Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Two nights ago I posted a picture, and a challenge to guess what the heck happened. Didn't get that many responses, though the best was: "While undercover you smoked up and your backup came to arrest you by accident..." from my loving brother. Thanks for the support. Harkins was right close with his: "I’d bet you got in an awful lot of trouble for making your car look like police car." Whoops, I meant: "Oh, it’s the other one? Got me then. Skidded through some ice and onto someone’s lawn?"

So, the fll story goes like this. Saturday here was really weird. I woke up, and it was snowing hard. An hour later it was sunny, and snow was melted. Repeat 3-4 times. 'Round evening time I went over to a friend's place for a Wii party. Was fun, until we realized there was no pizza, bummer. So two friends and I went out riding to grab a pizza and listen to Pirate Shanties, not half an hour after we'd arrive. When we went to the party, the roads were perfectly dry, wonderful traction. When we left, we had to go down a hill that starting from the crest of the hill curves to the left. Also starting at the crest of the hill (so you couldn't see it sooner) was an entire hill of black ice. By the time I realized we were on ice, I couldn't do anything, and we skidded into the curb. Ok, no we skidded onto the curb, and were stopped by a poor sapling who now sits at a 45 degree angle, and more costly, its concrete box. That initial hit busted my axle so my wheels couldn't turn more right than almost straight, luckily the hill curves left, right? So we had to move the car immediately, as the next car over that hill would smash right into me, and past this tree/box was a sloping hill down to a nice tree line, you guessed it, the hill was a nice sheet of ice as well. I kinda got us sliding down the hill again, with just about no control, and managed to skid up onto the left shoulder about a foot in front of that tree.

*Whew* Fun time's over, right? Well, not exactly. My bumper was still about a foot into the road, and some idiots were taking this hill as fast as 40 miles an hour. When I hit it I was only doing about 20, so we saw people whose cars did full 180 turns, even a few 270s as they tried to stop/turn/whatever. Moral of the story, this being a 1 lane on each side road, my car was still in the danger zone if anyone else lost all control. So we ran back up the hill to try not to get hit. Its 18 degrees out, by the way. Took me an hour to get a tow truck out there, an hour outside standing there watching people keep flying down the hill and sinlently hoping one would hit my car so it'd be on their insurance. No such luck, hello $500 deductible. Thankfully a police officer showed up with road flares and was able to guide a bus down that would have just gone down as fast as it normally does. Unfortunately that also means accident report, and that leaves me liable for that stupid sapling I beat up if the management of the property decides to be mean to a poor college student.

Oh, and the best part. I turned 21 at midnight. So I busted my car 2 hours before I was supposed to be in a bar with a coupla friends "celebrating". The really sad thing: Between a web contract I've got now, and my money to go out somewhere nice for my birthday I MIGHT be able to break even with regards to the deductible.

*Mutter* Wish I was a pirate and could just plunder me a new car...

Leave a comment with what you think happened. Best/finniest story will be featured here. And yes, that is my car.

Sorry, that was the best title I could think of for this post, and sorry, this'll be one of my more personal posts (though relevant to society as a whole). This isn't a dig at relationships, though it would make a good title for that as well, but a post about friendship, what it means to me, to society, and what it SHOULD mean.

To start with, I'll identify the problem. The issue here is that the word "friend" has lost all meaning in our society. Look at a few common applications.

• AIM - "Buddy" or "Friend" list... these get huge, especially those of college freshman girls (I shudder to remember the days of cleaning their systems... curse the dorms!) and are typically people you seldom talk to, sometimes go out of your way to avoid.
• Online games (Think MMOs) - These all have "Friends" lists, which are almost always people you haven't met, and will never meet online.
• Social Communities (MySpace, Facebook... etc) - Through personal studies I can tell you random friend invitations get about a 50% acceptance. Especially among college freshmen. Even the school you go to barely affects this.
• Blogs - Most blogs let you have a "friends" list which will typically have more real-life friends than not, but it is still easy to find random groups and people in friends lists.

Read More »

Well, I've decided to show you my ugly desktop, mainly because I don't want to muck around in my xorg.conf any more. You'll note the top and bottom bars on the left side aren't on the top and bottom of the screen, this is because TwinView makes the height of the whole screen the largest height, and just tells the smaller monitor it's using a smaller bit. So, yea, I lose about 400 pixels off my left monitor, but I'll survive. Also, I'm being really lazy right now, so the big screen is my distractions, while only the small one is work. When I'm actually coding seriously those flop so i can get more lines on one screen.

No, before you ask, I don't know the laws on online gambling, so before you take this too literally, there is NO money at stake (that I'll mention, of course). However, we have a unique situation in front of us. As such, I think I might start a wee bit of a betting pool, official prize being "props".

What is this unique situation that would get me so excited? Well, this semester I have four classes, back to back (to back to back) on Tuesday / Thursday. These are my only classes (yes, you heard me, 4 day weekends the entire semester... I could do such crazy things as drive 530 miles to visit people every weekend if they so desired) and all that are busy work require attendance. The other one is Compilers which I won't be missing for the world. To get the full implications as it dawns on you, I've never really attended class. My first semester of college just the classes I skipped on a regular basis added up to over 220 hours of class time. My estimate was I missed over 250. My grades? Two A+'s, two A's and one A-. That was by far my worst semester, but even after I got better a 50% attendance is darn good for me. (GPA to date: 3.7ish).

So, this unique opportunity is that I might ATTEND EVERY CLASS THIS SEMESTER. It is not THAT far from possible. To that end, I'm starting a betting pool. I'll offer 2:1 odds that I skip at least one class. Meaning, while I'm betting I'll have my butt in the seat every day of every class, I realize it seems far fetched, therefore if you bet two "props" that I'll be there, and I don't skip, you win two more in addition to your bet. I'm betting props because if I do this, I'm giving myself mad props for being a "good student" for a semester.

So, leave a comment with your bet!

Well, I'm sick. So what you ask? I'm not really digging for sympathy, and (as the people who try to help me find out) really just prefer to be left alone to let my body fight it. However, something just made me think that calling a computer virus a virus is very, very good naming. A biological virus that makes you sick, and a computer virus have much of the same characteristics.

First off, I'm slow. Ever since yesterday I haven't wanted to do anything. Even on a computer, I have no drive to program and that's minimal (physical) effort. my brain just wants to do nothing. For a computer, the virus ties up your CPUs time (depending on the type) and slows things down. Get more than one in there, and you now have a brick of a machine.

I'm also (if my diagnosis is correct) probably contagious. I can spread my disease to other humans of roughly the same type within a certain radius and by certain vectors. This is exactly the same as computer virii. They spread via some vector (email, ip scanning, whatever) to other computers of roughly the same type. Just as some people from foreign countries have immunities to certain attacks, so too does certain operating systems. A worm bred for Windows won't infect my Linux machine, in the same way that a virus attacking a machine with Apache's server installed won't affect IIS.

Then, each disease has different symptoms. Mine include being sore and having a headache. Computer virii have different symptoms as well which are side effects of whatever the virus is doing. Some may simply slow the computer down. Others will delete files, or lock certain menus.If I know a certain virus well, and see a computer displays its symptoms I can guess its my old friend MyDoom.

Virii are killed through certain medications. In humans, that's obvious, in computers those medications take the form of anti-virus softwware. It knows what files to delete to kill a virus, or what process must be taken to clean the system. Computers can also be immunized like humans by locking certain files that can expect infection by certain virii. This paragraph sucks because I'm about out of steam and already finished the post.

Finally, every virus behaves differently. Rather: It is not guarenteed that every virus will be the same. Each human disease does soemthing different. Some feed off brain tissue, others just live on your skin. In the same way, each computer virus does something different. Some delete files at random on certain days. Some watch what keys you type. Others are just broken and do nothing. The motivation of the virus is what determines its behavior.

To give an example of how varied computer virii are, here's a link to a nice list of many different types.

Well... big news... or not. I'm transfering domain registrars from Spry.com to dreamhost.com. Dreamhost is the owner of the server this is on, and amazing. Spry sold my domain to a reseller and I couldn't find out who my original registrar was... very annoying.

Also, apparently spry has a completely seperate domain (mywebpayments) that I have to login to to approve the transfer, and they didn't tell me that. I had to dig back into my email archives from last november to find that little tidbit out.

Moral of the story, I'm switching registrars. I'm also thinking of getting an actual hosting plan with them instead of bumming off of one cool smart guy. This would be if I put up a site on threeplanetssoftware.com... which once I have time I'll come up with.

Oh, and I've added Google Adsense to this site. Its on the side bar under 'Affiliates'. Right now I haven't been spidered to search for words to trigger off of yet (1 am on Sept. 20th) so it's just a blank box very slightly differently colored than the background. I'd kind of like to see what happens with it.

Tomorrow, July 5th, I shall be leaving for a month to study Arabic in Tunisia. This is a country in North Africa, and yes, I have had people actually ask me what/who it was. I have about three articles I'm working on currently, but right now am too busy to finalize any of them, sorry. I hope to post once I get back, as well as come up with some interesting food(s) for thought on the plane trip. I tell ya, nothing's weirder then being 20 and preparing a will, and power of attorney in case someone decides to blow up a few westerners to make a statement for 'peace'.

Well, 'tis Spring Break time 'round here. Most people think three things: alcohol, sun, and girls. I ignored two of the three, and went up north to visit my Grandma. My thinking was: food, sleep, and more food. I only got two of the three... but I digress.

It started, like most of my days, with a tech call. A family in Northern Indiana knew of my computer prowess, and had their son, my friend, ask me to come up and fix their computer. I agreed, once I figured out my plans, and spent the first night (Friday) checking that out. 'Twas a busted monitor. Once I got the mother to buy a new one, it amazed her that her "dead" computer worked again! Thankfully, since she didn't ever know about firewalls or virus protection, she counted everything on the hard drive as lost, and I was able to reformat the whole thing, and load it up with my usual suspects, zone alarm, et al.

Well, once I finished that chore, I pished on to Chicago, to visit malap. Now, I think it should be mentioned here how weird it is when you know someone from online, in this case, Walraven, as opposed to meeting them in person. It feels more natural to call them by their handle, as opposed to their real name. Interesting problem. Anyways, I spent the night with him*, had some excellant food (apparently real geeks cook... they also "instantiate the fish"), and went to an awesome show.

If you're ever in new York of Chicago, go see Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. It is *well* worth the $8-$13 you pay to get in. Why the variable cost? In true geek fasion you roll a d6 (that's a six sided die) and add the result to $7 to get the cost to get in. Since I always roll low on Leadership tests, though the Emperor's Finest never needs to, I paid $8. They (try to) do 30 plays in 60 minutes. If they don't finish, they don't finish. Every week they change 2d6 (think about how I described it before, and figure out what that means) plays, writing them from scratch. These plays are anything they want. many were funny, some were sad, others just... serious. All very high quality, though if you're conservative... you might not enjoy the serious ones. However, to watch a bunch of people doing flips in their underwear and making pudding... well worth it.

I awoke the next morning to my Grandma calling and telling me a snowstorm was expected, I better get on the road. So I did. I got in to her place about three hours before the snow started, and we got 6 inches that night. I got some good pictures, as we haven't really gotten snow here at school, at least, not decent accumulation, in a long time. I'll upload them sometime later. Spent three days with Grandma, got me some nice food and sleep. Then, Tuesday, they predicted more snow on Thursdy. I figured, no biggie, I'll go home Friday. Wednesday they upgraded accumulation from "slush" to "heavy 4-7 inches". I decided to get out of town before that happened, and left that morning for home. I stopped again in Chicago, and let me tell you, I hate driving in that city. It sucks. DC may be rated higher for bad traffic, but Chicago is way more annoying. So, I made it home in about 12 hours, of which I was driving about 10. So, not too bad. Trip was 650 miles.

Now, I am being confronted by the bulk of Ubuntu's stupid decisions. Such as not giving me the same header files as the kernal was compiled with. And making a "nice" seperate network interfaces GUI, when other distros actually have one that works, that for some odd reason requires a timeout for every change, as well as takes 45 seconds (no lie) to rewrite the routing tables. To put that in perspective, I can do all of the above with command line instructions in about 45 seconds. There's absolutely no wait time between hitting enter, and having the command execute. How it takes so long is beyond me. Also, this "handy" GUI doesn't recognize wifi so well, and often times will just clear the routing table. What... a... pain...

But, I've got a router to play with. Brand new Asus WL-500G Deluxe. The thing is sweet. It comes with two USB ports, and using the firmware included, its real easy to setup a wireless webcam, or wireless print server. However, putting a version of Linux on there, OpenWRT, you can do whatever you want with said USB ports. However, its got some.. sercurity problems. Such as OpenWRT not being able to switch the password for the web login. Other then that, once you get past the learning curve, 'tis quite sweet.

That's my break in a nutshell, oh, and a ton of WoW, just 'cause I have the urge. I'll post some screenshots I took a little later as well.

*Edit: Not "with" him, but I used his couch to catch a few hours of sleep.