News You Can Bruise for 1998 December

I wonder if I can create December's NYCB file just by entering an entry here.

What if I do this?

I may have spoken too hastily about the weather. So far the weather has been very nice and December-y. It rained yesterday even.

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 was bored (amazing how many projects are started out of boredom, no? I dare say boredom is one of the world's great motivators), and I'm having trouble thinking about the idea base, so I wrote a little finger client so that people who are using Windows can finger me (and others) without having to download a 400K program to do it.

Oh yeah, yesterday Peter and I voted to call the underscore character a "skid" (as per the Jargon File), as that is only one syllable. I don't care if you decide to do the same, but you might want to consider it.

Those of you who don't mind getting a 370K file can check out the Sam Peckinpah sp?)-ish cartoon I drew two weeks ago, Very Dull Things (part 1) (you can read it as it downloads, so it's not like you're wasting the downloading time doing nothing). Kris is working on scanning part 2, where it gets even more hurtful and bloody and meaningless. The guy with the Star Trek cap is Kris, the guy with the ramen noodle hair is Adam, and the other guy is me. Probably not the best place to cut off the story if it's going to be presented in parts, but when you've filled a page, you've filled a page.

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.

Hey, I did a bunch of work on the idea base program on Saturday. The work I did also translates into nicer-looking Segfault code. I haven't been able to reach Scott recently, so I don't know what the deal is on that. In the meantime, Enjoy my code.

I fixed the disambiguate typo. Are you happy in your work, Scott?

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?

Oh, hey, check out this fossil find. Kris had never heard of these guys; neither had I. There's an awesome artist's rendering but the file is huge. I'm going to gimp it down to size when I go in tomorrow.

Behold the gorgonopsid!

There's a new Leonardonics entry.

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

I put up a bunch of new tabs (new tabs for old songs) in the music section, including chords for the never-before-seen Frog/Antifrog. Note the new XML-like markup which I hope to write a palser for eventually to do nice formatting.

I took the CS final, and am about to go take the Statistics final. So far nobody has met anybody's father a steel cage; although Kris says the CS final met his grandfather in a steel cage.

Another music thing I typed up while cleaning out my accumulated papers from this quarter: The Jeff Lynne Rock Operas, rock operas about Mr. Rock Opera himself, Jeff Lynne. The second one is supposed to be Jeff Lynne's abuse of editorial power as author of the rock opera.

Today Kris came up with the best Yoda joke ever:

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!

I think it's safe to say that I met the father of the statistics final in a steel cage. I would not be surprised to get a perfect score on that final.

It's not Monday (It's Monday!), by the way. All in all, sampo's clock is slow.

Well, that's just great. My country has broken international law.

Thunderbirds and my vacation notifier are go. I'll just have to remember to activate it tomorrow.

Issue one: The Final Final. Time to go!

Well, that's over with. I got an A- on my Seneca paper, much better than I thought I would do. Now I have to get ready for leaving tomorrow.

Hey, I'm back again. Although I'm laying low (until after the holidays) for a while so that I don't have to do all the stuff I'm supposed to do quite yet. You know who you are.

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.