Old
News: February 18th, 2003 toMarch 16th, 2003
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10:22
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16 Mar.
2003 (Sun); Post #269
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On
Friday, some ppl came over. I think we played Tile Chess. I don't
quite remember. Anyway, late that evening, Jones, Hanwool, and I
played rummy. It was very fun. We played to 200 points and used
the rules from Hoyle's (I have a paperback with tons of game rules
in it). The score sheet is below. Jones actually won by more than
100 points.
On Saturday, we had two GURPS sessions. Quick summary: Hermes
called a conference of all the gods, JD joined Hanwool's group as
Gratamenos (the god of generosity and gratuity), some decisions
were made (about Exoriamundus, humanity, and the Fourths), and Hanwool's
group lived and worked on Cheju, Korea for 3 months, then found
and killed Kokytos, a Potamoi, and some nameless Drakon at a Denny's
in Everett, WA.
Also, mostly at Phill's request, I made a site for the Greek gods
campaign. Here it is: Theomundi.
The image next to the rummy score sheet is a title image I whipped
up in PSP 7. Today's MP3: Castlevania - Dance Of Pales.mp3 (2:30).
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8:31
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13 Mar.
2003 (Thu); Post #268
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Wow,
it was really warm today! 75 degrees Fahrenheit. I went outside
around one and it was actually warmer outside than in the house.
Very strange, considering the mean temperature for this time of
year is 47° F. It was really windy last week. I just finished
my CptS 401 midterm an hour and a half ago. It seemed pretty easy,
but the true/false part made me uneasy. I answered false to all
but one... statistically, it just feels wrong. Anyway, I
reviewed my answers. When I left, there were only two people left
in the room. One guy turned in his test after only 15 minutes. And
there were 5 short-essay questions. Hm. He either did really well
or really badly.
Umm. Next week is my spring break. Earth 2025 just restarted yesterday,
so I've been playing. And Battlefield 1942 is still okay. I updated
to 1.31. I play medics a lot. You can probably tell I don't have
a lot to talk about. I'm thinking about building something in my
dad's shop. Like a table or something. I wish he had a lathe. Maybe
I'll go to the toy shop tomorrow and get a model to build. That'd
be kewl maybe. Anyway. As I still have no digital camera,
here's an animated GIF to amuse and amaze you.
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12:43
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12 Mar.
2003 (Wed); Post #267
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Been
a while since I posted. Eight days... oops. We had a LAN... thing...
this weekend. Only Phill, Drew, Kevin (Moore), Justin, and Kevin
(Sanders) brought their machines. We played a few really awesome
games of CS. Drew and I played some games of Warcraft III, but the
rest didn't participate much. See, most of them have trouble copying
ISOs across the network, installing Daemon
Tools, and downloading and installing updates from Blizzard.
The level of computer literacy in some of the members of our little
cadre is sorely lacking.
I finally got around to building those shelves. Phill took a picture
for me (shown below). I'd have taken it myself, but my parents still
have the digital camera. They're using it to track the progress
of one of their horse's wounds (she lost a lot of tissue on her
leg to necrosis from a spider bite and it has been healing slowly).
Anyway, I worry about it. It's a 4.1 megapixel SONY, but my mom
leaves it out out on the hay bails in the barn at night.
I drew up a list of (nearly) all the gods in the campaign. Did it
over the course of a week and a half... 17 pages, 284 gods. Borrowed
American Gods from Jones. He says it's a really fantastic
book. I'm going to start it as soon as I finish Stinger (Nancy
Kress). Speaking of Mrs. Kress, I wrote to her and yadda-yadda,
she's sending me a signed photo! She's my favorite author. Not many
writers can really hold my attention the way she can. Some of Spider
Robinson's stuff has come close, maybe even Douglas Adams. I like
other authors, like Asimov and Gibson, but they aren't flat-out
fascinating like Kress is. Of course, that's just IMHO.
Jones, JD, and (later) Meghan came over earlier this evening. Jones
and I played Proteus (chess variant) while JD and Meghan watched
Baseketball. Of course, I beat him 22 to 16. I don't know why he
keeps trying to lose...
Today's MP3: Dance Dance Revolution - Bu Dam (Full Version).mp3
(3:53).
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11:49
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4 Mar.
2003 (Tue); Post #266 |
I spent most of
the evening with my dad building shelves for my room. As of now,
they are totally done except for the pine facings. They look pretty
good. Dimensions: 39 1/4 inches high, 36 inches wide, ~4 1/2 inches
deep. Of course, that's without the facing. Anyway, will probably
finish it tomorrow. I'll have pictures then.
The second
Animatrix episode came out today. See it here.
The large (640 x 272) MOV is 160 megs. Pretty good. I liked the
first one better though. Then again, I'm kinda biased; the second
one didn't have robots in it. I like robots.
Saw The Majestic
(stars Jim Carrey) today. Good movie. No surprising plot twists, but
it's still enjoyable. Well, I'm very tired, so I'm going to bed.
Today's MP3: No Doubt - Bathwater (4:02).
Members of No
Doubt
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12:03
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4 Mar.
2003 (Tue); Post #265 |
Some stuff
happened. On Friday night, Hanwool, his little sister, Jones, and I
went to dinner at the Olive Garden. I had the chicken alfredo. Very
good. Their salads are fantastic, but Jones wouldn't eat any. The
waitress even threatened him. BTW, if you want really good service
at the Olive Garden, take a 12 year old Korean girl with
you.
Then, on Saturday, I ate at Mongolian Grill not once but
twice. A bit much, but still good. When I went for lunch (take-out,
by myself), I saw Patty Cooper. She was the wife of my friend (and
boss at Uncle's Games) Bill Cooper. He died from an aneurysm
(technically, a subarachnoid hemorrhage — a ruptured artery in the
brain) back in the spring of 2000. Anyway, we talked for some time.
She bought a computer from Computer Renaissance (a local shop which
I don't think highly of) and is having some problems with it. I gave
her my number.
Oh, Saturday morning I had my Psych class. My
group finally met (we're doing a project on Les Schwab, the
company). There's this... woman... who's really bossy and rude. She
seems to have appointed herself as our leader. Anyway, I didn't
reply to her group e-mail so she lectured me and this other person
for like 5 minutes. OMFG, what a harpy. She's the reason we're doing
the project on Les Schwab. I mean, there have got to be
better subjects for an Organizational Psychology class. And she
wants to spend an eighth of the presentation (45 minutes total) on
trivial, irrelevant crap like what brands of tires they sell. She's
making the whole thing into a stupid infomercial just because her
husband sells hubcaps or some dritt for a living. Pule, the way she
talks about him, you'd think he owns the company. Newsflash, you
witch: a lowly sales job isn't such an amazing thing to brag about.
Tispe.
GURPS news. GMed Kevin (he killed some people and
ended up in Stockton, CA, IIRC). Then Phillip and Beefy. Zephyrus
hunted down Phobos and killed him. It was pretty dramatic, too. They
were fighting in the air while flying at high speeds, one of them
invisible. Phobos managed to burn Zephyrus's left leg, crippling it
permanently (later reversed by Panakheia). Anyway, they got
seperated; Phobos was on the sidewalk, Zephyrus perched on the ledge
of a 4-story building. Zephyrus whips out his god-knife, dives at
Phobos at 80 yards per second, kills him. Then he plunges through
the body, hits the pavement, ends up with many broken bones
and falls into a coma. Yadda yadda, he manages to join Hanwool's
team, Drew's character heals him.
Beefy re-enters the game as
Diktyon, god of networks. He and Michanamatos are neo-theoi (new
gods). Hanwool & co. grab Solodater (a god of portals), go to
New York, pick up Zephyrus and Diktyon. Michanamatos experiences his
second apotheosis (lots of machines and tools in the hospital become
animated). Meanwhile, they steal Phobos's remains from the morgue.
Everyone meets on the roof, Solodater opens a portal to Australia.
They go to Zephyrus's former home in the outback and hang out for 4
days. Then Hermes (da da DA-A-A!) shows up and ushers them through a
portal (pausing briefly to end Zephyrus's Time of Dormancy) to an
all-inclusive meeting of the gods.
I played a chess game on
Pogo with some guy named "PENTHOUSEOUTLAW." Beat him in 40 rounds.
Took a snapshot of the moves list (shown below). My moves are the
ones in red. Anyway. Today's MP3: Rockapella - For the Longest
Time.mp3 (3:29).
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7:01
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28
Feb. 2003 (Fri); Post
#264 |
Been having
some really weird things going on with the cable. At 5:15, my router
registered a TCP Null Scan attack... the IP originated from Tel-Aviv
University, according to IP Lookup. Anyway, I was getting some
extremely high pings. I called Charter (my service provider) and the
lady said there was some really weird stuff going on. She couldn't
explain the pings, suggested I cycle the power on my router. I tried
that, didn't do anything. Around 6:50, the problem seemed to take
care of itself.
Interesting note about the Speedstream 2 Port
DSL/Cable Router: when you cycle its power, it thinks it's January
1st, 1970 until it talks to one of the machines on your network (or
maybe when it gets the IP from the ISP... it's hard to tell). The
picture below is from some pings I did from Tabatha.
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3:35
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28
Feb. 2003 (Fri); Post
#263 |
Talked to Derek
Watts yesterday (he called my cell just as I got out of CptS 401).
He might wanna game with us this weekend. GMed a short game for
Phillip last night. Yesterday morning I watched One Hour Photo (has
Robin Williams as an obsessed guy who works at "SavMart"). It was
okay. Robin Williams does psychotics pretty well (he was really
good in Death to Smoochy).
I've been thinking about getting Battlefield 1942 (and maybe even
the Road to Rome expansion). I wish I could trade my WarCraft III
key to someone for a BF1942 key. Not that WarCraft III is bad, it's
just that I'm starting to get bored with it. You can only play Zone
Control so many times, you know? There's some really clever maps
on b.net; Zone Control, Missile Command (my current favorite), Defense
of the Ancients, various kinds of Tower Defense, Turret Defense,
Risk (weird, a little unbalanced, but fun), and of course, the six
hundred or so Hero's Siege variants.
The Straight Dope has an interesting article
today on the 1908 Tunguska, Siberia explosion. It seems like every
"Mysteries of the Unexplained" book I've ever read has a chapter
on this. Anyway. Today's MP3: Charlotte Church - Habanera.mp3 (4:32).
Charlotte Church
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10:08
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26
Feb. 2003 (Wed); Post
#262 |
Not a whole lot
going on except a lot of school. Tonight, my dad and I are going to
build those shelves I designed. I'm going to stain them to match the
walls in my room. I may figure out a way to put molding on the front
so it's not just a bare plywood facing...
Will probably go to
Mongolian Grill for lunch. Of course, you make your own meal from
ingredients in the buffet. My standard bowl is roughly: 2 units of
onions, 5-7 units of zucchini, 1 large spoonful of sunflower seeds,
1 unit of corn (sometimes), 5-6 units of chicken and/or pork, 1-2
units of mushrooms, as many noodles as I can stack on top without
too much spillage, 1 ladel of oil, 2-3 ladels of teriyaki, 2 ladels
of Mongolian sauce, 1-2 ladels of sweet & sour, and 2-3 ladels
of house BBQ.
I had started watching Bridget Jones's Diary
last week, but stopped because it seemed too stupid (and I don't
think Renée Zellweger's a very good actress... her English accent
kinda sucks). Anyway, I picked it up again yesterday at the
36-minute mark, finished it. It wasn't as horrible as I had
originally thought, but it still wouldn't make my top 50.
New
Penny-Arcade
strip today. Today's MP3: System of a Down - Chop Suey.mp3
(3:30).
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5:09
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24
Feb. 2003 (Mon); Post
#261 |
Was reading
Beefy's site, but I had to stop when I got to the phrase "my
glorious urine."
I forgot to mention the GURPS session this
weekend. The session before, Phobos (Beefy) had killed Pheme
(Hanwool) with three shotgun blasts to the latter's chest. Well,
Pheme/Johnny (having lost his laurels) appeared in Haides as a
shade. At the end of the session, he had decided he would petition
the Fates to turn back time so that he could off Phobos before
Phobos offed him. Well, I told Hanwool he needed to roll a crit
(only one try allowed), and he did. A natural 17 (this is on 3d6, of
course). There was much hooting and slapping of
palms.
Anyway, Michanamatos (Ryan) hears a knock at the door
and opens it to find (surprise) Pheme standing there covered in mud
(Michanamatos had dug a grave for the body; presumably, Pheme
teleported out when came back to life). Well, that was also session
#20 for Hanwool, so Pheme underwent his third apotheosis (a 205
point boon).
Oh, and when Phillip and I were at Walmart, in
addition to Warcraft III, I picked up a Phillips Magnavox RF
Modulator Video Converter. It cost $25 and converts signal from the
three RCA outputs (video, right audio, left audio) into coaxial. I
used it to connect Olivia (the new rackmount system; 2000+ Athlon
XP, 60 GB, 256 DDR, etc.) to this old, 1970s TV I got from my mom's
friend, Kathy. I also had to pick up 25' of coax cable. But, it's
cool. I've watched a few movies on it. Hm, need to get my other 256
MB DDR RAM stick from JD. Oh, the humiliation of having to operate a
system with less than a half-gig of RAM...
Of course, I'm
making this post from my power rig. Athlon 1700+ XP, two 80
GB HDs, 1 GB of PC2100 DDR RAM, GeForce 4 Ti4600, 40x-write CD-R.
Had been using Tabatha (the Vaio) a lot, but started using Chesty
again b/c of Warcraft III. Well, I've got to go;
l8er.
Today's MP3: Rockapella - Where in the World is Carmen
Sandiago.mp3 (2:59).
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3:57
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24
Feb. 2003 (Mon); Post
#260 |
A weekend of
good eating. Had Mongolian Grill and Shari's on Saturday (yeah, for
some reason, I like Shari's hamburgers...), Rattlesnake Mountain (14
oz. teriyaki steak, mm) and Shari's today (just got back from
Shari's; went with Hanwool). Been up 27+ hours twice now... did it
Friday to Sat. then Sat. to Sunday. Hopefully, won't have to do it
again. Though, it feels surprisingly good to wake up at 3:30 a.m.
fully rested. Anyway.
Been working on some stuff for the
Greek Gods campaign (as for a real name, how about "Theomundi?" It's
Greek for "World(s) of Gods"). I'm trying to compile a master-list
for the various gods. Names, homes, abilities, dates of
birth/apotheosis, descriptions, brief histories, notes, etc. As well
as making up new ones, I'm going through my session notes and
recording info on gods that were developed through PC interaction
(e.g. Melopomene, Comopaise).
I drew up some plans for some
shelves I'm going to build (I've got stacks of paperbacks on my
dresser right now). 3/4" plywood and pine boards, 5/16" dadoes, 39
3/4" tall, 28 5/8" wide. It'll be cool. I'm gonna hang it on the
wall.
For some reason, I kinda like reading other ppl's
blogs. I'm always up on Beefy and Phill's sites, but sometimes I
enjoy reading stranger's pages too. Yeah, I'm weird. I'm sure no one
reads this page except a few friends with internet connections and
too much free time. Anyway, I was reading this one guy's
blog/collection-of-rants/stories (link: Not My Desk). Really nicely
done site, and the pieces are interesting and funny. If you're
bored, it's worth looking into.
Today's MP3: Bobbysocks - La
det Swinge.mp3 (2:53).
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2:48
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21
Feb. 2003 (Fri); Post
#259 |
On Tuesday
night I went over to Pullman (140 miles/3 hours away) because my
dad's horse (a 2 year old named Stretch) was colicking (sp?). An
impaction in the intestines and what my dad was afraid might be a
torsion of the gut. Anyway, we ended up staying the night at a
Holiday Inn and having breakfast with my sister at a local Denny's.
Actually, I delivered Stretch; pulled him out of his dam. Why? My
parents used to pay me to stay up all night watching mares who were
about to give birth (I'd then call them when the foal started...
arriving). Anyway, Stretch got through surgery okay; had a lot of
coarse sand in his intestines. My parents will go pick him up on
Sunday.
I came home Wednesday around noon. Had lunch at
Mongolian Grill. I love that restaurant. I've eaten there three
times this week. Will probably eat there tomorrow if I can get
anyone to go with me. Heck, I'll prolly go by myself if it comes
down to it. They do carryout, but few ppl seem to know it. They
should have those cards like the espresso places use... buy 10, get
1 free. I've been there a total of 5 times, I think.
Been
playing Warcraft III quite a bit. I bought the game when Phill and I
went to Walmart a week ago or so. Battlenet is pretty good (better
than I remember it being when Diablo II came out — virtually
unplayable, even over my T1 connection at WSU). The only problem is
the dial-up users. I was once one myself, but I didn't inflict my
paper-thin bandwidth on others... no, I played games like Literati
and Reversi, which work great even at 2400 baud. I have nothing but
disdain for people who connect at 19,200 bps and have the audacity
to try playing Warcraft III on battlenet. If you play WC3 on b.net,
you spend about 70% of your game staring at these
screens:
 
But, those complaints aside, it's pretty fun. I
really like Defense of the Ancients (currently at version 2.2,
though I've heard that 2.3 is out). The map editor must be a lot
more advanced than what came with StarCraft. I've been thinking
about making my own map with triggers and whatnot. I'm looking
forward to the expansion, The Frozen Throne... comes out in Q2 2003.
I actually signed up for the Frozen Throne beta test a little while
ago. The cut-off is at 11:00 a.m. (PST, GMT-8:00) today. Well,
l8er.
Today's MP3: Rockapella - Michael Jackson Medley.mp3
(13:54).
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6:56
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18
Feb. 2003 (Tue); Post
#258 |
Well, it's been
about a week since my last post. Last Friday, Hanwool and I drove up
to Spokane for his citizenship test. We had to get up at 3:30 a.m.
and it was about a two-and-a-half hour drive. On the way, I helped
him study. As a side effect, I've memorized the first thirteen
states and the three amendments that have to do with voting rights
(15, 19, and 24, in case you were wondering). Anyway, I read The
Cat Who Walks Through Walls while he dealt with the INS ppl.
Then we had breakfast at this place called Molly's... I had a really
super-fantastic German sausage and cheddar cheese omelette. The
coffee was good too.
Speaking of Heinlein's novel, I'm about
four-fifths through. I wouldn't want to spoil it for you, but just
let me say that there's a point in the book where things get
extremely weird. In more ways than one. Heinlein gets kind of
dirty in this book... it really reminds me of Spider Robinson (whose
books can get pretty risque; frex: Deathkiller). Aside from
the blue material, it's a really fantastic book. It's funny to see
how he writes about computers... I mean, this book came out in 1985,
but still. He talks about "Sony Megawafers," which have the truly
astounding capacity of half a million words each! Gee, that's like a
whole... (8 b * 500,000) / 1,024^2... 3.81 megabytes! And they're 2
cm high, 3 cm diameter... huh. Kinda funny that memory sticks or
compact flash cards, etc. from 2003 beat the living daylights out of
state-of-the-art storage from 2188.
Anyway, we played GURPS
this weekend. Saturday was Hanwool's group (now, or then, rather,
consisting of Drew, Ryan, Beefy, and him), then Justin on Sunday,
then Hanwool's group again on Monday (President's Day). A lot
happened, so here's a quick summary: Ryan was detained, then
escaped, then got chased and sorta caught by Apollo, then escaped
again, Hanwool agreed to nuke Seattle, got petrified, Justin escaped
from Mundus Exoria, the exile dimension, Beefy killed Hanwool, and
Ryan and Drew lost fatigue, hitpoints, and stat points trying to
revive him (their efforts failed). It was...
eventful.
Archived the old news. Today's MP3: Riders In The
Sky - Jessie the Yodelin' Cowgirl.mp3 (3:02).
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"You
have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance."
— Ray Bradbury
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