So, I bet you've noticed I fell out of the whole blogging thing right? I think the biggest problem is that I had a sudden realisation of 2 things... 1.) this world's insane! and 2.) I have nothing of paricular interest or helpfulness to say about the insanity of the world... I just watch and react.

What's going on!? it's been over a week, and I haven't posted. Well I'll put it to you quickly... we have a week at work every semester called "Hell Week" and this one topped all others. mainly because that worm leaked in and we had to put it out because that many machines tftp'ing our main router brings it down... so yes, our work was up and down with internet connectivity... plus, we got 200+ new computers... which means we had to put those 200+ in place, and take the 200+ that were already there and either excess them, or cascade them... suckage... major suckage. my experimental asthma treatment is in the phase where it feels worse before it'll feel better. I worked all week extra hours, and then saturday for extra hours... I don't get overtime, because my boss doesn't budget for it... we get comp time... so whatever extra hours we work, we get to take those hours off later... of course, me being me, I argued that since overtime is time and a half, comp-time should be that way as well... so if we stay 4 hours extra, we should get to take 6 hours off... if we stay 6 hours extra we should get 9 hours off.. ect... That didn't go over very well. So after talking to berger, I decided to pull out my airbrush... only problem is that this brass fitting that used to connect the hose to the compressor is missing... I can't find it anywhere. it looks like a little brass hat. I'm hoping I can go to the local hobby shop and find an airbrush hose... my airbrush is a $180 Aztec airbrush, dual action... 4 different size nozzles... it's a real nice piece of equipment.

I'm going to get going before Julie wakes up and scares me half to death... my computer has me with my back to the door, so whenever Julie walks in it scares the shit out of me... I look back and see this silhouette of EVILNESS, becaue my brain sees scary things before the good ones... it's wierd that way, this is why I'll NEVER own a handgun, I'd be the jumpy one to shoot someone on accident. well, later all!

So I watched a rousing game of Chronopia, it seems pretty cool. I'd like to play it for fun with my friends, so I ordered a few of the Firstborn, so I can play... or at least have cool miniatures to paint. I dream of a miniature game... but not one where you fight someone... one like DnD, where you can group up with the other players... and then go fight monsters. It would have a GM, who would hide all sorts of things on the board, it would be like an RPG miniature game... that'd be so cool. You could go back to DnD 2nd edition rules to make it easier... I just think it'd be cool. I want to make elaborate landscapes for my miniatures to roam on, like tiles that are individually small, but snap together for a big board. I guess I geeked out there a bit.

So, I'm at work, and I had this message on my phone.. I'm going to name the caller McGruff... so McGruff called, and said he needed those 25 multicast disks by monday to ghost the lab... I said.. hey first off.. I don't have 25 disks... and second... I haven't gotten the new ones to work yet, so just use the old ones. work sucks. I am the lowest paid full time employee in this department, and I have the most to do.. that just isn't right... I don't feel well today, I was thinking of going home. I don't know if Julie would take me or not... I'm not feeling that bad, but I'm just uncomfortable. I do want to go to the LCAS picnic tonight, it's the astronomy club I'm in. It's a pretty cool club, with the exception of the website... it's hideous... it's an embarrassment to me... it's hosted on my server, but it's not in any way done by me... Check it out here Hideous... there's some good info on it though. I need to go to the hardware store for some nuts... my telescope adapter that I made needs nuts, but I can't find the right size, I feel like a useless individual... I bought 3 different size nuts and none fit. And unlike my own nuts, I can't just bang them into something to enflame them. whoa, that was pretty gross.. but what do you expect, it's me.. talking about nuts!

Theft... to steal something that doesn't belong to you... Here's something you may not know... in section 309 of the patriot act, stealing with a computer is considered terrorism. As you may know... the RIAA thinks trading music files is stealing... with a computer... which would mean every college student in America is a terrorist. Fortunately, for right now, trading files is just a copyright infringement... so don't let anyone tell you it's stealing, because that would make you a terrorist! But more recently SCO thinks everyone using Linux Kernel 2.4 or higher has stolen from them... which makes normal everyday citizens... you guessed it... terrorists! I nabbed a copy of conan O Brian's show, with Triumph the dog... technically I stole that... even though there's no way to buy it, and it was transmitted over standard airwaves... I'm a terrorist. Thank you Patirot Act... and thank you representatives for making America such a great place for everyone!

But really.. I'm at work now... and work is going SLOOOOOW. I have tons of shit to do, and it all sucks so I'm putting it off, like a slacker... or something that rhymes with it. But This patriot act crap pissed me off.. again... so here's my blog... on it.. The interesting thing is.. in the Patriot Act itself, are 3 separate references to Section 309... but Section 309 is missing. Call Mulder!

I never got into Java... I always felt it was this wierdly pushed language, that was too constrictive, yet so open... It reminds me of the history of pants... Java is like the codpiece. It opens up some convience but looks really stupid, and it's not THAT convienient. Maybe I just have a problem with ONLY using classes.. I love objects and all, but I kinda liked the straghtforward entry/exit point of C++... and not being able to manage your own memory, that is a little frustrating. So when you think of it.. Java is like only useful for like office apps... like spreadsheets and word processors... if you deal with graphics, you'll notably want to interface directly to the video card in some way, usually through an API like directX or OpenGl. I'm sure java can access an API like directx or opengl, but then it goes against its cross-platform design, so accessing said API's is really an afterthought, and will never be integrated to the level that would make it advantageous to use. In other words, I'm a geek. Thanks, later!

Well, last night I went to the fanciest wedding to end all weddings... The whole wedding put me in a surreal sort of mood. all the way from being told not to bring cameras... which I did NOT listen to... I nabbed some great pictures of my friends.. I'm pretty good at no-flash low light photography, my first SLR had no flash, and the flash socket didn't work... so I got lots of practice. anyway, about the surrealness of it... We had Macaroni and Cheese served in Martini glasses with golden spoons during cocktail hour... they had a guy sauteeing mushrooms... I was able to try a johnny walker and sprite.. black label, it was pretty nice... I love johnny walker whiskey. I own a bottle of johnny walker... red label... blue label is like $220 a bottle... black label is only a little more expensive than red label... I got my red label for $22, black label was like $27.... the order goes.. red, black, gold, blue. red being the cheapest, and blue being the most expensive. gold label is about $70 a bottle... give or take. It was berger that introduced me to johnny, while we were hanging out in a smokey pool hall... he brought over some shots of whiskey, and said, "Try it!" unbelievably it was smooth! I was used to the harsh bite of Jack... but it was smooth. Thanks berger!

Okay back to the surreal wedding... the ceremony was surreal as well... there were about 4 video cameras at random angles, and 3 very untalented photographers snapping away almost nonstop... It was scripted to the point of insanity, I really felt that if either one wanted to back out, none of the wing directors would let them... pure insanity I say. It felt like the set of a TV show I think is the best way of putting it... you know they practised all their lines in rehearsal and now they're delivering them. Her dad paid for most of it I think, he's a doctor of some type... I think. The only descriptive adjectives I heard when people from opposite families were describing their new In-law was... "he/she's great" I kept thinking of Futurama, the episode when Fry was dating Amy Wong, Amy's family basically owns mars, and are filthy rich. So Bender says to Fry, "Looks like you bagged yourself the perfect woman, Amy's rich, I'm sure she has other qualities..." And I couldn't stop thinking about that... or saying it... I was, I think, the most obnoxious person at the wedding... I just felt bad for my friend Foss... he only had $5 to his name, and had to drive around the jam packed city streets for an hour to find a place where he could afford to park... it was $20 to park at the hotel. Julie and I took a limo in... and looking at the home-bound traffic, we're glad we did! A limo was still $100 cheaper than staying at that hotel...

Then there was the illogical crying of the bride's sister during her speech... it's your sister... she's been living with this guy for almost a year... damn... the crying, it just made no sense.. I expect parents... and grandparents to cry... not the sister, I expect them to be happy, but not too happy because of the nagging jealousy... maybe my world views are screwed up... yes... in fact, I know they are. The food was good, I liked the way they made the potatoes... it was like, fried mashed potatoes... it was crispy on the outside, and soft inside... It was definitely fancy... I think the fanciest wedding I've ever seen... When I get hitched... I think it will be a midieval theme... all the groom's wedding party will wear their formal jerkins... I don't know if I want inside or outside... but it's gonna be FUN, and not extremely fancy... but definitely fun.

Suicide... an interesting thing. What's more interesting is that it's against the law, like that is some kind of deterrant. So I've been tabulating some statistics... firearm suicides are most likely to suceed. Wrist slitting is one of the least likely. Basically, if you're suicidal, I think you should join an alaskan fishing boat. It's a dangerous job, so being suicidal helps, it pays well, about $15k a season, with 3 fishing seasons a year, and if you're depressed because of people, you'll be far, far away from them... in fact, you'll be far far away, and living in a boat paying no rent, and making lots of cash. Then after a few years of that if you still feel like you killing yourself... use the cash you made from fishing to build an experimental space plane that you plan to test yourself. if it works, you'll have no reason to be depressed... if it doesn't.. problem solved, and other space plane people can learn from your mistakes... either way you've contributed something instead of being a red spot on the rug of your parents house. Well, that's it for today's episode of Caring, with Brent... tune in tomorrow when I regail you with a story of workplace horror!

This bit goes out to a special lady... Miss Jackie. Happy birthday and stuff!

So I was working my ass off at work the other day, and I kept thinking... if aliens took over and forced us to work.. I'd probably have less to do. As I intended again, but forgot again.. to look at mars.. again. The problem here isn't that it won't still be close, but late in the season mars usually goes through some weather system where it will be covered by a dust-storm... so that kinda sucks for me.

So I had the ever exciting Mac vs PC discussion today... I won. It's too easy to bash the Mac back down to what it really is, a glorified calculator that now runs off of PC components. Years ago this myth was started that Macs were better at graphics than PC's were. The Myth centered around graphics hardware. Well it turned out that it was really software, and the Mac did have a pretty good edge on the PC. Later on, most of the companies that wrote for the Mac decided to do PC ports... well, now those companies are rich beyond belief... because of Mac? no.. because of the PC market. Still don't believe it, just check out the size of the software shelf in any computer store... then look at the Mac section... smaller isn't it? So small that Apple had to build their own store chain just to have all 150 software titles in the same place. Well at any rate, the Macs have just upgraded to Geforce 4's while the PC guys have the GeForce FX 5900 ULTRA... oh yeah... graphics are better where mister mac man? I dunno, if I could half my polygon count, maybe we could race. Plus, Macs are ungodly expensive... too expensive. the crap-mac is $999, while a crap-PC is $499... How do you justify that? I dunno... I'm spent, I'm going to nap. At work... and nap.

I was thinking again today... look out! So, I was thinking about a lot of things... like 100 years after we made the first airplane, why are we so non-advanced... why haven't we discovered new and better ways of propulsion? So to my actual thoughts... roads are ugly, and environmentally damaging. We have roads that go everywhere, it's almost impossibly to find a place without a road. And locally they are still spending hundreds of millions of dollars maintaining and making new ones. Now if you've never heard of the SkyCar maybe you should. This is a single personal aircraft, gets 27 mpg, and travels at 350mph, and is capable of VTOL (vertical take off and landing), plus it's equipped with 2 fuselage chutes with a spreader gun... that means that even critical engine failures at low altitudes will be non-fatal. So why hasn't this cool invention made it further? well.. Once this is released it will be half a million dollars per unit. Once it goes into mass production, it'll cost about $75,000 per unit, less than a hummer. At that point, every cab company will have more than one, every upper-middle class household will have one, and the roads will begin to get less congested. later, as more companies make these sky-vehicles, more and more people will have them, until the roads will become a wasteway of asphalt, forgotton... broken... a home for illegal street racing. Then I realised why this hasn't happened... the airlines. They have a large legislative lobby... the loss of these contsituates would most likely be felt by our corrupt elected officials, so the skycar will probably be held under red tape for a few decades. Kinda like Marijuana... I'm convinced that the only reason it's not legal is because the tobacco companies didn't grow it and market it... it's been studied in several areas, and they test out about the same.. except marijuana contains THC instead of niccotine, and ciggarettes have niccotine instead of THC.. I think laws are fine in a society, but too many unneccessary laws turn normal people into criminals. How many of you curse aloud? if you do, then you could be imprisioned in Michigan for 2+ years. I could say shit all day, and it won't hurt a fucking thing, but if I say shit out loud in michigan and some fucking freak calls the cops, I'm a criminal. However there are some laws that benefit everyone... in Gurnee Illinois it's illegal for a woman who weighs more than 200 pounds to ride a horse while wearing shorts... now that's a law EVERYONE can agree with. Where was I going.. hell I don't know. Julie's talking to me about stocks... I'm trying to listen and remember where I was going... but I can't... who am I.. crap... I need a break... later guys.

So mars is supposed to be closer now... but I still can't stay up late enough to see it... oh, and it's fucking raining every evening... I hate sunny days, and love clear nights, but I usually get clear sunny days and cloudy nights... it's like I'm cursed, or hexed. So I have these friends that are hosting a "painting party" I view it as a way of pimping out free labor... well she said "drinks and snacks. " What kind of way is that to motivate people? It's not! dammit, you need to say "Beer and Pizza" or something to that effect... or "Beer and grilled food" something that doesn't sound like sprite and chips... that's all. I'm sure my dwindling readers will have plenty to say. all I can say guys is.. I'm sorry, I went on vacation, I thought I'd have internet access... I was wrong... I had all these cool updates planned too, but they were all shot to hell. forgive me?

Heya, take two!
Like I said, we were at gencon last week... Julie, Jackie, Bergertime, Ocean, Cassie and myself. We had some fun... we had some not fun... we caused a little trouble and made a little profit. Okay, starting with the cool stuff.. we all hung out and played many games together including "settlers of catan" and "Scrabble" as well as a rousing game of "Upwords" which I don't recommend anyone try. where was I? oh yeah.. so we all had some fun.. we did True Dungeon which I was a little upset at because I died only 45 minutes in, and had to wait over an hour for the next member of our group to die. I am truely a stupid rogue. Anyway, I think this part is truely damning me as an ultra-geek... I'm good with computers.. I like DnD... Star Trek even... wheew... I can't wait to see the cool names I get called at the gym! Okay... causing trouble... we went out for italian food in Indianapolis... and the town was truely not ready for a convention of such magnitude... it took a good half hour to get a seat, which wasn't bad at all... but we were in a room with a bunch of loud bachelorette party middleaged bitches. So we sat for about an hour and a half through ear shattering laughter non-stop... completely non-stop. So finally after brief brainstorming we decided to make a toast to "Shutting the fuck up." well when this toast was declared the entire room that we were in cheered.. except the bachelorette party that stood stunned for exactly 2 seconds... and went right back to doing what they do. Well, there was a problem in the kitchen and our food took another 2 hours to come... but we got half of it free, and 2 desserts... but the pain from the bitches remains... I think they caused permanent ear damage... shrilly bitches they were. ah.. then there was our money making... Gencon was so disorganized that Berger had to wait in line for 3 hours for generic tickets... so we started brainstorming when we met up with him, and we decided to buy extra tickets... and try to sell them at a higher price. So we bought like 120 tickets at $1.50ea. Then went to the middle of the line, and sold about half for $2.50ea... and people were thanking us for selling them.. it got them out of line fast, and onto gaming, and we got paid for the wait. ah... life is funny sometimes. well, that's my update, I hope it was as entertaining as something entertaining.

Heya guys, sorry it took so long for an update. We stayed at a hotel that advertised "Internet Access" and when we got there, it was $11 a night to use WebTV... that bites... that bites the big one. So I didn't update. I bought an adapter for my cell phone, but I don't think any updating was going to happen over 14.4kbps cellular Inet. Anyway, the trip was pretty cool, everyone went through wide emotional ranges... me too. yeah I know you're thinking, "what? brent moody? never!" But really, I had some cancelled events at gencon, and some things weren't as cool as I wanted them to be... but all in all it was a good time, with good people. I came back to the soup today. work abounds... everywhere. I'm rushing to type this because I have to go to lunch then tear down 25 computers and bring them to the junk hall. but it's kinda nice to be back. I was sorta dreading work... but really it's good to see everyone here again. I hope you didn't miss me too much, I'll come back later with some good rants. Later all.

So I had never changed the transmission fluid in my Truck before... it has 50,000 miles on it... so today while getting an oil change the cool guy doing it said in broken english, "Your transmission fluid is black, it should be pink, you should have it changed.. we can change it." I said okay... well alter they found out that I had a hole in my exhaust and they plugged it up with a towel.. the car caught the towel on fire... they sealed the hole up with a plate and some liquid gasket... come to the bill... $230. They count a 4x4 as 2 transmissions... but they did a fine job, and I liked the nice hispanic fellow who talked at me a lot. There was this extraordinarily fat couple in there too.. all the fat lady did was bitch. bitch bitch bitch... you think my bitching is bad? you should have heard hers... "it's been more than 10 minutes.. it says 10 minute oil changes, we should just leave" yeah lady.. just leave.. while they're checking all your fluids.. the dipshits had a broken dipstick, and tried to accuse them of breaking it... I wanted to punch a small hole in that fat sack of shit so it would oooze out then I could light the fat on fire... or make soap. Was I a little harsh there? yeah, I was... sorry if you were offended... I'm pretty overweight myself... but I'm excersising more, and eating much less... and I bitch less in real life than I do online... actually I more rant about things like the RIAA, and America's political stances... they're bastards. wait, where was I going now? oh yeah, I have to go to my parent's work in the morning to finish up my mom's computer that I royally screwed up, because I'm a suck-ass computer tech. I can fix anything that's not screwed up, and everyone's crap is waay too screwed up to fix by the time I get to it. Well, I'm gonna prepare for my upcoming vacation to GenCon!!! which I have been looking forward to all year. aah, vacations rock. this one doubly so becasue julie will be there, all hail the hypnotoad... BZZZZZZZZZZZ. later all!

Well, I've screwed everything up this weekend... go me! I didn't get anything accompished in a personal/creative sense... and everything I did got phucked up. My parent's computer? yeah, I screwed that up good... well it wasn't entirely my fault there were a few things that didn't work the way they advertised it to. first the windows 2000 upgrade... didn't work like it was supposed to. and second, my mom's accounting software installs BDE on it.. which is a borland product for database administration... why make a separate program for doing something windows already does? don't ask me, I'm just the bum who found out that this one thing doesn't work with windows 2000 but it works with windows 98.. which btw is more than 2 years unsupported by Microsoft now. But anyway, I did screw it up good. Not to mention the RIAA has been pissing me off more and more. apparantly they're serving subpoenas at the rate of 75 a day on US citizens for the crime of sharing the music they love. What rat bastards! Do you know how much they want per infringed song? no I'll bet you don't know what sharing one song with your friend is worth to the RIAA... well here it is... they want $150,000 PER SONG! Now congress was deep in thought friday contemplating this, and they think each song is really worth 10 songs, but each song is only worth $250... but since each song is really worth 10 songs, each song costs $2500. Now, I don't use software that shares MP3's but I have a HUGE collection... every CD I've ever bought is backed up to MP3. soon that will probably be illegal too, as according to the millenium copyright act that disabling copy protection methods is illegal... shit why do we pay any money for CD's at all if the usage on them is going to be so extremely limited. with Sony and their Key2audio crap making Ripping impossible without circumventing it... might I add you only need a ruler and a permanent marker to disable it, but this is denying you the right to acceptable use as outlined in the 1970's copyright act. Not only that, but the RIAA has beaten Verizon into the ground and got a court order for them to defy their privacy agreement with their clients and reveal the names of the clients who downloaded music that they liked. The RIAA is paying off congressmen of course with this many fans you can imagine that the RIAA is just pissed off and embarassed because they can't keep their Website from being defaced so it's just down most of the time. They also having a new NARC website in case anyone thinks someone pirated something... god forbid that... sharing music is being taken more seriously than weapons of mass destruction! I can see it now... you're holled up in an old hotel room, helicopters and bright lights heard and seen through the windows.. the voice comes in "come out with your hands up!" And you shout "Try and get me coppers, I have the whole REO speedwagon collection and I'm on a UPS powered wireless internet connection.. try and stop me!!!" just then SWAT breaks through the glass and doors simultaneously putting several bullets in your head just as you would expect a rogue para-military group to do... where was I? oh yeah! Narc on your friends, c'mon everyone's doing it! Narc on me why don't you!? I have 1 stratovarius song that I don't own the CD to... well.. I paid for the CD, but it's an import and taking forever to get here.. if it makes anyone feel better I ordered that CD because I liked the one song I downloaded online. Meanwhile congress is mulling about prison terms for Kazaa users, this may explain why last year the RIAA was given INTERNET VILLIAN AWARD!. Now I don't mean to scare you, but the RIAA isn't evil in itself.. if SOMEONE managed to KILL every single one of THEM ALL... some other group would manage to take their place as incessant cyber terrorists intending to bend the already scewed legal system into making ORDINARY PEOPLE into criminals. ugg.. I've ranted too long.. I need a drink, god damn. later all.

So I'm still working on that video capture machine that I was working on yesterday. Apparantly pinnacle doesn't like to maintain a fast internet connection because it's going to take an hour just to download the drivers... granted the drivers are 374MB... I cleaned my office last night, so that I could set my keyboard up again. it's been so long I think I'll have to vacuum out the MIDI plugs. MIDI has to be one of the coolest things invented... that and Mountain Dew. So anyway, I was setting up my stuff after cleaning the crap outta my office, and now I have room for things and stuff... it's amazing. I'm the biggest mess I know... I can't organize worth a crap. I do try, but nothing works, my brain fires too oddly and forces me to leave everything where I can see it. as you know... that's not good... my computer's desktop constantly gets filled with stuff, then I just pack it into a folder called "old desktop" when I get sick of looking at it. Well, I have to get back down to the room that I was working on... it's been almost an hour... I just got off the phone with Jordan so that's what ate up my hour... I wsa supposed to go to a bachelor party for a friend, but I'm too busy to make it to one of those, and since he's with someone he's not really a bachelor... it's just wierd to me... bachelor parties, it's like you're celebrating something that's fake, because you're not a bachelor in these days if you have a girlfriend (or boyfriend) you live with them often, and when you live with someone, dammit, that means you're not a bachelor... Even if youlive alone, but see these people everyday, you're not a bachelor. The institution of love has gotton beaten down lately. But in all honesty I'm busy saturday helping a different friend move, and then I have some PC work to do for my parents, since I'll be on vacation next week who knows what will happen, so I have to get it done. allright, I'm outta here for now, I'll post more crap when I get to the room.

Waiting for Windows to format a computer... it seems like it's been forever... wait, it has been forever. If I died, but my spirit goes on, would I realise that I'm dead? Would everyone else be alive, or would everyone else I interact with be spirits of other dead people. I guess the question is this, is the plane of existance I'm living in now real, or was I in a real plane before, and now it's not. and if so, are there places where my ethereal plane cross with the real plane? So I'm in this lab, and the class is over, but people still come pouring in to use the computers, likely for no-good I might add. The only reason I'm here is to fix a computer's config. I should have shut the door, it locks, and I have a key, but the students don't. Aha! I have a great idea, I'm just going to play Stratovarius very loudly... I choose... "Anthem of the World" yeah, that song rocks! downloading... downloading... playing loudly... oh yeah... lol... she asked me to turn it down, to which I responded, "Are you supposed to be here?" to which she said, "I'm a student" to which I said "Who's your instructor, I'll call them" to which she said "I'll be going now." Ah, what a wonderful day for this crap... oh good windows is done formatting and it's now copying files... fun. I should have screened that print that just went through, damn I'm lazy. But I hate it when people use the color printer to print a black and white picture... That color refill is expensive damnit.. even the black ink for the color printer is expensive.

I was practicing my guitar last night, and I kept thinking, wouldn't it be great if I could think of something worthy of recording, and then do it. I have some great recording software called n-track studio by a mad genius named Flavio Antonio http://www.fasoft.com Its only limitation is that you can only record one track at a time, it's pluses is that if you've used pro-tools.. it's not a hog like pro-tools, it'll integrate with other software because it uses standard wavs to record, and all the mixing is done in a separate file for that wav file, and it uses directX plugins.. hell yeah! Did I get too excited there? I do that sometimes. I love creative things, but I seem to be not doing anything... actually it gets me down... I wanted to record songs, but they always sound crappy to me, I'm very VERY hard on myself about everything. I have no portfolios of anything to show for anything that I do... I suck... crap.. I took this from a high to a low... I guess that could mean I'm bi-polar or something...

So I didn't sleep well last night. I'm too old to be afraid of the dark.. but I am. I woke up at like 3:45am looked outside and it was CRYSTAL clear. I could have gone to take a photo shot of Mars... but no... I stayed in my bed... because I was tired? NO, because I was afraid to go downstairs, then outside at 3:45am... I don't know what it is, but something feels particularly evil about the outside between 12:30am and 5:00am... My mom probably conditioned me to be scared at that time. well I've written a crapload... and this was more introspective than my normal global rants... take care all.

America is fascist. Now before you go waving your flags in my face, or emailing me pictures of the holocaust, or whipping out your webster's dictionary hear me out. Fascism can exsist without a dictatorship, all you need is an extreme right wing. Well, believe me, we have them. Fascism is mostly an economic control policy, focusing on free enterprise and business under centralized government control (by the way, that's almost exactly how the webster's definition from 1981 read). Well unless you're blind, you can see our big businesses and our centralized government make us prime candidates for this. Now, you also need extreme nationalism... I've never seen so many american flags go up for us carpet bombing some poor dirt country called afghanistan back into the stone age, when they hadn't even made it out of the stone age to begin with. Or back in 1991 when we did Desert storm... american flags everywhere.. up to that point Iraq was the most advanced nation in the middle east, it had the lowest crime rates, the best educational programs... don't let our sanitized news media fool you, we didn't do anything good there. Everyone cheered at the lighting up of AA fire and live explosions on TV... by the end of the first night, we had put in place the means for over 2,000,000 iraqi's to die, 60% of them children under the age of 10 according to an LA Times article. Racism is rampant here... In america everyone hates everyone else for lots of bad reasons. in the '60's you were bad if you were black, in the '70's if you were a woman, in the '80's if you didn't wear ugly colors, in the 90's if you were gay, and now it's a combination of all those things... how are we getting better? eh screw it, me bitching about it isn't going to change a damn thing.. arrg.. I'm gonna do some work.. later all.

Hey all, nothing really happened today. I went to the grocery store.. but mostly it was a boring day. Last night I was out with my telescope, the moon was up, but I was really looking for Mars. It rose at 10:30, but it was behind clouds to the south even after midnight, so I took a few moon pictures. It's a cool time with mars being closer than it's been pretty much in recoded history. If I can nab a picture of it, I will do so.. not a crappy picture either... I hope. If it's not cloudy tonight, I'll try again. So far it looks like it will be fairly not cloudy. I am making arrangements to train to be a pilot. I've dreamed of it most of my life... flying. My biggest problem is that after I get it, I'll want a plane, and those are expensive. Not to insult any pilots, but I don't want a little skyhawk.. especially not for $150,000. If world war 2 military planes could go 400mph, why should current civilian planes only go 175? If you ask me, and I know you haven't, there should be more ducted fan jets. you can get those up to 375.. not amazingly fast, but also not 175. Too bad those guys want half a million bucks for one. I saw the videos, old planes were pipes and cloth, probably cost a whole $75 in parts... if we've advanced so much, why is our pricing structure so out of whack? Well, no one could probably answer that for me... as well.. why am I watching the Panic Room while typing my blog? I don't think anyone could answer that either. Well, I guess that's it for this day's fine adventure, I'll work on a crappy website to show off my crappy astrophotographs so I can link to them soon. Later!

Time for more pleasant conversations, I had a ton of fun with bergertime, ocean, cassie, jackie and julie yesterday. Julie and I went to yuppie town, this high priced trendy area near lake zurich. Then we went to bergertime, ocean and jackie's place and played not one, but two rousing games of scrabble before going to see "Pirates of the caribbean" That movie made me want to be a pirate. Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom are so dreamy... honestly they make a great screen presence together, Depp is quite the versatile actor, he goes from serious to near goofy roles very seamlessly, I was a big fan of "Sleepy Hollow." Keira Knightley was also nice to see in the film. I think the last time anyone remembers her from was Star Wars Episode 1, she played Queen Amidala's decoy, and the queen herself many times. It was a real fun movie, the only thing I didn't like was the ending.. if you didn't see it, discuss it with me in the comments section after you have. (I don't like to spoil movies for people). It was VERY violent for a disney picture though, I was happy to see that, I was afraid the disney logo would kill a good film, it didn't, I liked it. Try to make a sentance run-on more than that last one, my english teacher would have failed me for not knowing any gooder. End Transmission

So there I was at work, thinking there was nothing to do... well that was incorrect, our non-exsistant helpdesk operator decided it would be a great day last night to take off. Well, maybe I should explain more, this "helpdesk operator" thinks it's okay to take classes in Wisconsin in the middle of the afternoon, she's gone everyday from 11:30am to 4:30pm... now the kicker, in the summer we get a day off if we work 9 hour days.. well she opted for that plan, so somehow between 7:00am and 8pm (those are our functional hours) she works 9 hours.. well as far as I can count... you can only put in 8 hours in that amount of time. Now, I'm not her boss, and I'm not an hour monger, the only reason I care is becasue everyday she complains about another girl she works with not putting in her hours. Now her boss and my boss are the same person, so she'll always tell me "the boss said (insert random exaggerated lie here)" So whenever I go ask the boss if he said some rediculous thing, he slaps his hands on his face and says in a low frustrated voice, "arrg that isn't what I said!" So now I just don't bring it up to him, he's a good guy and doesn't need me to bring up this helpdesk lady's incompitence any more than he already hears it. So now that you know she can't possibly put in all her time when she's here what do you think she does? She talks. Her job is to answer the phones and how often does that happen!? never! even her personal calls get picked up by the lab aids.

Okay, so there I was thinking I had nothing to do, when the lab aids come in and tell me the main website is down. so I checked it, it's fine. wierd to get a call like that from someone who's usually good about that stuff. Well, since the helpdesk lady assumed she put in so much extra time during the week, she took Thursday evening off, and automatically gets fridays off. So these lab aids were stockpiling help calls on their desk because they didn't know what to do. They couldn't enter them into the computer system, and we have only 2 techs, me and this other guy. The other guys does NOTHING all day. Well, he reads fark.com, and plays quake 3. Whenever the lab aids tell him there's a problem, he immediately yells, "AARRGHH, I JUST WALKED IN THE DOOR AND I'M ASSAULTED WITH WORK,GOD!!!" So the result is that the lab aids are afraid to approach anyone with problems. Well that does me a hell of a lot of good being the only one there on fridays. So the real problem is that one of our other important webservers went down, hard. We lost a hard drive in a proprietary Linux box. So needless to say, none of us could do anything about it, so I made a 10 minute replacement server, informing everyeone that the main server had problems. The guy who could take care of it, was off that day, and completely unreachable. He's not going to be happy when he gets his emails... I hope he can get the drive to work again. Well at any rate, that's my work rant.. I normally don't work rant, but it's been getting increasingly frustrating. Thanks for reading this is you're still here!

I thought I'd take this time to post about why never to use Pep Boys for anything. Well, now that I've wrote it, I'm sure there'll be a freaky ad at the top for pep boys. In November my Girlfriend and I went down to Atlanta for a kickass concert called ProgPower. it's a gathering of rare prog metal bands, last year was remarkable, because they had Blind Guardian, and Edguy, and Gamma Ray first time in America. So we went there. We stayed in a crappy hotel dressed up like a nice one, the holiday inn capitol plaza... never go there. We switched 2 nights in to another place. Well, we had a pretty good time checking out Atlanta, then we went to leave, that morning we took our tour of the CNN building, and as we were pulling out of the parking lot.. BAM, my front left wheel fell down, with the truck landing on top of it. Then it immediately started to rain. Well it got towed to a Pep Boys, then it took them 2 days just to wheel it in their garage. They diagnosed it with bad ball joints, and attempted to TRY to order new ones. Being an auto parts store I'd think they'd have something like ball joints, but this is not the case. it took a half a week to get the new parts in, and when it came out, the truck was still misaligned, and I was $1000 in the hole. that sucked... but the trip was fun.. but don't use pep boys, even the one's here screw you... don't get me started on my brake job BEFORE we went to Atlanta that while they were doing it, should have seen worn Ball joints... sigh.

Oh, Did I mention that Sony is the most EVIL corporation in the world? yes, more evil than AOL and Microsoft. I'm simply responding to those Sony Ads at the top of my page that seem to imply that you should buy something from Sony... you shouldn't. They're evil, and out to screw you.

Well, I updated the old blog. But since only 2 people in the world read it, I am wondering why I did it at all. oh well, I'm gonna go do something useful like.. work.

Heya guys,
Well, I'll get straight to the point. The RIAA is evil, everyone knows it. People think Microsoft is evil... well here's news for you, microsoft hasn't yet gone after a consumer for any licensing issues. Of course, they make that back organizing the buisiness software alliance which is really just a team of lawyers that go after buisnesses for disregarding those forgettable EULA agreements. So back to my point. Since EVERYONE knows the RIAA isn't looking after anyone's well being but they're own... how come a world in discord hasn't stopped buying records? Why haven't the artists wised up and started to deliver their content themselves? I mean, there has to be a way to circuimvent the RIAA... if there's not, that's basically saying old men and their money control the world. senile geriatric control, like depends. Now that's getting messy.

I saw this guy talking on TV the other day. He said that for only $59.95 I could be on my way to financial independence. That my success would be guaranteed. To them, guaranteed means they'll give you your $59.95 back after they get about $1000 of work from you. To me guaranteed means if I'm not financially independent by the time I'm done, they owe me a couple hundred grand. Semantics are hard to get past sometimes. Marketing reps are the most destructive people in the world. They took JavaScript and changed it from a cool web tool and changed it into a pop-up making monster. Marketers always want you to have to opt-out of stuff... instead of opt-in. My work has a marketing department... they're called Public Relations. They are constantly thinking up the most invasive ways of forcing their information on their clients. I always thought back in time.. to try to think of who the first marketers were. A lot is lost in history, but I'll bet the lost paintings on the sides of the pyramids were just huge alcoholic beverage ads. If they found a better way to preserve their papyrus I'm sure you'd see tons of ancient egyptions smut too. People suck.. except you... well.. only if you agree with me and read this far... or you're chris or jackie.

Again and again I've realised that the root of all evil is the Sony Corporation. Have you heard of Key2Audio? If you haven't... chances are you haven't seen it yet. It's a method of copy-protecting a music CD... by disabling its ability to be read on a PC or Macintosh. A certain configuration of Macintosh (one without a manual CD-release) has caused many people to have to send their Mac in to be dissassembled to remove the CD, all because of a Key2Audio protected Celine Dion CD. Only Sony would push their MiniDisc... which requires a PC with a CD-writer to "rip" songs and carry them with you... and simultaneously prevent CD's from being read by the device required to use the minidisc. Sony is evil. People should avoid buying things from them at all cost. Their equipment is inferior, more expensive and usually void of features unless you buy the most expensive model. So I'm going to start dedicating an entire site to sony... details to come!

The whole world can sleep safer tonight knowing that Martha Stewart's rampage of selling off a few shares of crap stock at almost too-perfect timing has been stopped. I gasped in horror the day I found out about it... I thought... imagine all the poor people's family's! The information from the day just came hurling at me.. it was happening too fast. 1...2... 300... 600... 15000, 30000, $45000 she ended up making... forty-five thousand dollars. I felt a personal need to persue this unthinkable crime to the end.
"How could this happen?", I kept thinking. I was beside myself, I just kept thinking that I could have stopped it... I saw her pots attractively prices at the K-mart... I could have said no. But I was an enabler. It has all come to a pass now, her corporate terrorism will never be able to hurt another innocent person again! We went after Osama... he got away... we went after Saddam... he got away... but Martha.. we caught her! the 3rd most dangerous person in the world. I like to call her "'Chemical' Martha Stewart". I printed a deck of cards, the Queens all had her face on them and handed them out to authorities, and warned them that she may be disguised. i hear the capture was rough... I believe it took a couple phone calls... maybe a letter in the mail... it could have also happened electronically. we may never know the details of the capture of 'Chemical' Martha Stewart, but I'll sleep better at night knowing I'm safe from her inside trades.

So I was watching the news tonight, and while watching I could only think.. damn people are stupid. They decided to do an extra long section on the Dixie Chicks concert. About how they're accepted again after doing the most horrible thing in the world... saying George Bush is bad! Well despite his overwhealming symmetries to satan I have concluded he is just a minor demon put upon the earth to cause war, famine and build walls. Oh yeah, back to my point about pepole being stupid. So The news reporters talked to concert goers.. they found 2 girls wearing "I Love George Bush" T-shirts... really what kind of moron wears that in the first place... so they said they forgave the group for their political views... and were happy that they played Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" over the PA as their opener for the concert. I thought to myself immediately... you morons, they stuck it to you again! If you think about it... "Born in the USA" is an entire song ragging on America. It's about a guy, who runs into trouble, gets sent off to vietnam, comes back and can't get a job and ends up in and out of jail... but he was born in the usa. It makes being born in the usa the consolation prize for a suck-ass life. The news even reported the playing of the song as a positive thing. Some people really can't hear anything except the chorus. Which is okay, because the best thing I got out of the spice girls was the word ZiggaZiggaahh. Okay.. have a wonderful evening, and I will try to have something intelligent again soon.. that doesn't mean it will happen.. I have a soft human brain, give me a break!

Been awhile, I never update. Logs take thoughts.. I have none. Sometimes I do.. nope, there they went again. I gotta take over the Terran base! ARRG Planetside stuck in my head. I can't get it out. I wake up in the middle of the night screaming INCOMING MAX'S!!! Because really, all you need to do is see them then you're dead. Rockets everywhere. I'm usually a good pilot in games, but flying sucks in this game. I'm a good pilot because I'm good at missing the ground.. in planetside the vehicles hover all by themselves, so there's no need for flying. I'm out of thoughts already. Blogs suck when there's nothing going on upstairs in the ole head. yup... pretty empty in there. Oh, I just thought of the cooooolest thing...

Here we go, my little rant for the day. Asthma sucks. I'd like to be able to breathe. That's what happens, you get a set of lungs then they don't work properly, and you're just out of your warranty period. I'd get a set of new lungs but then I have to worry about compatibility with my current system, and how to best get them. Retail lungs aren't very common, and black-market ones probably won't work with the bulletholes/stabwoundes and all. Gills would be kinda neat, but at the same time, it would make my neck a very sensitive area, and to see me dive for a bathtub everytime my air lungs fail would be kinda lame.
Another thing I hate... Dreamweaver... or specifically websites designed with it. Have you ever looked at the crap that it sticks in there? and the way MS word does XML is none too great either... in fact... if you can't code it by hand, it shouldn't be public IMO. It's different if you're using dreamweaver to do some down and dirty POS site that you didn't have time to actually plan (you should clean it up of course)... but you'd be amazed at the number of professional businesses with web presences use it... and use it poorly.
Another thing I despise... when you're helping someone out by hosting their orginazation's website and you inform them that you have the ability to use Multiple Virtual domains so they should just point their Domain at your IP address, and instead they use some crap-assed directory forwarder that makes it leech off of another domain... so not to be specific you make a domain like mydomain.com and then host it at say brent's domain Brentsdomain.com but Brent had stuff in his root so he gave you a folder to temporarily play with like brentsdomain.com/mydomain. well lets say something horrible happens and the old site hosted at mydomain.com was wiped, and you decided to switch it over without discussing it with brent to brent's domain. but instead of pointing at the ip, you point it at the directory underneath brentsdomain.com. This pisses me off... and why might you ask? Because now my logs are all screwed up... I could have kept the files in the same location, and made a new virtual domain for it so it would be a smooth hit to the site PLUS it would give you your own logs for only your domain. The more I get involved in web stuff, the more I realise that A. I can't design a web page worth crap. B. I know more than most people, yet the people in the know-less category don't heed my suggestions and hence keep driving the web one step closer to that intertwinement of crap that has 8 fail-points. C. that this rant is too long. and D. Dreamweaver sucks. well that's all I have today.

On a brighter note today, after I talked to Julie she was better, she said she's stressed and frustrated. She rubbed my chest and made me dinner, and told me to head upstairs. We haven't let the dog upstairs yet, so I usually feel better when I come up here... just not this time. I administered my albuterol via "the machine" and it didn't really seem to help. I feel helpless. I'm happy I have Julie, I love her. Unofficial will: if I die sooner than expected, I want Julie to have everything and distribute some of my more usefull things at her discretion, oh, and I want a viking funeral... in a boat, and all my friends can have bows with flaming arrows so they can try light it on fire to send me to valhalla, were I will feast in the great hall, and with my comrades go out in search of great battles. Preferably against Stryper, they suck. Did I mention that my health plan sucks?

Today is rather depressing. My asthma seemed better this morning, but since then I've had 5 minor asthma attacks. I can't really be around the dog, or my asthma instantly acts up... I was downstairs for a few minutes and I feel like I'm on number 6 already. Julie seems upset at me for being sick, it's a rather disheartening feeling since I can't help it in any way. I do everything she wants, I went to storage and emptied it out, I'm sure that helped my breathing problems a lot. The tempurature shifted in the last few days from 60s to 30s so that can't be helping either. I pulled my machine up (it's just an air compressor designed to atomize sterile saline and albuterol to get deep into my lungs) for the first time in over two years and I was asked if I really needed it. sigh, but on the bright side, it's not like I HAVE to breathe, right?

Sigh, the puppy we're watching makes my asthma act up, but for some strange reason, I don't have any topical allergic reactions to it... like no itchy eyes, or skin, when I pet it I don't sneeze, it was in my face for hours and my nose was clear. but when I woke up the next morning... I couldn't breathe. I puffed my albuterol inhaler like 8 times already today... I wish stupid things didn't make my lungs close up. asthma sucks. At least while I'm having these problems I'm not around any smokers, smoke makes my lungs hurt even more than they do normally. you people with healthy lungs probably don't know how nice it is to wake up and not have to struggle to get your breaths in. Anyway, the dog is cute, and I can't stop touching it... even if it does make my lungs close.

My mom called today to attempt to squeeze the last bit of life and intelligence out of me. Which sucks because I'm running extremely short on both things right now. I was thinking about going to my doctor, and then realised that the doctors you go see about problems, are really just normal people or in my case, an idiot. I was thinking a lot about dieticians, whose whole life revolves around people looking good, and some of the crap they say is good for you. As far as I can tell, as a species we hardly understand how our bodies work. But at any rate, I take doctor's advices very loosely. I compare them to programmers. normal doctors are like Programmers who use MFC or for the non-microsoft world people, microsoft foundation classes, while good doctors would be like programmers that code all their functions by hand, they have at least some idea of how things work. The elite specialists would be like that wierd guy that sits in the darkest corner of his empty dorm room and pumps out code in assembly. anyway, I just don't think most doctors, MFC programmers, or java programmers have any idea what their doing. I've written a whole 2 programs in my life, and one of them was done using MFC and to tell you the truth... I have no idea how it works!

Got my taxes done yesterday, big refund coming my way. I'm pretty happy about that. Went to hang out with some friends last night, and I learned something important, don't watch the discovery channel at 1:30 in the morning and think you remember what the special was about. I had watched a special on the evolution of the SCUD missile, and must have fallen asleep for 10 minutes or so and woke up when they were talking about the TLAM-D U.S. Cruise missile... I was freaked out at how accurate the SCUDs were because I thought they were talking about the many SCUD variants when they were talking about the TLAM-D. It's frustrating when your brian just doesn't work anymore. At any-rate I've decided to drop my math class because I'm too stupid to pass it. Well, that's enough from me, I'm going to go try to work.

I came in to work this morning. I finally updated a website that I help maintain for me and my friends... I felt bad for putting it off so long. But I talked to the girl who asked me to do it and she's always so nice about things like that. Some incompitent lady just asked me to copy a CD for her as a "backup" it was a whole 6.53MB worth of stuff. that's roughly 1/100th of the total space of a CD or in other words, less than 1% efficient. I have words for things that are less than 1% efficient, but waste management takes care of them all for me. If only they would take humans that are < 1% efficient... ah, but then we'd have no CEO's left. such is life.

Greetings all who read this. I made my blog name so long that it will be a pain to link to. Today's been an interesting day, I talked to a friend about the state of affairs with the country which I have changed the name of to protect its identity, we'll just call it Bushville. Well, in BushVille we're lead by our president to protect his identity I've changed his name to asshole. and now we're bombing everyone beause asshole is trying to take over the world before I can blow it up... and that makes me angry.