whoa.

Craziest. Night. EvAr.

Clare’s Work -> Left Clare’s House @ six -> Mt. Helix -> INO -> Hotel Del -> Mission Beach -> Clare’s house @ midnight

Ok… where was I…

Ah yes. A good book. So I started on Illusions, by Richard Bach, and finished 90% of it that night, with just a few more pages to read the next morning. Fabulous book. It kind of reminded me of what I used to believe… the basic idea is that it’s a novel about a philosophy, almost. If you’ve studied philosophy, you’re probably familiar with Plato’s philosophy of the cave. The book is based on that idea, with a twist – rather than the cave being the creation of some outside force, we create our own “cave”. The book follows a pair of characters, one is the next Messiah, who has discovered that the idea of mortal reality is only what you want it to be. The other is a ‘potential Messiah’, a guy who could learn the truth, and have the power to tell others that God merely wants us to be happy, in whatever way we can be.

At any rate, its a good book. I’m going to reread it fairly soon, I think. After finishing that book the morning after starting it, I had the most fantabulous day. It was just like everything was going great, and the day was beautiful. I finished my Christmas shopping, drove to Lakeside to drop some stuff off, and on the way there every song on the radio was just awesome. I dunno, it sounds dumb, but it made me happy.

Speaking of Christmas shopping that day… I bought Lance a couple Gameboy Advance games for his Nintendo DS (since the DS’ launch titles aren’t much to write home about). I picked up Advance Wars, used and Fire Emblem, new. Well… at least I thought I did. Turns out, christmas morning when Lance opened up Fire Emblem, it was just the box – no game. Apparently the guy behind the counter at Gamestop sold me the display box. And since Bri and Kyle were feeling slightly cleaning-nazi-esque, there was no chance in finding the reciept which was still sitting in the original bag. Thankfully, when I did go into Gamestop the day after Christmas, the guy behind the counter was pretty forgiving. He checked the shelf and saw that the display box was missing, checked the computer and saw that they had sold one copy on Thursday, then checked behind the counter and saw that they had one more copy than they should. Not bad.

Speaking of Christmas presents, though. I couldn’t decide what to get Melanie, so I got her a $40 to Kohl’s. Now, that seemed a little too bland, so to liven things up, I took another plastic card out of my wallet (a PetCo card) and cut it up into tiny slithers, then wadded it up with some tape, and put it at the bottom of a gift bag with some confetti stuff. Then I taped the actual gift card to the bottom of the bag, on the underside. The result was pretty amusing. Bri got me a cool Altoids tin, which was very thoughtful of her, and appreciated… except that the three flavors of altoids it came with were Ginger (gag), Cinnamon (choke), and Spearmint (insta-migraine). :o/ I was just glad she got me something, really. I ended up giving Eireann the tin, maybe she’ll like it.

And what did I get for Christmas, you ask? Oh… Not much. Just a most excellent Ruby Red Acoustic/Electric Ovation Celebrity, with preamp and cool guy builtin digital tuner. Complete with gig bag, stand, music books (DMB and Lynyrd Skynyrd), and spiffy guitar strap that they chose because it ‘matched my tatoo’. Heh. Yeah. It was awesome. I didn’t really get much besides this stuff (which is perfectly ok with me), and so as I was opening presents, I kept opening guitar stuff, but no guitar. Til finally all the presents were unwrapped, and I was beginning to think that perhaps my dad had the guitar at his house, and my Mills family had just gotten me all the accessories. Then Bri started pushing me to unwrap the coffee table. See, the night before they had gotten a bit on the loopy side with Christmas present wrapping… and decided to wrap the coffee table. Apparently this had some significance with a certain holiday commercial – I didn’t get it, as I don’t watch TV. Well, I was feeling lazy, so I didn’t want to go unwrap the coffee table and besides there was no where to put it but where it already was, but Bri kept insisting. At that point I realized where my guitar was. They had taped the box it came in to the underside of the coffee table. So upon unwrapping it, I found my new guitar. Pretty funny. The rest of the day was rather uneventful… we went to my step-grandma’s house, and hung out there for a while. I had Chevy with me, whom everyone adored and she adored in return… but she wasn’t terribly impressed with my aunt’s poodle-type dogs.

From there, Chevy and I went to visit Tom and family, but Tom ended up leaving so I got to spend time with Angela, whom I hadn’t seen in a forever. So that was good.

Alright, its totally 2:30 in the morning, and I think my psuedo-insomnia is going away now, so I’ll finish this off for tonight, and add more tomorrow

Ok…. soo…. updates n stuff. Lotsa interes^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstuff has happened since my last update!

For instance, I finally had my bake-a-thon! It turned out pretty well, overall. I didn’t get to make all the recipes I’d brought, but thats alright, the stuff we made turned out alright. We started off with the uber-moist chocolate/peanut butter -chip cookies, which weren’t supposed to spread much. Well, turns out they do. A lot. So the first batch ended up as two huge (well, cookie sheet sized) cookies, with burnt edges. The next couple batches turned out good, though still not quite as soft as I would have liked…. guess they just cooked too long. Then we started up the Ultimate Cheesecake, which turned out a little too soft, but still tasted quite good… Timmay took the whole thing home (minus about a slice). Then we started the Cinnamon Apple Crisps, which we were afraid weren’t being made right, but actually turned out excellent… close to perfection, I’d say.

Then it was onto the main course – Fajitas! I was quite proud of the fajitas… and surprised we were able to feed as many people as we did. I had planned on five – Clare’s family plus me – and we ended up with those five, and what seemed like almost another five, though I can only recall David, Heather, and Tres, so I’m probably quite wrong. Anyway, the cooking turned out to be a success, and Clare’s mom seemed impressed, which made me happy. Then we watched movies… Benny and Joon, and Almost Famous, the director’s cut. Good movies. Still didn’t get to watch Memento. Good times anyway, though. After the movies, Clare, David and I just sorta hung out in the living room, with David playing a bit of guitar. Then after a while he left, and Clare and I just sort of wound up laying down talking on the floor in the living room for a few hours. Well, it was probably mostly me just babbling, but thats ok. Then the next morning we went and hiked up to this nice view in Julian that she called Upper Meadow. It was a good hike up and back over barbed wire and fallen trees and stuff…. and abandoned mines we didn’t get to explore. Then she went to tea, and then she came back and gave me my Christmas present. Two books, one of which I finished in almost one night and was very excellent, the other I haven’t had a chance to start yet. I got her a rose made out of Legos, and something else, which she hasn’t received yet.

I think that’s all for tonight… I’ll update some more about other stuff tomorrow. I should never be allowed to drink coffee when I’m tired… it just makes me more tired.

In the meantime, I’ll be pondering about implementing a color-selector in CGI, using perl, CSS, and maybe a splash of Javascript for a couple of fancy frills. I think its possible… I just need to ponder it to figure out the best way to do it.

Merry Christmas/Yule all!

I’ve got an entry coming up later on, probably tonight. So stay tuned, and enjoy your holidays and associated goodies.

The extent of my Christmas spirit to be expressed on this journal:

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus < north pole > town

cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty > nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice > giftlist
santa claus < north pole > town

who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | grep bad || good
for (goodness sake) {
be good
}

If any of that made sense to you, kudos, if not, well, I can explain ;o)

/me waves his bullshit flag

So I’m taking my Javascript midterm. No problems. Easy as pie. Talking to Clare online at the same time. then I get to one question on the exam.

“The date object begins on…?”

The two (well, the two most logical of the four) possible answers are January 1st, 1970, and current (local) time

The arguments are these

If you just have these lines in your actual code:

var myTime; //initialize an empty variable
myTime = new Date(); //this fills our empty variable with the default of "Date()"

The contents of “myTime” would be the current time, whenever it is run.

the 1970 bit, on the other hand, is a reference to the way computers in general store time.. that is, they store it as a big ass number. Usually the number of seconds (though sometimes its milliseconds) since January first, 1970. Then whenever the computer is supposed to display the date, it simply does the math. Right now, the date in seconds is: “1103165492” So you’d take that, divide by 60 (seconds in a minute), then divide by 60 (minutes/hour), then divide by 24 (hours/minute), then by 365.4 (days/year) and you get “34.942….” which means 34 years (and some change, almost 35 years) since the epoch – January 1st, 1970.

So, it’s a frame of reference. Like most programming languages, the “Date()” function of JavaScript starts at the beginning of the “epoch”, January 1st, 1970.

So at first I chose the 1970 answer. Being a full on nerd, this answer made the most sense. But then I second guessed myself, and said “well, it does output the actual date…” and picked “current time” – which happened to be wrong.

Long story short, I think the question should have been worded a little differently. So here I wave my bullshit flag, with my 24/25. But hey, at least I’m all done with JS.

You are a Maine Coon! You are larger than life, a
gentle giant. You are independent, but very
affectionate with your friends and family.

What breed of cat are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ok. A clarification. Er… pun?

I should say that Clare doesn’t look like Jenna Malone, but rather that the way Jenna Malone looks reminds me of Clare.

Heres an update I wrote while I was still back in San Jose:
So I’m sitting here at the airport waiting for my flight to leave. Killin time. And I look up and there’s a movie on this little TV screen. No one’s really watching it, but it looks familiar. It’s a movie I’ve seen before. Oh… it’s… Weird Science? Wait a minute… I remember this scene… They forgot to plug the computer into the doll… and now everything is getting sucked out of the house. There was something odd about that scene.. Oh yeah! A girl is stuck in the house, and it starts to suck her up the chimney, but she holds onto a window, and then… Er… wait, they can’t show that part. Whoa, they just did. That’s… not PG rated…

Anyway, back to the now. So yeah, I’ve been missing out on the updates for a while. A big reason for it is cuz of my final for my US History class has been looming. See, I have this thing where when I have a huge project to do, I put off the project for a long time, and everything else. It’s weird, I just won’t feel like doing anything, because I’ll think I ought to be working on the project, but I don’t really want to work on the project either, so I end up doing nothing. At any rate, I’ve finished it, and now all I have to do is finish up my Javascript and perl/CGI stuff.

Speaking of which, my Javascript class is teh lame. How lame, you wonder? Well, the semester is almost over, and I can verifiably say that I’ve learned about nothing so far – and supreme knowledge doesn’t seem to be coming down the pike within the next week or so I feel I can safely make this claim. The class is disheartening for other reasons… it appears that my teacher, aside from having the crappiest website design for a “Web Site Design Internet Publishing” firm, also has the typing skills of an 11 year old. Class assignments have completely retarded directions, too. Like this one, about image rollovers [which basically means when you move your mouse over an image, change the image, when you move it away, change it back]… the directions basically say: “make a sample website using javascript, which includes image rollovers. Or, if you prefer, do something else.” What the hell does that even mean?

And all the assignments have typos in them. And I don’t mean typos like, you know, spelling a word like *ahem* “deciduous” wrong. That would be understandable. But really, if you’re a computer science teacher, you shouldn’t be spelling words such as “Imag” instead of “image”, or “muose” instead of “mouse”. And to show that it’s not just just simple typos (which you know, a word processor would catch) but a true lack of caring about putting any amount of effort into it, I bring you the following quote: “Pass 2 parameters n use 1 functien” I don’t know what exactly to make of that. I mean, I know what it means – but as someone who would someday like to be a teacher, I’m extremely disappointed at the sense of apathy I get when reading these.

On the bright side, I’m totally taking a guitar class next semester. And Clare is going to be back in town in a week! Which is good, cuz Mollie is leaving in about a week, and I’m gonna probably be bored like whoa. And well, Clare totally rules, in case my opinion on the matter wasn’t yet known by the world. I feel like we totally click. We’re going to have a bake-a-thon. And have music lessons. And watch lots of movies. Cuz there’s lots of movies she needs to see. I wonder if she’s seen Empire Records. I’ve been watching a shitload of movies lately. See, whats been happening is that I’ll put on a movie on my ibook right before I go to bed, and just put the laptop on the bed and fall asleep watching it. In the past two-three weeks (some nights I get through a whole movie and put another on) I’ve watched Bourne Identity, Pirates of the Caribbean, Donnie Darko, Memento, The Perfect Score, Ninth Gate, the uncut version of Almost Famous (about three times – its good), 1776, A Guy Thing, Saved!, Three To Tango, and . So after watching Donnie Darko and Saved!, I keep thinking that Clare looks kinda like Jenna Malone. But thats probably just me.

Chevy totally just ate a moth. Poor bastard never saw it coming.

Sorry. Anyway, so its like almost Christmas and stuff, and I’ve only bought two presents. And I’m not sure what to get everyone else. And I think I’m broke. So this will be interesting.

I’m also in the middle of this fairly crappy book…. and as usual, I feel the urge to reread an old tried and tested series…. Ender, speak to me! Where are you Ender? Or maybe it’s time to visit Rand-land again.

Whoa, I found this on the Guitar Noise forums. It’s a guitar made out of wood from a pallet. Guitars are typically made out of fancy and or expensive woods (Ebony, Rosewood, Ash, Maple, Spruce, I’ve also heard of Mahogony and even Manzanita [for smaller parts on the guitar] being used) and usually a few different kinds of wood will make up different parts of a guitar. For whatever reason, these woods just have a better physical tone than others, and they also sound better as they get older. So, the higher end the guitar is, the better the materials are, and typically the older they are as well. Well, Bob Taylor (founder of Taylor guitars – probably one of the best known guitar companys) decided he wanted to prove its not just what you use, but how you use it. So they handmade this pallet guitar, and by all accounts, it sounds and plays great, there’s not many on the market, and the list price (which doesn’t always equal retail price) is $10,000. !.

Also of interest was this story about a modern day vigilante superhero, Angle Cutter Man.

Ok, I started this entry last night, and so I’ll just go ahead and post what I’ve got now.

Since tres is a slacker, and doesn’t have his own journal, he asked me to put this on mine. So here’s Tres’ 15 songs.

• “I’ll sing for you, if you want me to. I’ll give to you. And it’s a chance I’ll have to take, and it’s a chance I’ll have to break.”
• “I’ve been leaving on my things, so in the morning when the morning bird sings, there’s still dinner on my dinner jacket ’til the dinner bell rings” this ones for you, bill… and maybe tristan
• “Walking down the street, distant memories are buried in the past forever” i think i chose about the most unrecognizable line for this song..
• “I take a look and I wonder why, why these birds don’t fly”
• “Climb aboard, strap yourself in, and wait for the ride of life to begin” if anyone not named tristan or dana gets this one, i will seriously be amazed
• “Somewhere I have heard this before, in a dream of memory restored” hah! try to guess this one now, bill!
• “The hate you feel is nothing more than love you feel to win this war” look at the comment to 5
• “But I know that I’m ok, ’cause you’re here with me today. I haven’t got a single problem now that I’m with you” if anyone besides my mother gets this one, they win.
• “You don’t understand who they thought I was supposed to be. Look at me now a man Who won’t let himself be”
• “Rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond… Call me what you will!” wow… back in the day…
• “You love to pretend that you’re good, when you’re always up to no good. You really can’t make him hate her so your tongue became a razor.”
• “She is like a cat in the dark and then she is the darkness. She rules her life like a fine skylark and then the sky is starless” you’ve got this one, bill
• “Best, you’ve got to be the best. You’ve got to change the world, and use this chance to be heard”
• “We arrive at this place of no return, my brothers, only to discover that our minds have led us away so far from the painful truth off who we are”
• “Lovely legs there are. what a big black mass, what a hunk of love. Walk her every day into a shady place. He’s like the dark, but I’d want him.” another bill song