Tim`: “Tell some rookie to do a fucking fighter, i want to be a damn sorcerer for once.”

Well then. Whats been going on in bill-land?

Much. Much stuff and much thing-age.

I’ve recently had my programming urges rekindled. I have done some work on a RPG Game, which will be playable on a PC Computer (as opposed to an ATM Machine which takes your PIN Number). That’s in C++. In perl, I’ve written a new IRC dicebot, to replace the old mIRC one. That’s nice because it’ll let me add functionality over time, as opposed to the other one which was just lame and required Windows. In Gambas (a Visual Basic work-alike) I’ve begun work on a program that’ll work on Linux and Windows (and prolly MacOSX) which will let me post diary entries on my new self-hosted journal. Speaking of which, I’ve also been working on the (perl-CGI) backend of said journal, and I’ve managed to get Apache WebServer running well enough to suit my standards on a stand-alone server computer. Last but not least, I’ve also been tooling around some more with SDL in C++. Eventually I’d like to take what I’m learning with that project and add it onto the RPG I’m writing.

So lets see, what else. I have the dubious honor of being the owner of an $850 cat. Jealous? I thought you might be. It was actually way back like a month or two ago, now, but Kal’El had some serious liver problems, lost a lot of weight and had to go into the vet for some (apparently inconclusive) bloodwork, some antibiotics and an IV drip. He was not pleased, and he’s extremely unhappy about his shaved belly and shaved wrist (where they put the IV). Don’t pet either spot, he’s a little sensitive about it and very touchy. He’s quite fine now, though. Well, I should mention that he’s still rather stupid. But he wasn’t exposed to any Gamma radiation while at the vet, so its hard to expect a miracle.

I have a new baby sister coming, which I haven’t mentioned on here yet, but I’ve known about for quite some time (though in all fairness I knew about it long before I was supposed to tell anyone, so I had to force myself to hold back). Her name will be (when she’s born in Novemberish) Sarah. Sarah Ashley Sanders. Everyone is pretty stoked about that, and I’m enjoying the idea of Jill baby-proofing her exquisitely decorated home. She has lamps that have no light bulbs and aren’t plugged in, but they look nice. She also has multiple clocks in the house which are stuck and reading the wrong time (in the case of the living room clocks, they read the *same* wrong time, which is eerie). Etc, etc. It’ll be interesting.

I finally got to play DnD again last night. I’m working on a new campaign. I obviously can’t give away details here, but its pretty interesting, I think. Anyway, there were only 4 of us last night (Clare, Chris, Tristan, and Katie) but it was sort of a last minute get together. If everyone plays that’s said they wanted to, it should be a 10 person game. Just how I’m to manage 10 players (among which are the unmanageable likes of Tres “I-found-a-new-feat/class/race/prestige class-I-want-to-try”, Tristan “I’m-going-over-here-on-my-own”, Chris “I-slap-bears-whenever-encountered” and Timmy “shit-do-I-even-need-to-go-there”, not to mention the at least 4 players who have next to no experience with DnD) is beyond me. I’m hoping I can add a lot of functionality to dbot.pl to answer basic questions and do some bookkeeping for us. I also might be enlisting Tres as a co-DM.

Mollie set up her goldfish in the 50 Gallon in the living room. Despite a few sad die-off’s its looking really nice now. I’ll see what I can do about getting a couple pics. We also have a new fish setup in a little 6 Gallon take. He’s a betta named “Bird”.

My room is clean, for the first time in… well… since we moved. Clare helped me clean it, and then we vacuumed and had the carpet cleaned. I took the oppurtunity to move my bed. And now I’m contemplating getting some posters and maybe a hamper or two for it, so it looks a little nicer. I’ve been looking at some Demotivational posters from Despair.com. That’d be cool. In an odd sort of way.

Work is going pretty good. They went ahead and promoted me, after about 2 months or so of working there. Kinda cool. The high school kids there definitely come and go.

School is looking to be interesting… I’m taking the Cisco Certified Networking Associate classes, semesters 3 and 4, CSIS 111 (which is Networking Fundamentals, should be a breeze, especially after CCNA 1 & 2… and its with the same teacher I took that for), CSIS 280, which is C++ programming, and History 102 with a teacher who’s had great reviews on RateMyProfessor.

I’ve been spending a crazy amount of time with Clare lately. Like… as in… three, four, sometimes five days a week. She makes me happy in ways I didn’t know existed, and just having her smile at me can brighten my day.

In other news, I’m probably geekier than most people who read this.

40.23669% – Major Geek. Though apparently I don’t watch nearly enough Star Trek or read as many comics as I should. But I most certainly know of 7 or more card games that can be played with a standard deck. Hell, I think I know 7 or more gambling games and 7 or more non-gambling games that you can play with a standard deck. Lets see…

Non-gambling: Rummy, Cribbage, Mao, Three Card, Speed, War, Hearts, Spades, Crazy 8’s, Screw Your Neighbor, Bridge
Gamblinkg: Acey-Ducey, Black Mariah, Chase the Queen, Harem, 7-Card No Peak, Pass the Trash, [Midnight] Baseball, Texas Hold-um, Thirty-one, Black Jack, Lowball

Am I forgetting any?

Hey, I should make a page on my journal describing various card games…

I am an Asteroid.
I am a drifter. I go where life leads, which makes me usually a very calm and content sort of person. That or thoroughly apathetic. Usually I keep on doing whatever I’m doing, and it takes something special to make me change my mind.
What Video Game Character Are You?

So Shane finally came and picked up his fish tank. Which is amusing since he bought it in what, October? And has since sold it to someone else…

In other news, Japan has an interesting fruit on the market, and some crazy bastard wrote a virtual implementation of Unix completely in Javascript. For my non-programming/non-unix friends out there, this act is silly bordering on clinically insane.

Finally, before I go to work, do you know what kind of cheese you are?

I believe I was cheddar…

So its kind of weird. It’s almost like sometimes, the more stuff you have to write about, the less you want to write it. Like its too much effort or something.

And then like, there’s times when you sit down and start to write it all out. Like when I wrote 80% of an entry about the 3 new consoles coming out, then decided “ehh, I’ll finish it tomorrow” and never did.

Anyway. Clare and I are doing great. Words can’t express how happy I am to have her home for summer. I love her like crazy. Apparently we’re moving to Scotland for a year.

So lots of crazy shit has been going on lately. I guess I never actually mentioned it in my journal, but I’m now working at Rock and Jenny’s, which is about 50 yards from the PetCo I used to work at. Things are going pretty good there. I’m liking most of the people, and the work is a lot more enjoyable.

I think thats gonna be it for tonight though. I could easily spend a couple hours on the insanity that is Apple switching to Intel, or my excitement about the BeOS resurrection, and yea, untold number of other non-geeky things. But for some reason I’m pretty damn tired.

One shouldn’t be required to make decisions this close to one’s girlfriend coming home.

And whats up with managers not able to read applications?

“Do you still work at PetCo currently?”

No, of course not, I wrote on that application that I was fired, and that was over, what, 3 weeks ago?

In my dreams I see myself hitting a baseball
In a green field somewhere near a freeway
I’m all tan and smiling and running from third base
And it’s hot and the kids keep on playing the driving game
And they’re singing the same goddamn refrain
And the sky is a blueish grey.

-Rilo Kiley, My Slumbering Heart

I swear there’ll be another update here today or tomorrow.

Tres, I expect you to attend.

Won’t you carry it in?

So Petco fired me. Yeah. Woulda been three years in about a week. I figured that warrants a new page, since I haven’t moved. I haven’t updated in a while, but its not really cuz there hasn’t been anything going on.

Like right now for instance. I’ve got Eireann over here, we just got back from getting kicked off the beach. Apparently in Oceanside, you’re not supposed to be on the beach after 11pm. (…) Anyway. We went to see The Laramie Project today at Palomar, since Mollie is in it. It was pretty good… about as sad as I figured it would be. If you don’t know what The Laramie Project is, or you don’t know who Matthew Shepard was, you should take a moment to read those links and educate yourself. It’s ok, I’ll wait. Just lemme know when you’re done.

Hmmm. Doo do doo…. Oh, ok you’re back. So anyway, after the play, we were supposed to all go to the beach. And we did. Except when we got there the police were arresting this guy who was crazy/drunk/on drugs and were clearing the beach, because, as I said before, no one is supposed to be on it after 11pm.

Anyway. So I’m starting work at “Rock n Jenny’s” on Wednesday. We’ll see how it works out. Other than that though, I’ve been good. Crazy shit abounds, though. For example, my Dad’s gonna be a Daddy again. That’s fairly crazy. I believe he said the expected due date was in November? He also decided to randomly buy me a new computer, which I promptly installed Half-Life 2 on, and beat twice within a week. It’s a pretty sweet machine. An Athlon 64 3000+, 512MB RAM, PCI-E GeForce 6600GT, dual onboard gigabit Ethernet, and a CD-R/RW,DVD+-RW/DualLayer. Yeah, I can burn a full length DVD (4.5 gigs, or ~6+ CDs) in about… 7 minutes. It’s what Apple (they’re also in the newest G5’s) internally calls a SuperDuperDrive, which amused me to no end, and I think Amber will appreciate, but I’m not sure anyone else will get.

There’s been other cool happenings and goings on lately, but mostly I’m super excited about Clare coming home, cuz I miss her lots.

Let’s see… what else. I’ve been hanging out with Matt (from my Cisco class, which is also going well) a bit lately, he’s a pretty cool dude. Chris and I taught him Mao. Now, I say “Chris and I” not because we both explained the rules – oh no. No I say that because, I taught him the rules, and Chris simply enforced them with a kind of vigor that you might expect from a cat jumping upon a three legged mouse. So in that regard, Chris definitely helped in the teaching. It was like playing with Amber. Only at least Amber had the decency to make an attempt to hide her evil smiles. Chris displayed his shit-eating grin for the whole world to see. We also taught Eireann, last night.

I’ve been playing a lot of Age of Wonders lately. I can now remember why that game is so bad for you. You just sit down and take a turn, right. But its a strategy game, so you’re usually at least thinking a few turns in advance. Build these units, send them here, cast this spell… a lot of that can take more than one turn to see the results. So you sit down to take your turn, only… now you’re waiting for stuff to happen. So you go ahead and take another turn. In which you build more units, cast other spells, and maybe send some units to capture a town. Well, now you’ve got a bunch more units to send out, and even a new town to do stuff with. So you can’t stop there, cuz you’ve been sorta planning on getting that new town, and doing some stuff with the gold you get from it. So you make a few upgrades, maybe start to make some new units… which takes another turn or two. Might as well wait to get one of those new units to see what it can do, and oh, it looks like that new unit might come in handy at that town over there.. lets send that new unit to that tow-OH MY GOD IT’S 2 IN THE MORNING?! Or in the case of one game Tres and I were playing together late one night. “Dude, look at the window. Is that the fucking sun?” It’s not that turns take a long time, cuz usually they don’t. It’s just you lose track of the time. What’s amusing (and odd, I’ve never seen another game that has this) is that the game actually has a system clock built-in on the main screen. So really you shouldn’t lose track of the time, cuz its right there.

I suppose thats enough of an update for now, seeing as how “some” is better than the “none” that’s been up lately. I think I might add some stuff to the left side there.

In my dreams, I see you asleep on a twin bed, the covers pulled up over your head. Am I asleep or awake? -Rilo Kiley