Saturday, August 26, 2000

Whoa. I wish I had taken my Dad more seriously when he suggested I check out Virtual High School earlier. It's too late now for me to enroll for the fall semester, and thus far, the courses I'd like to take are full year courses, so I've stopped looking through those for now. Anyhow... there are two classes I'm taking this year in high school, that I'd rather be taking on a higher level. Those two classes are Economics and Physics. I'm taking those two as honors courses, when I'd rather be taking them as AP courses. Of course, the likelyhood of that is unfortunately low, since I don't know how to go about doing so. The school doesn't offer those courses as AP courses, and so... I'm thinking unless I can figure out some way to do this in school... it won't work.

Hmm.

I need to find a way to do more this year.

Alright. What a day. 5 hours at the beach is great. Popham beach (where I just was for 5 hours) is an amazing beach. The waves were good, the weather was perfect, and it was all good.

So anyhow, little kids, wow. I mean it's crazy. The things that set them into temper tantrum mode, the things they just brush off, how some of them totally disregard other's well being or comfort for their own sake in some cases, and care unconditionally about other things. It's crazy. I don't understand them, I don't understand how they can cry as long as they do sometimes (they need air, right?) and they just all around confuse me. Maybe that's why I don't like babysitting, or the concept.

Well... that's it for now. Back to screwing around, maybe I'll watch Young Frankenstein. I'm told it's quite funny, and I've never seen it, but really want to. Hopefully I will.

Ok, now that I've gotten that out of the way, I can do a decent blog.

Having fiddled around with Dreamweaver 3, I find that I am almost totally inept when it comes to designing and creating a website. Furthermore, I now realize it's going to take a bit more time and effort than I had initially planned on to build a new layout for my site. In spite of the fact that I need to wake up at 9:30 tomorrow, I'm not feeling motivated to go to sleep. I've also taken a slight interest in XML, although I really don't know anything about it, it seems quite interesting. I feel quite curious and plan to investigate more, however I unfortunately can't predict if this interest will survive longer than a couple of weeks.

I can't believe this... I really truly want to get out of school at the end of this year if I can. The thing is, in my school... I'll have met all of the graduation requirements except... 1 english credit and one or two arbitrary ones. The english credit will be a humanities class and some other half-year one, and anything else. Problem is, I don't particularly want to stick around for that. And what's worse, is that there is apparently no possible way for me to meet other requirements. So, either I get stuck in high school for another year... taking 1-3 classes, and wasting my time... or I find something else to do, and hopefully, I will. There aren't any more math or science courses I want to/can take after this year, and the english/social studies classes although interesting, aren't... well.... interesting enough I guess.

I hope I can find some way to take AP Physics this year, instead of just Honors Physics, however I fear that this plan may require I find other people with the same interest, which I am worried there won't be.

Well... I think I'm going to finish up my conversation online, and get some sleep.

Friday, August 25, 2000

I have to blog! AAHHH!! I can't leave a day w/o blogging. Hahah.. this is an entry. So there "Doos."

Thursday, August 24, 2000

Main Entry: de·us ex ma·chi·na
Pronunciation: 'dA-&s-"eks-'mä-ki-n&, -'ma-, -"nä; -m&-'shE-n&
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, a god from a machine, translation of Greek theos ek mEchanEs
Date: 1697
1 : a god introduced by means of a crane in ancient Greek and Roman drama to decide the final outcome
2 : a person or thing (as in fiction or drama) that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty

I'll have you know, this was taken directly from the Britannica website online dictionary thing. But still... what a cool phrase, although I doubt I'll be able to use it correctly any time soon...

Today has been a very bad day for blogging. I've got not too much on my mind... I'm just sort of vegetating wondering what to do.

Whoops. Had I not mentioned it, I think both of those songs are by "They Might Be Giants."
The "Fish Heads" Song is so terribly f***ed up.

So is the "Dr. Worm" song, but to a lesser degree.

They call me Dr. Worm... good morning, how are you I'm Dr. Worm, I'm interested in things, I'm not a real doctor... but I am a real worm, I am an actual worm, I live like a worm, I like to play the drums, I'm think I'm getting good, but I can handle criticism, I'll show you what I know, and you can tell me if you think I'm getting better on the drums, I'll leave the front unlocked because I can't hear the doorbell...
That's pretty messed up.

Wednesday, August 23, 2000

I need to put something onilne for today... so if nothing else, this is symbolic of my ever flowing stream of conciousness. It's really too bad that I'm at school, and on a school computer. The problem with this being that I can't do anything to take advantage of the high bandwith here, and furthermore, that because the restrictions that applied during the school year (such as no music being played) still do because there are teachers present in the assorted computer labs. Also, I don't have any headphones to get around this problem. So, here I wait, while I wait for some new assignment to do. After this I have to get back to the office, because at 15:30 I've got a meeting to attend that I didn't know about, which isn't too good either. No matter.

Why is it that people opt to use resolutions like 800 x 600 or 640 x 480 when their computers and monitors offer options up to resolutions such as 1600 x 1200? Perhaps at the higher end, the fonts and such become too small to read, however there is middle ground, like 1024 x 768 or 1152 x 864, or in my case, 1280 x 1024. The benefit being that there is more "space" on the desktop for windows and other assorted bits of clutter. Well... I think I'm supposed to be doing something now, so I'm off.

Tuesday, August 22, 2000

Quick note: Sim Ant, a very old game from Maxis (from 1991) those guys who made SimCity and The Sims is an anti-communist propaganda scheme! Just look at it. The black ants which you control, fighting ceaselessly against the RED ants who merely want to survive. The objective is to rid the yard of the people (facists) and of the red ants (communists). This is how I see the game. It's terrible.

Gads. I surely hope the people who read this don't take this seriously. I'm not that crazy.

There's so much I don't know. So much I need to do. I've already precluded so many options. So many things I could have (although I don't know I necessarily want to do some of the precluded things...) like colleges for example. By slacking off... I may have precluded going to colleges like Harvard, however, I personally don't feel I have the level of motivation it takes to go there and do well and enjoy myself. What do I want to do next year? Well... that's not really too important seeing as it's only going to be my Junior year of high school. However, what comes next is important. Do I stick around in high school to take one class and do a humanities project, do I try to go to a middle quality college, and eventually transfer from there? Do I try to get employed and spend a year interning or something like that? I don't know. It's just that this is the kind of stuff I have to think about. Do I need to bring up my grades?

Well, these are all things that I thought of earlier, when the internet connection was failing. Anyhow, at the time, I think how I need to sleep. And how apparently it's difficult to discern different entries on the same day. Regardless. I don't care. Hmm... What to write. I'm feeling uninspired, and irritated about my total lack of knowledge of my surroundings. I couldn't navigate my around the area at all. It's dissappointing. Well... I'm going totry to come up with a way to make seperate entries more discernable now... so adios.

Monday, August 21, 2000

Alright! The archives work! Now you can access the archive index right at the bottom of the blog! Just click on the link at the top of the blog, right under the title and my name, that or scroll down a lot. Cool. Now all of my blogging since the very beginning is available for public consumption.
What next?

What do I write, as I wait patiently for mp3s to download. I’m not tired yet. For the past week and a bit, I’ve been regularly staying up to past 2 AM, so… my entire clock is off. I probably should get to sleep before… umm… 20 minutes ago in order to get 8 hours of sleep and still be ready to go to work at 10:00 tomorrow morning. Aw crap. This is not good. Well… I really only need 30 minutes about to get ready… so another 10 minutes writing is ok…

I like They Might be Giants. They’re music, albeit slightly odd, is quite nice to listen to. Oh… bah. I’ve got nothing. I’m doing nothing. It’s to late to try to do anything really productive. I suppose that’s why I write. I write to think. I think to do, and to do, I write. So, do I think to write what I do? Bah. Silly babble. I’m not even going over my earlier sentences to check if they make sense. Maybe I’ll come up with some flawed logic, that always seems to be entertaining… something like… umm… argh! I hate when this happens. I think of something as an example, however it’s a bit too offensive to be posted, or said aloud, and furthermore, I need to think of something else, but the first thought seems such a great example, it just doesn’t leave my mind. So, never mind, no example here. Whoa. Nevermind, according to MS Word’s spellchecker, is spelled incorrectly, and should be “never mind.” That’s news to me. Bah. I am interested in things. I’m not a real doctor, but I am a real… person. Who am I? Am I crazy? And if I am, who’s to know? What defines me as crazy? The mob, the majority, the large group of people who might be crazy and I might be notcrazy. Well… thinking like that makes me think I’m a bit mad…. Although well… not too mad. I anticipate about 30 minutes more until my mp3 is done downloading. I need a cool and interesting alias… although I may use the word Waloo for a number of things… it simply doesn’t have meaning. Unfortunately, I’m seriously lacking in better ideas, so for the time being, I’ll go right on using waloo as a silly alias for internet based activities. Metasyntactic variables are great. Things like “foobar” (as opposed to “FUBAR”), wibble, zot, blarg, xyzzy and other bits of random typed babble. Hmm… time for something completely new.

     o           o         o       o         o       <o         <o>       o>       o
     .|.        \|.      \|/      //        X         \            |        <|        <|>
     /\          >\      /<        >\      /<          >\        /<          >\        /<
Well… I wonder if all that nonbreakinspacing and left and right bracket thingy marks worked. I hope so.

ARGH! I think it didn't.

It was supposed to be a little ascii (text) character dancing the macarena.

Well… I’m done for tonight. More next time on my scream of consciousness.

Curses. I've spent so much time looking for one stupid little black cable. You see... one of my sisters has an mp3 player, and she's currently in France, and furthermore, she left it here, and as a result I now have the option of using it myself... but I am provided with a dilemma. I can find the player itself, I have some mp3s to use with it, I have the parallel port adapter for it, I have headphones, and I have batteries. However, I can't find the cable to go from the parallel port adapter to the player device. Now, because of all this, I can't use it, and now, as a reaction, I say, "fooey."

Another thing is that I consider spending a lot of time cleaning rooms or in general, is a waste of time. I would think that people have a lot of better things to do, such as... well... something, for example, in my case, I could work on my writing skills because based on my previous PSAT scores, they need improvement. This wouldn't require an enormous amount of effort, however the potential returns are fairly good.

I probably would have hit the "post and publish" button right then... however due to my lack of wanting to, and my lack of other things to do at half past 12:00 in the morning (i.e. 00:33)... maybe I'll try to figure out what's wrong w/ my blogger link graphic on the inasphere site.

I'm having a good enough time now though... listening to some 303 Infinity (it's a bit weird, I found them on mp3.com, but it's nice enough to listen to) and other things.... I guess I'll just keep on blogging. Remarking about how there's a lot of things I wish I did, or a lot of things I've wished I said... but I didn’t, and there's no changing the past... at least not so far as I know. It's kind of funny, how when I start to get tired, the randomness of my thoughts gets... more random.

In light of the new song that just came onto my nifty computer based (as opposed to portable, like a discman) mp3 player... I wonder... am I a creep? a loser? do I belong here? what the hell am doing here? haha. right. capital letters are for WUSSIES. Whoops.

Well... new song. I guess I must be a zombie. Apparently independence is not a trend, but the only way of life, because I'm not really alive if somebody else controls my destiny, makin' the important choices for me. Then I'm a walking dead, a zombie. Well... I suppose I do have some level of control.

Server side includes continue to confuse me. I have a vague idea of how they work... but I don't know. I have a lot of things I want/should/need to do. I need to improve my writing/verbal skills. I want to learn some sort of programming language such as java... well, not learn it well... but just some basics, considering that I've only got a couple weeks before school starts again. I want to learn to play chess better. I need to get myself into a healthier condition. These are the things that run across my mind as things I didn't get done before now. I see my summer as somewhat of a waste. There was a month-long period in which I don't count as summer, because that was the time I was at camp. That was fun, and entirely worthwhile, however it has provided me with something else I should do, which is write more letters to people in order to keep in contact with them. I'm quite terrible at convincing myself to do any of the listed tasks... I would always rather do something else... and that's usually all it takes to prevent me from getting things done. Anyhow... before camp, and now after, I feel that I've done little to nothing. Many of my friends are doing a lot, some of them off checking out colleges around the country (no, this is not a specific reference to any one person... there are a number of people who I consider friends doing such things... of course, there's a lot of people who I know who I wouldn't consider a friend doing this as well... I guess if I make this statement ambiguous enough it doesn't really matter...) and then there's one person working for the local congressman and one who's trekking across the country w/ his family to where his sister will be attending higher education. These are all things that I am not doing, and sitting around doing testing for Schoolbrain and Traxit just isn't... gratifying, or fulfilling. I don't know. I suppose I should stop griping, I've got a lot of things I can and do do that others can't, so what am I complaining about.

TV continues to amaze me. It's so terribly full of absolutely repulsive junk, yet, at the same time, the glowing box is amazingly adhesive... sitting down w/ plans only to watch one show (the Simpsons) earlier today resulted with me wasting a full... hour and a half watching drivel... it wasn't even that good... but I watched it anyway. Why? I don't know, but the people responsible for TV today, are brilliant, in some way. Of course, then there's those TiVo things and replayTV boxes which would allow me to... well... avoid commercials and do all sorts of weird stuff. That would be pretty crazy though. I don't think I would ever leave the couch, and that would be bad. I've got enough things to do that sitting down and watching TV is not really a good thing to do. I really am rambling now... the true intention of this blog is here. I sit, and I type what's on my mind. A ceaseless stream of consciousness that allows me to vent any sort of emotional response to anything in a relatively harmless manner. The things I say on this... they bear no real significance to anything, and that's kind of what's so great. I put things up here, with no real idea of who reads it, considering I never receive feedback (of the three times I have, only two were ones that were actually feedback, the other was just a test I made a friend do to make sure it worked...) and otherwise, the only time I get a response to it is when people talk to me about it in school, the day after I write it. Of course, the only reason people ever do that is when I accidentally, although sometimes intentionally, make a semi-offensive statement. The new song from Madonna, "Music," is in my mind, junk. I find it an effort to make myself listen to the entirety to it, however at this point; I'll just change the channel on the radio, because I don't like it that much. I don't know why. Usually, I just don't care about the music I'm listening to, I'm fairly indiscriminate, however every so often, there comes along a song I feel I can not, and will not listen to, "Music" happens to be one of them. Country music for the most part I find hard to listen to as well, and some variants of rap, although not all I suppose. Well... I suppose I am not quite as open minded as I used to consider myself, but no matter... usually I can find something worth listening to... and that's all that really matters. Maybe I'll build a theme-park ride... and it will be called the utilitarian ride, it gets you from point A to point B, and that's all that matters. Of course... that probably wouldn't work out too well for me.

Napster is a wonderful thing to have. Yes, I realize it's quite illegal. Most of the mp3s I have aren't illegal... however their portion is growing rapidly since I've started to use Napster heavily (which is quite difficult for me mind you, seeing as my internet connection is through a "56k" modem, but the rate of transfer is rarely anywhere near, let alone higher than 3k/sec). Well... I think I'm going to go update my blog template, and then I will begin a second possibly large blog entry.

Sunday, August 20, 2000

Why is it that Apple computers are so much niftier, nicer looking, and in many cases better functioning than MS Windows based machines? Or perhaps I should be asking, why is it that computers built by anybody other than Apple (or so it seems) are so dysfunctional and in many cases ugly? I don't know, but looking at the stuff about the Power Mac Cube has certainly made an impression on me. It's just so dang nifty! But, enough of this, back to fixing the world's problems.... well... not really, just fixing my own.
Hmm... my friend who happens to be one of the webmaster types at inAsphere.com has explained to me how to use their server side includes however should I opt to do so, I will negate the option of having seperate sections to my blog, but instead one, long, blog. I'll give it a try, and if I can figure out how to put an archive index onto the front page, it might just stay that way.
Well... the past weekend has been very fun. I visited a friend of mine's house on Cape Cod. It was quite fun, we watched the annual "Falmouth Road Race" in which his brother was running. It was also funny, seeing somebody we both recognized from school, and his sudden yelling out of that person's name. I don't know why... it just strikes me as humorous. Well... maybe it isn't. I need to go check my backlog of email.