Older blog entries for timg (starting at number 19)

March of the Bullets

  • Played some Starcraft with a bunch of friends today. Lost one game right off, then we had a 2 vs 2 ally game where I and my teammate cleaned up. I was Protoss, a race I usually don't do well at, and my teammate was Zerg. Vs Terran and Protoss. Fun fun stuff.
  • We also played some Monopoly. I lost. Hard. Remind me not to go into any field involving large finances and shady deals.
  • Then we went to Pizza Hut at about 11:30. Not very busy. Mmmm, heartburn!
  • As you might imagine, not much hacking or real work today. But it is Saturday.
  • Decided to crown Neal Morse of Transatlantic and Spock's Beard either my #1 or #2 rock vocalist, depending on my mood. Whee! And I'm seeing Spock's Beard and Dream Theater (with James LaBrie is my #2 or #1 rated rock vocalist) in August!
  • Church tomorrow, and since I type up the program each morning, I leave early. So I am off.
  • Hey lewing, get better soon!
  • Tried to do some Galeon hacking today, I managed to get a decent open location dialog up, and fought with glade a bit...It's biting me back now, unable to find signal handler or something. I'll go back to it Sunday I guess.
  • Whee, tomorrow I'm going to hang out with a couple of guys from school, whom I haven't seen since spring. Should be a good day.
  • I guess I did go into work today...Didn't get much done.
  • Hmm, one of the household computers seems to be randomly deleting files...Windows was completely buggered. Reinstalled. Seems better now. I don't like Windows' file association system, way too clumsy to edit things or fix stuff it trashed. For some reason zip files were associated with MS Help...Rrriigghhtt.
  • Darn, it's supposed to get warm again tomorrow. I liked 60-75 degrees F in July! I really don't like Minnesota weather...Evilly hot in the summer, similarly cold in the winter. Gah.
  • New music; Shotgun Innocence from Savatage, a demo from Edge of Thorns. Cool. Want more. Mogwai Fear Satan by Mogwai, really weird ambient stuff with a very strong tonal center. I want to go find a guitar and play along, just so I can hit the tonic once in a while.
  • I should stop eating out at Subway and buy cds with my extra cash. Yeah. Something like that.
  • Night. Going to sleep to the soothing sounds of Radiohead.

Back to the bullets

  • Late morning...Took Tylenol PM last night for a splitting headache and other ailments. Feel better this morning.
  • Goodish voice lesson this afternoon. Browsed a CD shop, heard some weird instrumental fuzz-rock playing. Wondered what it was. Turns out it's Mogwai..Gotta get me some of that. Napstered one song.
  • I was browsing Iain's diary entries, just because he's an interesting guy, and noticed that he mentioned Mogwai more than once. SHall have to talk to him about his musical taste.
  • Funny. Very often when I've just heard of something new, a concept, word, place, band, person, frob, I'll see it pop up someplace and recognize it. Just chance, but it's still trippy when it happens.
  • I was going to say something else here..
  • Working on a Netscape -> Galeon bookmark conversion tool. Got it almost done except for Perl's evil XML packages, they're way convoluted and overengineered. I can't find a simple "Encode this text nicely for an XML attribute". Grr. Surprised to find not 1, not 2, but 3 different Perl modules to work with Netscape bookmarks. Boggle.
  • Oh, and XML::Parser doesn't seem to work cleanly with XML::Writer. Double boggle.
  • Skipped piano lesson and went out doing some proselyting Latter-day Saint style with one of our missionaries. Met a lady who is a Jehovah's Witness, and all she wanted to do was battle points of doctrine. Learned afterwards that JW's aren't allowed by their religion to take books or info about other religions, especially the Book of Mormon. Logical oddness like that bugs me. If JW is a true religion, then what's the harm of learning about others? Boggle again.
  • Grrr, IE's backspace binding just bit me again. Glad it keeps the contents of forms across cached pages, though.
  • Off to read new SciAm and get some sleep.
  • Wow, this is getting long.

I found Advogato through Salo...er..wait..

Dum de dum. Went to work late today. Got some stuff done. Locked my keys in the car yesterday, felt pretty smart about that. Got it open in about 10 minutes with a coathanger though. Got Galeon working. Using it as my primary brower on the laptop side. Needs cookies and ssl support though. Better transfer stats would be nice, too. Oh, and lots of other stuff I could theoretically code but figure "why bother" because someone else is probably already doing it and could do it better than I. There's my cynical runon sentence for tonight. Hope you enjoy it! Mozilla's menus are slower than Gtk's. Ugh.

OK, enough mindless blathering. I think I'm catching a cold or something, so I need some sleep..

PS: IE is stupid to have the backspace key bound to the Back button.

Nice relaxing day today..Napped from 3-6. Should do some work tomorrow, got some easy database stuff coming up. Kind of like my music review system (which I still haven't got online), it's just put-together-the-pieces perl/SQL.

Ook, this is too much canned pineapple for one person. Acid, bad for mouth.

Picked up OK Computer by Radiohead the other day. I have a distinct feeling it'll take more than a few casual listens to grok it.

Saw X-Men last night with a buddy of mine. Fun stuff. I thought the mixture of realism (beginning description of human evolution) was silly when compared to the actual mutations shown in the movie.. Oh well, it was fun anyway. I wished they'd made it longer and went into more detail about Wolverine's past. Guess that's for a sequel, or something.

  • Off day today...Went into work at about 3. Skipped voice lessons, I had a feeling I wouldn't be singing very well. Darn this Deus Ex game. Making me stay up late still, even though I've beat it once.
  • Headache
  • Got some cds recently...Queensryche - Operation: Mindcrime (thanks to dave camp), Beethoven's Last Night by Trans-Siberian Orchestra (see "Awesome music" below), and Transatlantic, some supergroup made up of Neil Morse, Mike Portney, Roine Stolt, and Pete Trewavas..Very prog, with some Beatles and Pink Floyd thrown in.
  • Poof

Attack of the bulleted lists:

  • Whee. I'm going to see Dream Theater live next month! I'm pumped.
  • Finished Deus Ex. Dang, what a great game.
  • I have new faith in M$ tech support. They're going to replace my broken Intellimouse, no trouble at all.
  • Cripes, it's hot and humid here. I hate Minnesota. You have to suffer heat and humidity, and not even have tropical beaches to enjoy. Why do people live here, anyway?

I've been spending a lot of time on a CGI/Perl-based music review system, so I can write a little blurb about each album in my small collection. Dunno how useful it will be, but it's fun and gives me something to do. Inspired by Ram's Music Ramblings and The War Against Silence

In other news, my office floor at work is being re-waxed. Thus, I guess I have a few days off while it dries..

Welcome to the next voyueristic peak into Tim's exciting life.

  • Started cleaning my room up. Pulled everything out from the corners, stacked some boxes on the shelf, and arranged my books. Looks messier than it was before...Couple more hours and it'll be good. I miss having a closet. Keeps me honest though.
  • Check out The Hunger Site. 8-10 sponsers donate a certain amount of food to the UN (could be worse) food folks for each click per client per day.
  • Ordered Deus Ex today. Awesome game.
  • Must practice voice and piano songs tomorrow. Lessons coming up.
  • Learning JavaScript for work. Joy joy. Grr, it can't draw on an image. Oh well, I handle that.
  • Ok, it's 2:00, time to sleep.

Another bulleted list because I don't feel like making coherent sentences tonight.

  • Finished some vocal recording for The Castle. Crappy laptop soundcard butchered it. Must grab master. It's hard acting voice when your co-stars are across the Atlantic ocean.
  • Awesome music. More awesome music.
  • Trampolines are fun. They can also leave a crick in your neck if you land wrong.
  • Been mapping for Unreal Tournament. It's fun.
  • Rain can suck. So can lack of rain. Weird weather this summer.
  • Hey boc! My menu panel gets overly tall when I disable "Make buttons flush with panel edge". Maybe this should be a per-panel option.
Ok, night.

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