adam says, it was funny by inspection, not by definition.

    Apart from finals, school is officially over. Of course, nobody pays any attention to this little tidbit. I still have homework and projects due. The last week is called "dead week" because you're not supposed to have lectures unless it's review, but that's not what actually happens. But I don't have as much homework due as I have in the past. No CS180 homework, for instance. Just Math 31 homework and CS51A homework and a Math 31 lab. I might try to redo my third CS51A project now that I know how to actually do it.

    Here is my finals schedule:

    So, not as bad as might be expected. Just those two finals right next to each other on Monday, but it shouldn't be too tough. I've got all week to study for CS180.

    Today I'm wearing my Dweebspeak Primer shirt. I don't know why this is turning into the What Shirt Leonard Is Wearing Today Page, which would really be a stupid use of the Web, but I've got a lot of cool shirts. Which reminds me, I need to do something about Crummy Online Odd T-Shirts. Something I've been meaning to do for a while.

    Jake wanted my address today. I hope I sent it to him in time. This means tapes for me. I wonder if he sent me Jer's tapes as well as his tape and his tape of stuff he wants me to listen to. Maybe I should ask him via email instead of posing the question on the Web. Push does have its advantages, you know.

    Even the mighty BBC is not free from typos on Web pages. Go to here to see those zany Brits use "flower" instead of "flour". Prince Charles is full of it. I'm sorry, he shouldn't be in any kind of position of power. Dismantle the House of Lords while you're at it (nobody knew he was from the House of Lords). Down with the royals!

Later: More newshub stuff. The headline for this piece is "Parks Against New Kenniwick Law". You'd think it'd be about a place called New Kenniwick which passed a law that inadvertantly banned parks. But it's not. It's about the National Park Service speaking out against a law that will allow a 9200-year-old specimen called Kenniwick Man to be examined despite the objections of Native American groups who claim Kenniwick Man as an ancestor despite the lack of any evidence for this claim. It burns my toast, both the objections and the ambiguity of the headline.

    The survey is not turning out the way I thought it would. Of four responses, only Joe Barr has given an answer analagous to mine. Oh well.

    Well, in half an hour I need to go to a CS51A review. Whee. I am rapidly approaching the end of my second year of college. Whee again.

    Here I am today: CrotchCam, FaceCam, and PeekabooCam.

    I was on the recieving end of another tract attack today. I haven't really looked at it but I plan to. It's called How Can I Go To Heaven?. I've just cast a cursory glance at it and the author doesn't seem to understand that the people he wants to convert don't already share his worldview. I don't understand why religious people don't get this. If I want to get someone to use Linux I don't say, "Well, Linux Journal reccommends that you use Linux." or "Well, the LinuxStone benchmark gives Linux alone a perfect score of 1.0." or "Well, most of the people on slashdot.org use Linux." It just doesn't work that way.

    I also don't think religious people have really thought about what heaven entails. Can you think of anything you like doing so much that you would never get bored doing it? The key word is never. We are not talking about some place you go for a couple billion years and have some fun and then you're done. You're stuck there forever.

    My claim, based on observation, is that when you die, that's it. Is that really so bad?

    Think of the alternative.

[f][i][n][e]

    Compaq bought us out. We said we wouldn't change. But you didn't believe us. You said we'd become NT whores. You said we'd fire all our competent engineers. You said we'd kill the Alpha.

    We ran ads in trade magazines trying to convince you. But you wouldn't believe us. So we're just going ahead and doing all the stuff you said we'd be doing anyway. We might as well, right?

    But it goes further than that. How many times do we stretch the truth to make a rhetorical point? How often do we willingly use old data or ambiguous remarks to suit our own purposes? It makes me uncomfortable that I did it, but at least I caught myself.

    I don't like this. I just read that Compaq was firing people and I extrapolated a bunch of stuff from that and my own prejudices. Am I willing to sacrifice accuracy and fairness for a laugh? I don't think so, at least not unless it's really, really good. So I'll wait until Compaq begins twisting Digital technology to its own evil ends before doing something like that again.

    Anyway, Adam came over and gave me some of the tapes he's making of the records I've gathered from Goodwills and Rhino Records sidewalk sales. He gave me Switched-On Bach I and II, by Walter Carlos [Walter], whom Jake says is now a transsexual; Play Bach vol. 4 by the Jacque Loussier Trio, which is Bach played in jazz style; and a collection of Barbershop Ballads sung by the world famous Sportsman Quartet. I was hoping for my PDQ Bach album and Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti but no joy, as Jerry Pournelle would say.

    SOB1 has an awesome version of Wachet Auf (Sleepers Awake), which is my all-time favorite Bach piece right now, even more so than Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring. It's such a catchy tune. Here, have a MIDI. There's a version of it on Play Bach as well, but I haven't gotten to that yet.

    I dub this week the week of new tapes (actually, the week starting tomorrow is the week I dub that, but who cares?). I should be getting Jake's tapes any day now, and Jer's tapes a while after that. Tapes, tapes, tapes. Whee!

    LJ is having a barbecue next Sunday. I wanna go. So I probably will, rather than spend that weekend in Bakersfield. I can go home the weekend after. Mmm, a barbecue. I didn't go last time but apparantly there was food aplenty.

    Man, Adam even printed out little track lists that fit in the cassette holder. What a guy. All must bow before his might.

Later: ALL RIGHT! YEAH! WOO! I just discovered that we get the Sci-Fi Channel! MST3K!!!!!! WOO! WOO! WOO! We don't even have cable! Free Sci-Fi Channel! WOO! WOO! MST3K! WOO! It's on right now! WOO! WOO! WOO! MST3K!

    It's channel 53. You don't care, but I want that written down so I don't forget.

    We didn't used to get all these channels. We might be getting the scraps of someone else's private broadcast or something. But I'm not complaining. MST3K! WOO! Gotta go, the commercials are almost over.

Later still: Urban legend has it that grapefruit juice contains a chemical that intensifies the effects of caffeine, so I went and bought a bottle of it at Breadstiks, the stupidly-named local grocery store. I'm such a junkie.

    My dad used to eat half a grapefruit every day at breakfast. We had a couple of special spoons just for grapefruit, they had ridges on the edges for scooping out the fruit. He tried to get me into eating grapefruit for breakfast, but I didn't like it. I still don't. Man, that stuff is bitter, even watered down with Mountain Dew rip-off.

    I also got In-N-Out. There is a disturbing rumor going around that the people who run In-N-Out are big donators to the radical religious right; if it's true, we may have to go into boycott mode. I told Adam this and he said "Bad news for our taste buds, dude.". Indeed. I know they're fanatical Christians--they have Bible references printed on the bottoms of all their cups--but I can deal with that. It's the alleged political contributions I don't approve of.

    Today I have CS51A at 8AM and Math 31C at 11:30AM. Then I've got to get cracking on philosophy. I'm working on my cheat sheet for CS51A. I've only used about 1/4 my allotted space, so I'll probably put some examples of flip-flop problems on the sheet. I think today's finals will be easy, but I'm nervous anyway.

Later: I told Lisa from Sun about the Java reference in last week's MST3K (there was a pigeon pecking buttons on a wall and Crow said (as the pigeon) "I'm programming a Java applet here."). She [Lisa] was VASTLY amused. Gloat, gloat. I don't know why I'm gloating over knowing a marketing person.

    Man, the gods of butt-kicking are fickle. In the morning, I kicked the butt of my CS51A final. But in the afternoon, the tables were turned, and my butt was kicked by the Math 31C final. Argh.

Later still: Agh. On Switched-On Bach II there is the Musette in D Major and the Minuet in G Major and tbe Marche in D Major from the Anna Magdalena Notebook, and they scare me. They scare me because I had to learn them in piano lessons when I was little. I didn't even recognize it as Bach. I thought Mozart wrote them. I tend to blame Mozart for all classical music I don't like, especially that which I had to learn in piano lessons.

A "DELI"-GATION OF OLD FAVORITES
AND NEW SPECIALTY BREADS
VOTE FOR THE SANDWICH OF YOUR CHOICE

    First the Elvis stamp, and now this.

    Oh my goodness. I forgot it was Bloomsday.

    If only Berkeley had known about proof by induction.

    Today is the day of one-sentence paragraphs.

    Ha ha, I have defined a mighty emacs macro to do the non-binding spaces thing. Emacs, Emacs, Emacs.

    Every time I listen to Zappa I gain more and more respect for his genius. Have I aligned with a blown mind? Wasted my time on a drawn blind? Andy!

Later: Michael Yount expressed his disappointment at the absence of my yelling-guy rant. I may put it back up eventually.

    I finally got my tapes from Jake. Awesome is all I can say. Especially the mighty mighty cover of The Chickadee, which he turned into a Lutheran humn, and Butterfly. My demon Lucille Ball bit got sampled in Check Yourself (For Ticks). The so-called "Booty Tape 2" is also cool. Jer's tapes coming soon, again [the world] according to Jake.

    I begin work again. I don't have summer school until next week, though.

    I'm now locally on gogol. It's just like telnetting in. I can't get over how cool that is.

    I just remembered something today. I'm almost 19. If I were still a Mormon it would be almost time for me to go and proselytize for two years. But I'm not, so I don't have to. This makes me happy.

    Here is my smiley face. :)

    I think this should provide some historical perspective on Microsoft's usage of the term "integration":

Users of either the MS-DOS or the Microsoft Windows operating systems can take advantage of these great new features--and use them in either MS-DOS or Windows mode--because MS-DOS 6 is tightly integrated with Windows.

    Hmm, maybe I should use the graphical Internet Explorer rather than the text-only Internet Explorer to check the graphics on my pages. I didn't give read permission for the blue ribbon banner. It's fixed now. When something breaks, you people need to tell me.

CS51A: B
Math 31C: C+
Philosophy 21: A
CS180: Not in yet

    So far I've called them all except the math one, which I called as a C. I'm hoping for an A in CS180 but I should get at least a B. If I get an A, my GPA for last quarter will be about 3.4.

Later: I did some work on the OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO tape insert tonight. There are turning out to be four major pieces to the collage. There is the title, which is going to be ransom-note-style cut-out words and a drawing from an IBM training catalog Al MacMorres gave me; there is Sally, with cake, football, and corn syrup; there is a girl I cut out of a Jews For Jesus cartoon tract who is longing after an ambiguously priced bra insert product being advertised by porcelain Easter bunnies; and, of course, there is Porcelain Puppy himself. Hey Kris, I need you to do the Porcelain Puppy drawing. We also need to do some flyers for the kaplan-leonardr-kaplan gig on the 23rd. Get back to me. The whole collage is mounted on my CUSP calculator project from CS33, on the page where it says "Syntax error in your favor", just because I think that phrase is funny. I'm going to write the track list and stuff just crammed in the white space between the parts of the collage. It should be pretty cool, bro.

    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.

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?

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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?

    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."

    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.

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

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

    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.

Later: Hmm, Shoemaker-Levy 9 Style is a good name for a song. Speaking of songs, I corrected the bad link for Kleptomania. I have music for Benchmarks Of Love now (I played it at Coffee Junction), but I haven't written them down yet. Not speaking of songs, I changed my link to Michael Yount's box as per his request.

Adam and Kris: We need to meet and greet to record your respective sounds on tape.

Yeah, I know it's August. Gimme a break, okay? I have about 40 things to do, most of which are more important that updating this site.

I've decided to stop with the nbsps (agin wid da nbsp!). They take too long to type/copy-and-paste/activate a macro and they're not really worth it.

I have to do my last two physics labs before Thursday. But then I will never have to do another physics lab as long as I live, unless I go insane and change my major to physics or something.

Later: My mother is back from Europe. She sent me this huge travelogue. Here it is. The Leonard mentioned in the piece is my uncle, not me.

Later still: By an amazing coincidence, today is the day I got both of the postcards my mother sent me from Europe. They were both mailed from Paris. When I go home this Friday I will be the recipient of French and British candy. Woo-hoo.

My watch is broken, so I never know what time it is or what date it is anymore. It's pretty pathetic.

Later: Quite possibly the shortest email I've ever gotten, from Peter Hodgson. I told him I was going to be over at his office at around 3, and he said "come ahead" and I asked him if he was using an idiom or if he wanted me to be there before 3.

I just realised that Flyer 2 gives the date of our gig as being June 23, rather than July 23. Oh darn.

It won't be the 13th for long, though, as it's... oh, why do I do this? [looks again] 10:05. I'd be asleep by now, but I slept in the evening some.

I hate finding another place to live. I'm gonna try to just move in with someone who wants a roommate. I should probably call the Poulsons and set up an emergency plan such that I can crash at their house if I don't find a place in time. Then I could test my Macarynna bit on Rynna (see last month).

I desperately need to get someplace cheap, as living in this money-sucking apartment for 9 months has drained my resources. On the plus side, however, my National Merit Scholarship got upped (oi!) from $500 a year to $2000 a year, presumably because I'm now an upperclassman, or because I still have over a 3.0 GPA, or something. I can also get a government-subsidized loan for $1500 or so, but after that I have to go to the private sector.

I finally got a coherent picture of the whole plot for the Bastard Squad! screenplay. It's a very complex plot, I'm pleased. I am slowly hacking away at the Herculean task of writing the script. So far the bastards are at the party, but they have not yet killed the guy who's not really British.

Later: Actually, it doesn't. It doesn't have the town sets for some incomprehensible reason. But the space sets rocked. They used to, anyway. Now they're incomprehensibly, mind-bogglingly stupid.

Attention everyone. It's birthday time in the lunchroom. Birthday time in the lunchroom.

Later still: I got Coffee Junction pictures from Mrs. Irby. They are cool, black and white. Two of them look like press pack photos. They will be scanned probably next week, assuming I can get the scanner to work (it died).

Even later than that: This is the first "Even later than that" entry. Go look through the archives if you don't believe me.

Everyone else is doing it, why can't we^H^HI? I wanted to succumb to screenshot mania, but I never use X except for Netscape, so I just have this pathetic default Afterstep configuration. The solution, however, is simple. All it takes is hope and trust, and a little bit of pixie dust. I just fired up Netscape and went over to Garrett's page, loaded his neato Enlightenment Emulation In Windowmaker theme screenshot, and took a screenshot of that. It's a meta-screenshot! Now includes the obligatory IRC window. Aah, you kids today. When I was your age all we had were ones and zeroes. And sometimes we'd run out of ones, and we had to use just zeroes.

Speaking of zeroes, I wrote a rant about Windows 98. Yeah, that was an easy shot, but I didn't plan it, so I figured I might as well take it.

I finally put up Kris' hilarious birthday greeting to me. Enjoy it.

Jake and friends have left on their roadtrip. Good luck, Boingy.

My cousin Shannon is getting married on Saturday, so I get to take Friday off. Whee.

I finally put up a 404 message.

I signed up for the 5-unit Survey of Roman Civilization class, as everything else on my schedule for the next 2 years is full. Bleah. I may have to drop the CS lab.

I'm gonna put the mega header and the nice SSI-enabled footer (look at the source) into include files and try including them in all Crummy files. Cool. The front page now passes the W3C's HTML validator. Don't know about the other stuff though.

I got Jake's tape liner and Jeremy's tape yesterday. The tape liner is cool. It mentions me twice, once as "Leonard Richardson of Leonard Richardson fame... about whom we know virtually nothing." Jer's tape is so cool that I was enthralled despite nothing on the tape having to do with me in any way.

I was being facetious just there. Jer's tape is the double stuff.

I'm going to put up a web-based notebook for URLs and stuff. I use so many different computers nowadays, and remote bookmark management is still merely a dream. I don't like bookmarking stuff, because I won't be able to use it everywhere I go, but at the same time I don't want to lose valuable URLs. I've taken to actually writing down URLs, if you can believe that. So a Web notebook is the answer. Powered, of course, by SSI.

OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO is mostly done. By this I mean that I just have a couple (4) more songs that can be recorded with what I have on hand. 6 more I can record once Adam lends me his hog. 2-4 more require Adam/Leonard collabaration. That sounds like a lot (many full albums have fewer than 14 songs), but a) my songs are short, and, in general, pretty easy to record; and b) this is not your standard "mainstream" release, pink boy. I intend to, I intend to rock you, long and hard, and without mercy. So don't give me any crap about the number of tracks on the tape. My songs are defined integer but they pack a double-precision punch, and each dose of musical medicine is more potent than the last. Packed with hooks and crooks, nooks and brooks, they really satisfy the Eulerian path condition. So don't stand making faces, 'cause only one release this year bears the Porcelain Puppy Seal of Approval.

Later: Cool, I wrote the notebook thing I said I was gonna write. No more lost URLs and ideas for me.

I'll open the source to the notebook program as soon as I make sure there aren't any bonehead security holes in it, not that I would know a bonehead security hole if it bit me in the ass. It's a ridiculously simple program, but the concept is one that deserves much more popularity than it currently posesses, and I'm glad people like it.

Tomorrow there is a scheduled outage for gogol, as we will be upgrading to the new Debian 2.0. It's the way to go.

Second paragraph requires both tags.

This is a test of the mighty News You Can Bruise web publication system. Behold the HTML!

09/11/1998: In keeping with the tradition of recieving mail from cool people I don't know on account of having reflected upon their work in some fashion, I present this message recieved from the mighty Brett Glass in response to my Segfault article which I don't have gpm on this terminal and I'm not going to type the URL so you'll just have to find it yourself that talked about his Windows 3.1 error message program.

In other news, I am making the notebook program into a nitro-burning remote publishing mobile. It will rock, oh yes. More traffic on the ones.

09/08/1998: Woohoo! I got mail from Pokey himself! And Pokey uses Linux!

09/07/1998: Whee, we have moved. Crummy will be here until next June, probably. Puff the mighty Sampo lived by the sea.

09/04/98: Oh no, yenrab found my secret page!

Soon I may be moving webbily as well as physically. Peter has decided to claim gogol as his own. I hope Andy comes back soon.

09/02/98: Screw it. Here's the notebook source. CGI is wonko lately. Some people see the browser greeting and some don't. Agh.

09/01/98: The Browser Greetings program stopped working. I don't know why.

Source for the notebook will be forthcoming, unlike my renewal. If you get that reference, I'm really impressed.

http://www.backoffice.com/images/sep98.gif

All of my services have been cancelled, except for the damn Sprint long distance that David got and that I can't find a bill for. I hate phone companies even more than I hate the firewall.

My new apartment is mighty. Each day I am humbled before its cleanness and carpetedness and all-around groovyness.

I forgot the pizza I was going to bring for lunch. But no, I planned not to bring it for lunch. I think. Either way, it ain't here.

Soon we will have a new firewall, which I wouldn't hate except it runs on NT so I am obligated to hate it. We are testing it now.

I was bored, so I updated my CSUA homepage. I can't type the URL, as it contains a tilde, and the laptop I'm using has no tilde key. So it's time to use the %7E trick. http://fire.csua.ucla.edu/%7Eleonardr"

09/19/1998 (leonardr) My mail was bouncing yesterday. They changed my SEASNet username from leonard to leonardr (They told me they were gonna do this, and I'm glad they did as now I have the same username everywhere except at work where I'm still leonard), and therein hangs a tale. A while ago (you can check the NYCB archives if you care) I was pissed off at OAC for sending me warning messages about checking my mail too often (which was my fault, actually; I had a misconfigured asmailbox) so I decided to go off OAC and I set my forwarding address to leonard@seas.ucla.edu. Then I moved over to fire, where I am now, and I changed my SEAS forwarding address to leonardr@fire.csua.ucla.edu. So for quite a while everything sent to leonardr@ucla.edu had been forwarded to SEAS and then forwarded to fire where I got it. But when they changed my username, anything that went to leonardr@ucla.edu got sent to leonard@seas.ucla.edu and bounced. So yesterday I decided to just stop with the Rube Goldberg thing and now leonardr@ucla.edu forwards directly to leonardr@fire.csua.ucla.edu. So if you sent anything important to me in the last 36 hours and it bounced, send it again.

The sound files I made yesterday are obviously not proper .au files. This salesman is obviously a dummy. I don't know what they are. Sorry. I can play them in my weird X-based sound editor that's the best I've found so far that won a Microsoft Student Innovation Award or something even though it sucks like an empty oil well.

Oh yeah, Lucky generic Mountain Dew is pretty bad, too.

leonardr Hey, check it out. I found a program on sunsite (I ain't gonna play sunsite) called sapphire, an "acoustic compiler". It's basically a sound specification language. Not something I'd use to create many of my tracks, but good for some things. The easiest thing you can do with it, actually, is use it to play samples playing musical notation into a sound file. So I scrounged up some musical notation I did the last time I was near a piano, and made sapphire-compiled versions of the opening and the mega piano closing (which I will use in a recording someday) to I Screw Up Everything I Touch, and the main theme to Yo Quiero Breakfast. The latter doesn't sound right, as it has a weird rhythm, and I have no rhythm, musical-notation-wise, so it doesn't exactly fit into two measures and it gets cut off. The sounds are in the sound directory. Final verdict, sapphire is pretty cool. I'm still looking for something that will duplicate the functionality of a 4-track, though.

Correction: In the NYCB for March 5, 1998, I claimed that Winston Churchill was the originator of the term "Iron Curtain". According to the radio programme My Word, which would know, this is not true. It was someone who wrote a book about (being in Russia during the 1917 revolution).

Project: Finish the Bastard Squad! screenplay
Status: I finally figured out the plot, but only about 20 minutes of screenplay have actually been written. Put this down as a work in progress.

Project: Write stories for Segfault
Status: Completely achieved. I continue to write stories for Segfault to this day.

Project: Write a GTK clone of the blow-other-players-up-in-a-mine game
Status: Still just a gleam in my eye. I may never even start on this. Total and utter failure.

Project: Work on FaultNIC and other Segfault stuff
Status: Brilliantly achieved. Rewrites continue to this day.

Project: Record Ow, My Prostate! 24,996 Years Of Porcelain Puppy Oppression.
Status: Almost achieved. Would be completely achieved if Adam and/or Kris had stuck around during the summer.

Project: Write rock opera: Boris Goodenough
Status: Not much progress made. Most songs have yet do be written; still unsure as to plot details. Chalk this up as a failure.

Project: Write rock opera: His Own Platters
Status: Some progress made. Again I can blame Adam and Kris on account of their not being accessible. Plot set, most of my songs and some dialogue written. Still have to find out what the heck Jack Platters are, exactly.

So, there you have it. This evaluation of one's projects strikes me as quite Franklinian, and I shall continue it. Look for a new list of projects soon.

As I was telling Jake, I cannot, to save my life, remember the circumstances under which I first watched Fargo. I'm pretty sure I watched it with somebody who had already seen it and thought it was great. Andy, was it you?

I just spent $160 on books. I could have easily spent over twice that if I had bought the optional CS M151B books. I may return the one CSM151B book I did get if I can get a better price on it from Amazon.

Woop, I just got mail from Ilyah. Time to go downstairs.

Sep 26 1998 (leonardr): Wow, Kris shares three of my four classes (all except Classics). I think Adam shares one but I have not heard from him. Kris must endure the four-hour lab with me and then he has three more hours of class right after that. My heart bleeds for you, Scally.

Ilyah and I spent 2 or 3 hours cleaning up the CSUA lounge. We moved in the big bookcase and put the books into it. Many of our books are autographed by Linus, but he just wrote "Linus" on the part of the book that's made up of the sides of all the pag es, so it looks like they are Linus' books and we stole them. We also hung up the mega Star Trek: First Contact poster.

Then on the way home I decided to get some stuff from Trader Joe's and test my hypothesis that I could save time by getting off the bus and walking home down National. I made it home in about 15 minutes, so I think that doing that should save from 5 to 10 minutes, depending on how much stuff is in my backpack. My backpack is completely full right now.

I fear that Trader Joe's may not stock the raspberry sticks anymore. All they had were two tubs of orange sticks. I bought one of those just to try it, but I don't think they're going to sell them anymore. Oh darn.

I'm watching my tape of The Sinister Urge, and one of the commercials is one of the old Nike "Griffey in '96" commercials. And it showed a clip of Ken Griffey Jr. cavorting on the baseball field, and close-captions were shown that were not the close-captions for the commercial, but rather the close-captions for the game commentary during the period of the game from which the clip. I thought it was interesting that they'd let that slip through.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

La de da, just publishing a couple Segfault articles.

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.

Woo-hoo!

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

I went home for the weekend. My mother made me grade spelling tests and write quizzes for little Isaac Asimov-narrated films about the earth and the moon. That was a dirty trick.

Then we went shopping and snarfed all the marked-down Halloween candy. I got 440 Pixie Stix. Numnumnumnumnum.

I have midterms next week. I also have to work and work on this dull benefit data entry program.

I lost my absentee ballot puncher thing, so I punched my ballot with my logic probe.

That Microsoft memo thing blows my mind. Well, I guess it doesn't. Actually I'm not really surprised at all. Oh well. Back to work.

You can probably tell that I just updated the intro text.

Vader: Where are the plans you were given?

Curly: [begins dancing wildly] Woob woob woob woob woob! Ruuuuh ruuuuuh ruuuuuh!

Moe: What are you doing?

Curly: Eeeh, I'm givin' him the plans!

Moe: That's not how you give him the plans, you lunkhead!

[bonk]

cp *_* ~/crummy/mail/

This also means that all the old mail messages from the old Leonard's Yummy homepage are in the mail/ directory now. I still need to write the automatic header-reader and menu-generator.

I should probably go to sleep.

I think I might switch to Debian. gogol uses it, and I like it better than Red Hat.

Well, the <p> tag sure is easy to type. Andyway, segfault has won awards. Yippee.

Da da [sic] Pokey has 18 votes! That's a whopping 6%! Not bad, for the random recombination of someone else's work. Also check out the glowing endorsement from none other than Tom Servo.

Work!

I am somewhat better at Dvorak than I was yesterday. An interesting side effect is that I sometimes feel a sense of resignation upon beginning to read something, thinking that I'm going to have to read it really slowly.

Oops, I almost let a Dvorak-spawned typo through there.

None of the original Lucky Charms marshmallows are still part of Lucky Charms. They have all disappeared in a Stalinesque purge, replaced by other freeze-dried marshmallows.

Actual scripting has begun on The Nathan Hale Comedy Hour Beer. Stay tuned for more details.

I got an A on my Plautus paper. "Leonard - this is an awesome analysis of Plautus. You clearly have thought it through clearly. You've made some very keen insights [sic] & I thorougly enjoyed reading it. But you seem to have trouble distinguishing what makes a complete paragraph."

You know, one day I'll write a paper the weekend before it's due and it will get a terrible grade and then I'll be sorry. But until that happens, let the good times roll!

Andy is coming over today.

Finally, the fact that browser/OS integration is a dumb idea gets submitted to the general public.

On another note, I have proved completely unable to do my CS homework. I will have to seek help from Kris or Adam.

Soon it will be time for Thanksgiving break. I have to write a paper over the aforementioned break.

I'm glad I installed Ewan on my mother's computer.

My hard drive isn't coming in til next week. I wonder how I'm going to print out my Classics paper.

I am now officially blown away by the might of L_yX and T_eX in general.

One of my recent fears has been that film critics would hail Very Bad Things as the greatest film of the twentieth century, and KALL would thusly be made to look foolish. Fortunately, that fear was unfounded, as every movie critic who I respect (not that I know a whole lot of movie critics) hated it as much as we did.

But speaking of the greatest film of the twentieth century (love that segue!), I saw Citizen Kane last night. I don't think it's the greatest film of the twentieth century, but there are people who do. I stand by Biodome as the greatest film of the twentieth century.

KIDDING! I'M KIDDING!

I got a bunch of books at the library's perpetual used book sale. The best book is The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, which combines all my favorite topics: biology, pseudoscience, history, and the Soviet Union. Yummy! There's a non-perpetual used book sale going on tomorrow in Kinsey too.

Our (Kris' and mine) modem works perfectly. Once we are allowed to use state machine definitions, all the annoying little tiny glitches that have plagued us in this lab melt away like snow exposed to the glare of the sun. It took about 12 hours of work to get it going, but that was just the result of the complexity of the project. It was downhill all the way. Now we just have to hape that the board doesn't fail and the modem interfaces properly with a program we've never s een.

In other news, I just pulled off the scheduling feat of the century. Although I will be taking a full 16 units next quarter, I have no class on Tuesday and my only class on Thursday is a math discussion which I hope to be able to skip. Also, a quick look at the list of classes shows that I have only one more circuit-related class (the dread follow-up to my current lab) and I will never have to think about hardware again.

Who's at dialup8.trail.com and is using Python/urllib to look at my homepage?

Today I had the easiest final I've ever taken. The hard ones are on Monday.

Hmm! Wars do not make one great! Tabasco makes one great! Makes one great omelette!

I'd like to say that it was worth taking the bus all the way over to campus and then back again to have helped spawn that joke, but I don't think it was.

CS and stats finals tomorrow. Bring 'em on!

This is my official yummy homepage until sampo comes back. I didn't think Andy would move sampo, but there you go. Andy Schile had a plaid dealy, it was mealy, but touchy-feely. That's my theme song for Andy, sung to the tune of the "Andy Devine had a thong rind, it was divine, but the wrong kind" part of Frank Zappa's Andy. Speaking of Zappa, I got Joe's Garage and Strictly Commercial at the CD Exchange in San Antonio. I also got the Goldberg variations and some old English choral songs, but that's not speaking of Zappa.

Speaking of not speaking of Zappa, my grades are in.

• Survey of Roman civilization: A
• CS design lab of horrors: A-
• Logic design of digital systems: B+
• Statistics: B

That's around a 3.5, which is my best quarter in a while.

Okay, okay, I'd better get started on all my stuff. I have to write Segfault code, write idea base code for the LUG, write slides for my class, and write up my huge travelog complete with dadaist observations on billboards and such, and with wacky lists I compiled on the trip such as lists of apostrophe errors and roadkill.

I want to write a song about a rebellion against UPC codes and other forms of classification, a rebellion which inevitably ends in disaster. It's all part of my post-OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO (will I never finish that?) fantasy, the second in my Porcelain Puppy trilogy, Porcelain Puppy Versus Demon Dog. It will be all (mostly) about confusing the subjective and the objective. I have more songs about that than you'd think.

Oh yeah, there's also another big thing, but I'm not going to write about it until I talk to Adam and Kris about it. Oh, it's huge, it's immense. I'm surprised I haven't started obsessing about it. Wait, I just did.