ShinyPlasticBag

Woohoo! We got our new car today — it's amazing. It's a metallic silver 2002 Hyundai Elantra GT, with a spoiler, CD player (Clarion deck), air conditioning, and power everything. It's very nice — it feels like it's out of our price range, to be honest. Not only is it packed with features, but it has blue dash lights. Wee! =)

I spent most of the day dealing with the car — cleaning out the old one and stuff. Mom had to work uber late (she's actually still at work — poor Mom) so I ended up picking up the car. It's too bad she didn't get to be the first to drive it; I know she really wanted to be. But she had no choice.

Here's a list of the people who've been in the car thus far:

1. Me
2. Janet
3. Sarah
4. Nick
5. Ryan
6. Steve
7. Catro
8. Mom
9. Maryann

Yeah, I know. That's useless info. But anyway.

Here's what I really wanted to blog about tonight

The Nova Scotia government is planning on offering two different high school diplomas. One for normal students, and one for — get this — people who can't read. Insert proof that there is something wrong with our educational system! I find this absolutely absurd, and utterly appalling. Instead of fixing the problem, they're making it okay to be illiterate. This is not the dark ages, folks. There is no reason in the world why people who are illiterate should be illiterate, and there's even less reason why they should be graduating. How many businesses would want to hire someone with a “lite” high school diploma?

This topic makes me very angry.

I have very little respect for stupid people. I mean, if you have problems, that's not your fault. But people who are stupid for no reason (I consider eschewing education out of boredom to be no reason) frustrate me. There's just no need.

Arg. Anyway...I don't really have much more to say, I guess.

Let's hear it for sexy Korean cars!

PS: I was mistaken in my last entry. It's an Evel Knievel bouncy-head thing, not a Super Dave Osborne one.

• Written on 26 September 2002 & posted at 08:37 PM.
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Well that was quite the hiatus. Sorry — been really really busy with school and work and stuff. I'm really wishing I had at least one day where I didn't have to go to school or work. But alas...

School...boring...uber...sigh. I wish I was at home...programming. Yeah, I'm sad, but I'm in the middle of Shiny Plastic Index. Version three. I've restarted that program so many friggin' times. I've decided, once again, that I want an Explorer-style experience. And I've decided to store each index in a separate file. That'll mean speed boosts. I've got some special classes and types that are speeding things up.

I have decided how to do the folders list yet — it would take a bit too long to load all of the folders in advance. I think I will do it on-demand, which will be slowish, but faster overall. Anyway, I am an uber geek, and the guys in the CS help desk have a Super Dave Osborne bouncy-head thing. How sad.

Super Dave Rocked.

• Written on 23 September 2002 & posted at 11:50 AM.
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I will return at some point. =)

• Written on 22 September 2002 & posted at 08:36 AM.
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Yay for nothing. It's the week already — that weekend flew by. I had my family reunion on Saturday (not particularly fun, but it wasn't as horrid as I had expected) and work on Sunday (slow slow slow!).

In terms of the “fun” stuff, I went to see Stealing Harvard on Saturday. It really sucked. It wasn't really a bad movie, but it sort of felt as though they had just gone with the first draft of the script and shot it. It didn't feel “polished” enough. I dunno. Maybe I just really hate Tom Green (I do).

Last night, I went out to Nick's and watched War Games, the original hacker kind of movie. Surprisingly, Matthew Broderick was in it, which led to me constantly thinking of Ferris Bueller's Day Off through the whole thing. However, it was a pretty good movie, and it actually had a limited degree of street cred — moreso than Hackers or The Net did. He had an acoustic coupler! Yay! =)

So yeah. Today has been sort of dull — it's raining, which sucks, and I missed my first class. By missed I mean skipped, but I was late anyway. So I went back over to Dartmouth with Pugs and went to Mic Mac Mall. He bought some boring X-Box game and dumped me off in time for the worst Discrete Structures lecture ever. I hope my last class (Computer Org) is more interesting. After classes, I have to go waste (and I mean waste) money on text books. $414 for three> books. That is fucking sick. Especially since I doubt I really need them.

Sigh.

Anyway, I have to go. Bubye.

@703

PS: Check out John's new blog.

• Written on 16 September 2002 & posted at 11:44 AM.
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Well blah. Today was one of the most boring days I have ever lived through. I'm not sure why, but it was. Every class seemed to drag on — even Computer Organization, which I love. There's nothing you can do about it, though, so ... yeah.

I finally visited my course web sites tonight and discovered that my Comp Org class has a great web site. Along with a handy-dandy do-it-all numerical convertor, it has a neat-ass assembly language simulator. Cool as shit! If you're even 10% geek, I suggest you check it out.

So, the big family reunion is tomorrow. I'm stuck going, and I think I'd rather have teeth pulled than go to it. I don't find family stuff in the least bit pleasant, so life sucks. However, Mom is unveiling the song she wrote for the occasion, so I want to be there to give her moral support. And on an unrelated tangent, don't you think it should be “morale support”? I mean, their morals are fine, it's their confidence and morale you're boosting.

But I digress. My SimCity awaits me, and I have to pee.

@946

• Written on 13 September 2002 & posted at 05:44 PM.
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Phew. I made it past September 11th without being deluged in media crap. I'm very happy about that. They've focused on that for so long, anything that can be said, they've said, and anything they have left to say is worthless.

Anyway, weird day yesterday. School was boring. I went to Wendy's at lunch with Pugs, where we watched some creepy “I'm gonna be stuck at Wendy's for the rest of my life” guy hit on some girl. It was quite sad. After I went to my first psych tutorial (which turned out to not be my tutorial — mine is next week), we hopped in Pug's car and headed home. He ended up having a fender-bender which didn't actually bend any fenders, and didn't cause any damage, except to crack the license plate holder on the other car. At least it worked out.

Yesterday had some crazy rain. The drive home from school was fine, but later on in the evening, it got absolutely insane out, and I hydroplaned many a time. However, I managed to make it home okay, so life is happy.

So yeah. I'm at school now. Been here for half an hour or so, class is in another hour and a half. I'm out of that class at 1:00, and then I don't have another class until four. But I think I'll go to the 1:00 showing of computer science so I can leave at 2:30 instead of 5:30. I have to go to the Hyundai dealer to firm up some prices on the beloved Elantra GT, which Mom is planning on purchasing on Monday or Tuesday. I can't wait! Happy happy.

Anyhoo, I'm off, so...bye.

@586

• Written on 12 September 2002 & posted at 09:05 AM.
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320GB Hard Drives announced
from the are-we-there-yet-mommy dept.
SparkyTWP writes “Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn by announcing new IDE hard drives with capacities of up to 320GB. Prices will be between $300 and $400 and be commercially available by the end of the year.”

Holy crap. This is getting absolutely absurd. The only way people (that is, normal people) would ever really need that much space is if computers were to make a massive quality leap.

By quality leap, I mean data quality. Sound should be in better quality, broadband should be broader, and most importantly, screen resolution should be greatly enhanced. I'm looking forward to the day when icons are 640x640 pixels, and look roughly the same size on screen as they do now (so a 1024x768 resolution would go up to around 20480x15360). If we have that much space to kill, why not?

Anyway, I'm at school. I've finished with my Comp Org tutorial and Psych (which was quite interesting today), and now I have 3 hours to kill until my next class. I could just take the car home and come back, but that's a waste of gas and bridge tokens. We need Macpass.

Oops. SimCity is done downloading. Screw you, Blogger!

Sometime around @700

• Written on 10 September 2002 & posted at 12:11 PM.
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Okay, life is happy. I'm not at work. =) Mind you, the day is over, but hey...not at work. Yeah.

I came home and vegged in front of the TV for a bit and then headed down to the basement to do some overdue coding. I'm working on a replacement for my CD indexing program, X-Search. Like many of my utility programs, I wrote it to serve a purpose, quick and dirty, and it worked, so it never got updated. So X-Search is ugly and poorly designed. However, it works. Anyway, I decided to finally overhaul it as Shiny Plastic Index. Spindex, as I like to call it, is coming along nicely. Right now, it can index stuff, but it doesn't save the indexes yet, so it's kind of useless. But the interface is coming along. I was going to make it look pretty much like you were viewing the folders in Windows Explorer, but I realized that would be extremely slow. So I don't know how I'll deal with it, exactly, but for now, it's just a big file list. Besides its search capabilities (AND, OR, and NOT inside of files and/or folders, for any of the indexes you choose), it has a file list option, which just copies the current index to the clipboard in a pretty list. It's quite nice — I'm satisfied. I'm considering adding a remote search capability, where you could connect to another computer running Spindex and search through it's indexes. Not sure if it's worth the effort yet, though.

Anyway, I had to drive to get Mom tonight, as usual. But fortunately, I only had to go halfway to meet her in Hammonds Plains. After a weird discussion about waking dreams and sixth senses, we got home and I sped off to Tony's to hang out with him and John. Nothing terribly exciting, but I did get to put copious amounts of packing tape on Tony's arm, causing him to remove large portions of hair from it.

Fun.

Anyway, I've got to go to sleep so I'm not dead on my feet at school tomorrow. See all y'all.

@142

• Written on 08 September 2002 & posted at 10:26 PM.
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This is absolutely absurd. What the hell is wrong with Americans?

Methinks cultural sensitivity has gone too far.

Anyway, check this out. I'll write when I have more than ten seconds to allocate to it.

@662

• Written on 08 September 2002 & posted at 10:53 AM.
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Well, it's ten to twelve and I'm on lunch. Work is going slow today, and I'm glad to escape it for as long as I can. My work schedule is sort of crappy — it eats up my weekends, so I only have two days off from now until December (assuming work continues until then). Still, I'm thinking of talking to my boss when she gets back from vacation and asking if I can add an extra shift a week — either working half a shift on Tuesday and Thursday, or on Wednesday nights. I have until the end of September to think about it.

Mike got his laptop yesterday. It is sickeningly nice, a Sony Vaio, 1.6 GHz system with a huge 16" screen and a DVD/CD burner drive. It's so nice. Although I had already made a decision to forget my computer upgrade that I'm saving for and put the money towards a laptop instead, now I want the laptop even more. Life's like that, I guess. If things work out, I could have one by Christmas, similar to Mike's.

Anyway, I'm researching laptops at the moment, so I'm not going to continue writing. I'll blog later.

@666

• Written on 07 September 2002 & posted at 10:59 AM.
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(This following was written at 2:03pm — @752 — while on the grass in back of the Arts & Administration building)

This sucks! Today is not going very well. Allow me to enumerate my woes before I describe Mike's. My point of stress (enumeration is meaningless, I suppose, when one only has one woe) is student loans, as usual. I find the forms and jargon to be absolutely infuriating (here is my suggestion for a redesign). I received all of my stuff in the mail, but one of the sheets says I am not eligible for any loans, and one says I get $5100. Why? No clue. So I have an appointment to talk to someone any time from 30 minutes to an hour from now. They're backed up.

I love university, but I hate this stuff.

And Mike...poor Mike. He didn't get a passing grade (B- or higher, for some reason) in one of his music classes last year, so he had to retake all of them this year. But now, they won't even let him into the program. So, their timing was bad and their logic was flawed in the first place. He's now considering psychology instead of music, which is a pretty worthless degree anyway. What a stupid department.

(Returning to the present)

I'm too tired to write right now. I got my student loans fixed, and Mike fell asleep on the bus on the way home. Here's a picture of me from this morning. Night.

@118

• Written on 05 September 2002 & posted at 09:40 PM.
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Crap. I missed the dateline again, and now my entry for yesterday goes under today. Blah.

It's 12:08, so I should be in bed, to get all rested for my first day of school. I don't know what's weirder: that school starts tomorrow, or that it's technically tomorrow now, and school starts today. Regardlessly (??), I have to make this a quick entry.

I just saw something very cool at domesticat. The site is skinnable — there are different layouts to choose from. This is something I have been toying with for quite some time; more than a year, actually. But I haven't had the guts to attempt it. However, when I was designing this site, I took that possibility into account and separated everything. The layout is almost totally independent of the content. At the moment, the data files have a little bit of formatting in them, but it's minimal, and I plan on taking it out at some point soon, whenever I get the time.

Anyway, I spent a chunk of the evening preparing for school. I got my binders all set, and put batteries in my discman, digital camera, and Visor. It's nice to see the Visor (his name is Moody) working again, because it's been off since June. PDAs (at least mine) are pretty worthless in the summertime, and are just a waste of batteries/money to keep running. Downloading the Palm Desktop took no time, and neither did importing my contact list or old applications. I installed a few new ones, too — I have a Hackmaster hack that displays Internet Time instead of normal time. I'm such a loser. But my record of mentioning Internet Time in every entry goes on. =)

I'm very excited. But kind of nervous, too. I don't know why I feel either of those things, since I've done this all before. It doesn't matter, I suppose. It's not like I have a choice! Pugsley is picking me up at 9:15 and taking me over. So, I have 9 hours and 2 minutes to go.

Arg. Sleep now. Bye.

@176

• Written on 04 September 2002 & posted at 11:15 PM.
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Holy friggin' crap-o-la. School starts tomorrow!

Well. Not much to be done now. I've got to get my school stuff in order, but my classes are settled. It turns out that I won't be alone after all — Apollo and Nathan are in a few of my classes. Nothing gets rid of boredom in long CS classes better than knowing people. I didn't think I'd be in anyone's classes, because I registered so late and ended up in the shitty blocks. But hey, life worked out randomly, just as I always say it will.

Anyhoots, if you care, my schedule is up here.

And if you feel like impeding the epidemic of spam on the Net, you should link here.

@741

• Written on 04 September 2002 & posted at 12:48 PM.
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Alright, this entry is actually under the right day.

I just realized that most of my blog thus far has been about my computer and my web site. That seems so sad. I swear I'm not that much of a loser, but that's what has been occupying my time lately. Trying to make up for lost time before school starts, I suppose.

St. Mary's goes in tomorrow, but Dal doesn't start until Thursday. I wonder why that is? Anyway, it gives me an extra day to sleep in while my friends are stuck in classes. =) I got the bill for this semester, and I'm a little concerned. It's due by September 20th, which is way too soon. I know for a fact that my student loan won't be here in time. Fortunately, they're not allowed to charge any more than $50 for late fees, and they're not going to kick me out, but still. It's a little bit crappy.

Today was a weird day. I slept in kind of late (noon), but it felt really early when I woke up. By 2:00, it seemed like I had been up forever. Weird. Anyway, Steve came over, and James showed up, which was weird. I haven't seen him since the New Year's party. He just moved into a new place in Colby Village that his dad built (well, he didn't build it...he had it built for him, but you know what I mean). It's insane — cable, phone, and network jacks in every room — even the bathrooms. My house doesn't even have cable jacks at all...just leech wires we ran from the main tap thingie. It was like that when we got here, I swear! =P Anyway, hopefully we'll be fixing that with our fall renovations. Mom wants to redo the kitchen and the living room, then add a patio, although that's more likely to happen in the spring. The living room won't be fun at all...she wants hardwood floors, but there are two layers of carpet, and the bottom one is glued down. The people who owned this house before us must've been on crack.

At least my room is done being “renovated”. I dunno if that's the right word for it, cos we did it ourselves and it's kind of weird. I cleaned it today, though, and it looks quite nice.

ARG. Why is it that every time I am writing in my blog a tiny little mosquito is buzzing around my monitor? Grr!

Anyway, it's high time to mention my computer again (I am so sad). Here's a picture of my desktop to satisfy that criteria. =)

• Written on 03 September 2002 & posted at 10:37 PM.
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Well, it's later than I want, and it sucks, because this entry is supposed to be under September the 2nd. But there's not much I can do now.

Today (yesterday?) was a pretty average day. I had to work, which wasn't bad, although it went rather slowly. At lunch time, I decided to take my site layout and rewrite it in 100% proper HTML/CSS. I quickly realized that it would be impossible to attain 100%, but I am very close. The only issues that the W3C Validator complained about were minor. Insignificant, in fact. It looked at the URIs in the menu, saw the PHP stuff, and freaked. The way you pass variables to PHP scripts is like this: script.php?variable1=value1&variable2=value2. The problem is the &variable2 part: the validator thinks it's supposed to be an entitty, like &copy (©). How annoying. I can't seem to find a way around it, though, so I guess my little “4.01 Compliant” banner will have to wait. =)

Other than that issue, converting to a compliant file was pretty easy. It took me a while to finally use a table to align this content window, but I couldn't find another way. And I spent more than half an hour just making the code “pretty”. In the end, however, I'm happy, and it looks almost perfect in Mozilla. If you want to contrast the old version and the new version, do it. If you're looking at this in Internet Explorer, you'll notice that the header in the right-hand area doesn't show up correctly in Mozilla. I'm not sure why this happens, or how to fix it, but I actually kind of like the look, so I'm not too worried at the moment.

I still shudder to see what Opera would do to the page.

Anyway, in the end, it was a learning experience, and I cut the site down from 9.59 KB to 6.63 KB. Not that it matters at all nowadays, but hey. My codes 30% tighter. =)

But, backing away from the geek world, in the real world, tonight was mildly fun. We watched Dante's Peak, which is a pretty good movie. I wasn't really in the mood to do anything at all tonight, because I was super-tired, but I kind of got into it, so it worked out. I definitely need to get some rest before school starts, though.

Two days left. Sigh.

• Written on 02 September 2002 & posted at 11:56 PM.
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Any chance of you included an option for Swatch .beat time instead of normal time? It'd be a great feature for you to add, in my opinion. For more info on .beats check out www.swatch.com and look for “Internet Time”.

Nexxus

• Written on 02 September 2002 & posted at 11:55 AM.
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CSS is really starting to bug me. I just spent the last half-hour or so messing around with the W3C code validators, and I don't understand what the problems are. I think, maybe, I need to do what I did to learn HTML in the first place: start looking at other people's code to learn what I'm doing wrong. I guess my syntax is just a little off. =)

Anyway, today was rather fun. I slept in way too much after a sleepover that went on way too late. I spent the afternoon driving around in the valley aimlessly, and then went to a barbeque at Joey's house to celebrate his new deck. It's a damn big deck. It was a good barbeque, although it was marred by the presence of Judith (lights flicker), unbeloved mother of an ex-girlfriend. I hate that woman. She was civil, I guess (by civil, I mean she ignored me, thank bob), but I wish she had not showed up at all. Quite an unpleasant person.

I got home around nine o'clock, had a shower, and planted myself in front of the computer. My activites proceeded like this:

1) Read slashdot.
2) Got bored — decided to research metric time.
3) Followed a link to another site.
4) Noticed that site has a built-in Swatch .beat clock.
5) Went to swatch.com to get my own built-in Swatch .beat clock for this site.
6) Wrote some bad code that put the clock in a weird place (roughly where it is now). Liked the position, loaded up Mozilla to check it.
7) Clock didn't bother showing up. Oh well, at least it looked good in IE.
8) Decided to research CSS a bit more to fix my issues.9) Got tired, and decided to put it off til tomorrow.

Anyway, I'm sure you don't give a crap about my thought processes. At least not in that regard. And I need sleep anyway.

I can't believe classes start Thursday . . .

@139

• Written on 01 September 2002 & posted at 10:15 AM.
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