- saturday 08 24 02 -

Part two. Wrangled the header around, combining the elements of my slap-dash work with the much more refined products of my man from Indiana. That is a lot more along the lines of what I wanted - just had to put two heads together and see what fell out. If it makes you want to vomit, I'm afraid you'll have to go do it somewhere else. That's my logo, and I'm sticking to it.

- saturday 08 24 02 -

Part one. Uh oh. This update thing seems to be becoming a more frequent occurrence. Managed to make it through a few more pages, including beer, cinema, and caffeine. More soon.

- friday 08 23 02 -

I have forged my way through Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, an epic, thought-provoking, infuriating, and finally wonderful, take on the Arthurian legends of ancient Britain. With a definitively feminist tone, Bradley creates a stunning rendering of the Arthurian mythology and its characters. The voice of Morgaine paints a compelling story of humans caught in times of momentous change and struggling for greatness against their own worst inclinations and weaknesses. While I can't competently comment on the historical veracity of her account, as storytelling, it stands with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Herbert's Dune series as a key to another time and world. It will join those works as something that I will read again and again.

On other fronts, I saw The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD, and I found no faults with it. It still ranks as one of the best movies that I have ever seen. While not as visually amazing on a 32-inch TV as on a 75-foot theatre screen, the performances, production design, special effects, and obvious love of the story that went into the movie were entirely undiminished. I think my breath will catch every time I see Ian McKellen's Gandalf silent agony as Frodo stands and takes up the mantle of Ring-bearer in the council at Rivendell. I am counting the days until we can see the second chapter of what promises to be the standard by which all epic fantasy films will be judged from now on.

Thanks to the mighty Mudbar, Smack2.com is now running on 512MB of RAM, which doesn't make much difference to those of you trying to fight your way through ATTBI's crappy routers, but makes a huge difference in how the console responds to my random tinkerings and tweakings. I owe you a beer before you head to the hinterlands.

More updates soon - I'm actually considering turning some of my unproductive hours to something along these lines. Combining reading, watching movies, listening to music, and writing about all of the previous sounds like a good way to exercise my brain, which feels a bit under-utilized these days. Unsurprisingly, someone out there has already condensed most of my views on life in general into one webpage, saving me the effort of typing it all up. When I manage actually to get my actions aligned with my beliefs, I'll post film of my first walk on water. Don't hold your breath for that, 'cause you'll likely die in the interim. While you're waiting, you may as well go check out SinFest, a.k.a. Calvin and Hobbes with gratuitous sex, God as hand-puppeter, and the Devil in a tuxedo. Link courtesy of Geoduck. I think I will have to spend some more time following his links - hell, they might even end up over here.

- wednesday 08 21 02 -

I just wanna say:
SHIT.
ON.
TOAST.

- monday 08 19 02 -

Well, I finally made it to QuakeCon. Picked up some cool free shirts from the gods of gaming hardware and let some VIA PR flack write "Doom III" on my arm so I could snag an official QuakeCon shirt. Free burgers, hotdogs, and Bawls for all, with the latter being the source for every imaginable comment combining holding, breaking, freezing, grabbing, drinking, and the word "Bawls", that you can think of. After all, you're talking about a group of 5000 white male geeks gathered together to frag each other and drool over the PCB equivalent of crack. I've been trying for four years, and I managed to get in about seven hours onsite - bit of a pain in the ass to drag Moby Dick out there for a half day, but it was more than worth it for the chance to see the future. The Doom III preview was just as mind-blowing as you've read - although I'm afraid playing it on a home system is going to be a bit of a letdown after being immersed in this beast, replete with 100-inch screen and 5.1 surround sound being pumped through enough speakers to crush your skull. Damn. All I can say is w00t!

On other, less happy fronts, I'm unemployed, broke, and looking at some less-appealing career options. The Dallas job market is completely on it's ass, what with the robber barons, terrorist victims, and Big Blue itself kicking thousands into the streets. Amazing how the month after Dubya hit the White House, the unemployment rate takes off like a rocket. I was informed during one interview that over 3500 resumés had appeared in one day for the position I applied for. Shit. Looks like it's time to head for the hills and take up sheep ranching.

More later - for now, I think I'm going to go get some sleep.

- sunday 08 04 02 -

If you can read this, you're lucky. My leased POS RCA cable modem is dropping packets left and right, eventually losing connectivity completely. It cooks along fine for anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 days, and then suddenly dies. I've already had one tech out here - no dice. The next one is going to bring me a new modem.

On other fronts, Service Pack 3 is out and about. Had some hellacious fun installing this, as it apparently decided my multi-homed firewall / webserver needed to have all of it's network bindings re-ordered and jacked around. This led to a few hours of chasing my tail trying to figure out why my server couldn't talk to a domain controller, thereby causing Exchange and all the other fun services on the box to die slow and painful deaths. Boo. Ya. After resetting everything, all is well - updating my single-homed DC was much more straightforward. Still waiting on SP1 for XP, so I can get to integrating all the lovely hotfixes into my installation folder. More later - gotta go hit another disc of X-Files while I can stay awake.

- wednesday 07 31 02 -

Thanks to my ever-vigilant readers for finding all the broken shit in my page and letting me know about it. I think the typos and errors are fixed - if not, lemme know.

I've been here before, but I'd forgotten about it until a fellow victim of The Borg sent me the link. A timeless example of what too much sugar, not enough sleep, and a fast internet connection can do for the college students of America.

- tuesday 07 30 02 -

Probably the final update to this page - added the new header most graciously provided by the Wild Man of the North. Now I just have to get finished with the rest of the site ... blecch. Other than that, I'm still unemployed, still poor, and sporting a sore thumb from the electronic equivalent of heroin. And they're working on installment *four*. I'm screwed.

For those who know, today is two years. Working on five total, and looking forward to another seventy-five. Geronimo.

- saturday 07 13 02 -

Another day, another revamp. I think I like this best of the combinations I've tried. Block, clean design, direct colors, and I streamlined the graphics down by about 150K, so those of you on skinny pipes aren't sitting around wondering what the site actually looks like. Now that I've banged the front page into a semi-complete shape, I've got to tackle the rest of the damn site. Blah. However, I think I've got a few ideas about creating some style sheets and stripping the code down a bit. That'll be a task for another day.

On an unrelated note, I rode a real-life skateboard for the first time in some 15 years tonight. I am now convinced that I am getting to be one old, creaky bastard. We'll see if this leads to anything exercise-related or not - I could stand to lose about 75 pounds. Blood and broken bones will be optional.

- friday 07 12 02 -

And a bit more on the tweakage. Tuned up the logo a bit, added the sidebars and headers, b0rked around with some new colors. Went darker to try and tone down the layout, but I think it actually intensified it a bit. No matter - I've got as much time as I want to keep screwing this thing up. Come back tomorrow for some more tasty updates.

- thursday 07 11 02 -

Redesigned! Finally sat down and blasted the site into a new shape - I don't like the logo as much as my old one, but I needed a complete overhaul. Maybe I can convince my friend from Indiana to hack me up a new one. I'm going to be banging around with some new coding, so the site may get utterly hosed for periods of time. Not entirely sure I like the new look, but I'll be tweaking it - if it makes you want to barf, lemme know.

Archived the news, as well. Page was getting a bit, um, fat.

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