You know...

...I've got a lot of stories to tell from the last ten days.

Hell, from the last ten hours, even...

Have I mentioned how REALLY REALLY GOOD it feels to be all done with school this semester?

[photo credit to JT, I think]

Well, life is officially moving faster than the speed of blog. Even when you have a tablet pc with always-on internet with you where ever you go.

Posting's been light because of finals week.

We only have two left - Thursday Lab, Friday Philosophy - and the friends from everywhere else that are coming for finals are starting to trickle in, which makes the already-undesirable process of studying even more unatainable. Yikes.

I keep forgetting what these are called. But I need a good bottle jack now, since my siscors-jack...um, split...

Actually that thing I posted about my last class being in 18 minutes wasn't true. Which is pretty funny, because it means that even down to the last class of the semester, I still don't know my schedule.

Ah, what can you do?

In other news, I am pleased that when it comes time to do my laundry, it only takes two loads.

Now if I could only get rid of all the other junk in my life...

Actually, I only have one computer here now... and ten hard drives with 1.34 terrabytes of storage space...

WELL, it's 18 minutes until my last class of the semester. It should be no problem making it to this one, and then's there's no danger of flunking out due to absences. Whew. Because BOY DO I HAVE A STORY about making it to the last, and vitally important, seminar last night.

We were caught in floods, rivers, tumbling mud-and-rock cliffs, huge tree trunks... and about 15 feet of garden hose. More on this later.

I routinely forget that I blog. There was a time when it was prominent in my thoughts, but recently I have been pulling open my blog page only to gaze in wonderment that it's only been two days since my last post. I guess it comes with the times and the circumstances: finals time for this semester, and unreliable internet access.

That's the extent of my observations for now, but I will console you with this thought:

- PM

So the 150's open from Santa Paula up to campus, and there is only one stoplight in there, as opposed to three between school and Ojai.

MG bought this guy's car, and it's a gud 'un so far...

I'm writing my sonata at my new favorite coffee shop in Ventura that Coffee Boy himself recommended: The Underground.

Backattack!

Here we are, just arrived. We took a whole load of stuff up in the bed of the same '97 toyota in which I smashed a window over Easter break, so long ago.

No broken windows or smashed cell phones this time.

We made it safe back down here after a whirlwind weekend of reunions, family, and the descent of the Holy Ghost. Though it was not Pentecost Sunday, at my little brother's confirmation today there was significant Holy Spirit content in the readings... I was his sponsor for the Sacrament...

Back here we have a week of classes left; finals start on Saturday next. This semester's flown by... I've got a sonata to write/finish writing, and a lot of partying studying to do before everyone leaves finals.

Driving through San Fran today I wished that it were already Summer. I didn't want to come back down, go to this last week of classes, or take these tests. But oh well. I will finish this semester on a good note... and then come back in the fall for a final year.

Thing'sar g'ud.

Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson

Home!

Made it up the coast in six and a half hours...

Got some socializing to do now, so blog atcha later...

Some short phrases that GoStats found led to my blog:

I found this somewhat amusing...

This is the only usb 2.0 to sata adapter that I have found, short of a $65 case. I bought an external sata case only to realize that it just passed the sata through from the drive and didn't give me a usb i/o option. But now that is solved, and it is better this way, because i would rather use external sata anyway, where it's available...

It feels like forever since I've blogged. Maybe it just feels that way because everything feels like its been forever when you get up at 6:37 am every morning. Which is what I have been doing.

I also saw a rainbow in the sky, in the middle of the day, on saturday, where no rainbow could be.

It wasn't a 'bow,' it was just a shimmering, iridescent beam of color, hanging in the air like a sign from God.

It was beautiful, and I'd never seen anything like it before, and every word I type right now look like it's mispelled, so I'm going to bed. But it was awesome.

Well...

I wrote a Philosophy paper today that was the epitome of "whipping out a paper"... I wrote 1800 words in a few hours, inspired by the Holy Spirit... On a topic I'd been thinking about for a long time, the relation of Catholic moral philosophy to Aristotle's Ethics... The paper only covered part of the first book, and was limited even in that, but it turned out okay...

In other news, we bid goobye to the G's in Ojai (Achilles). They are moving off to Boston, and we'll miss them dearly...

On the bright side, I obtained some furniture, but it's a sorry replacement for their company... We will miss Achilles and Upstairs Wife... Especially next year...

Bloggin' 'sbeen light this side of the fence, because of spending a lot of time in Ventura this weekend... Made it to morning mass several times in the last few days, and the second-to-last week of the school year dawns in a few hours.

I'm going to fall asleep listening to Tom Waits... I think I have enough of his stuff to have it still playing tomorrow morning when I wake up. G'night all...

More Oliver Twist: Have any of you guys seen any of the film versions (there are a ton of 'em)... LEt me know...

more Oliver Twist links...

I still haven't seen Oliver Twist, the musical, so next time you hear of it showing somewhere near you, let me know. But I'm loving the music...

- 2.5 hours of sleep
- 7 am mass
- 2 cups of coffee
- 2 WILD classes
and the first SEAL workout I've done in months...

I feel pretty good.

+ And we have a jam session scheduled for tonight, afterwhich I will fall over and sleep like mad.

My pulse is higher than it should be during the workout, and I'm sucking wind a little harder than I should be, and I'm only doing a 10-12-14 pyramid, but I feel pretty good within those confines...

I've realized that I have some music which is purely weight-room music, and I think that is because the struggle in working out is mind over matter, the spirit against the flesh, reason against physics, order against chaos. And adding some chaotic music in the background heightens the intensity of that struggle. You stuggle against the flesh and the music at the same time.

Still, that's 174 push-ups (diamonds, regulars, and wides) in 35-36 minutes, which isn't that bad. The Hud and I were doing upwards of 300 in an hour (20-22-24's or 18-20-22's), but still...

Things that help studying in school & class (some counter-intuitive, some not so):

- Studying (though from 2-4:30 am is not the best time slot for that)
- Waking up early (this really helps)
- Morning Mass (I was running on God & adrenaline in class this morning, and based on the studying I did last night, it worked out pretty well)
- Having gotten to Calculus (I HATE doing physics WITHOUT using Calculus - besides being frustratingly hard, it's mindless to ignore a powerful tool/aid for no real reason...)
- Falling*/Being in Love

*I don't like that language because it sounds like it's out of control, and Love is far wider than that... It is the ultimate control of will that allows True Love - that allows surrender of control in order to sacrifice... for the Beloved... Think Christ & the Church...

Also, going back to the working-out thing, there is something to being in good shape and keeping good posture. In a way, you can simply "will" yourself to be strong, and you will. Sitting with good posture requires using certain muscles to pull yourself upright, and it helps other muscles out by giving them good leverage to act. So there are two benefits: you get actually more strong by flexing certain muscles or muscle groups (almost) all the time, and you get practically stronger by moving in the right ways (you do more with what you got). I somewhat overdo it, and am tense all the time, but that ends up translating into strength, eventually. It's all about getting in these little, good habits.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

You know what I did today?

I order Mother's Day Flowers.

Eleven and a half hours, two hundred fifty miles, four brake pads, and less one scissors jack later... We still don't have a car for MG.

The first car looked pretty - Honda Civic EX, but it was a little bit pimped out: aftermarket taillight covers, air intake, and springs. It also didn't have a finishing coat of paint, just the dull matte finish, like a primer or something.

Those types of modifications immediately made me think that it had been raced, or at least thrashed... The engine, clutch and everything seemed fine, but there were some weird noises that the dude said were due to the aftermarket intake...

The second car was a salvage title, which the slimeball dude didn't tell us on the phone, so that was right out...

But we did stop in Pasadena and see EM briefly, had a pint and chatted.

Lots of adventures so far, what with a bum who gave us advice on where to feed ourselves, and a dude who was riding around on a motor-bike-stylie-thingie that was truely far out. I wish I had a camera. He had taken a regular push bike and built (out of foil and some structural material) it into the shape of a Honda Goldwing, complete with a battery, dual radio antennas, a radio attached to these antennas (and blaring music), but the crowning glory of the bike was the duak, slowly-blinking tail light/turn signals. It was awesome.

Sitting in a parking lot in Long Beach, waiting for a car to show up, that we are going to look at and maybe buy for MG.

And blogging, of course... Via the Cingular wireless card, outside the Coin Laundry and Donut shop...

- Robert Browning, Two in the Campagna

If you haven't seen Gizoogle, it's pretty funny, if you're into that sort of thing...

I want to start doing an-essay-a-day in academia land, just so I'm writing and re-processing the information that I read and discuss in class. I used to do that, back in the day when my father and I were designing my curriculum.

And an added benefit of doing that would be that when it comes times (such as it is now) to pen a paper, it wouldn't seem like it had been so long since I wrote a cohesive, concise, scholastic document. I haven't been writing much, at least not things of that length - I have been blogging, I guess - and I was thinking about that at the beginning of this year.

We are going to start a new clothing line, based on That Anonymous College that we all gravitate around, so email me any ideas you have for t-shirts and stuff. That crazy girl I've been hanging around lately gets the credit for that idea.

I've got so many things to blog about, and so little time to do it!

I spoke with a friend of mine over the weekend who gets paid to blog.

I bought a collection of Evelyn Waugh's travel stories, Waugh Abroad, which you can buy at Amazon for a lot cheaper than I paid for it at B&N when I was there last night.

I've been thinking a lot about Catholic moral philosophy, what with the paper I'm writing on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and the recent passing of John Paul II, and so on...

In fact, I've been writing a lot of blogs, but not posting them, so I will be posting some of those later today I think, maybe over the course of this week.

Anyways, Eveyln Waugh is defintely a kindred spirit in the search for the perfect representation of formulated Catholic moral philosophy...

A kindred spirit indeed.
(emphasis added by me)

If you guys and gals haven't seen this, you're missing out. And NOBODY wants to miss out...

Things have been too hectic here to sit down and blog, even when I'm carrying my tablet pc everywhere with me.

- I slept 15 hours tuesday night, from 10pm to 3pm the next day.

- Clara and I biked (push-bikes) into Santa Paula, down the rancher's rocky road, got Garden Market Burritos (The Best Burritos in Town), Turbo-Liter-Margaritas at La Cabana's, and stopped by the F's. We then borrow a flashlight, and biked back, uphill, in the dark, finishing the rest of the margaritas that we had saved in my water bottle on the way.

- Still studying like mad.

- Didn't do my taxes on time.

- Had a crazy-wonderful jam session yesterday at Toque's apartment last night, as per our new friday tradition. We got some new folk, and new song this time, which was good, and some of our old standby's are starting to sound really good, IMHO.

* My room is the coldest place on campus. The air conditioning is set low enough for all my electronics to superconduct. I haven't been able to figure out where the air conditioning controls are in the building, but I'm sure that they are set to "Minnesota Winter" or something like that. And then I leave the windows open all evening and come back at night and getting into bed is like laying down on an iceberg, which isn't something you generally do without clothing...

* My banjo was having all sorts of tone-quality problems. I took a ruler out and measured the strings and found out where the (adjustable bridge should be, and moved it back there. I check it using the old compare the 12th-fret harmonic to the 12th fret trick, and tuned it close to perfect. The banjo sounds MUCH better now. I've got to figure out how to fix the north bridge-like thing for the 5th string, though, because it's not functional at all.

- Townes Van Zandt, No Place to Fall

Friday night, over at Toque's we had a big music bash. The idea, which he and I formulated last week sometime was to expand our musial investigations to include more people. So we scheduled a jam session every friday night, from 6-10pm, at his apartment in Ojai. The first one was a smashing success. I brought five instruments myself alone, not including harmonicas.

Saturday I drove around Ventura all day, just kind of chilling, relaxing, unwinding... and spending money. I bought a new tube of toothpaste, and some fingerpicks. And some other things, stuff for the car, brake pads, a few switches and lugs.

Saturday night was Mass time in Ojai - the 7:30pm Spanish Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Parish. I think it's my new favorite Mass. Then it was time to hang out in Ojai, and later Ventura, for a good portion of the night, and back to catch the tail end of the Freshman dance on campus.

Sunday was devoted to sleeping, and then the afternoon/evening study groups, in between which I worked on installing my tablet pc in my car. I'll post pictures later, when I get a hold of a digital camera, because it's going to be the cutting edge as far and car-computer technology is concerned.

I had some great bloggable quotes, but I keep forgeting them. I did say "I'm blogging this" twice, but I can't remember the right phrasing for the things I heard, and that was what made them funny, so maybe next time. I've gotta start writing this stuff down.

How long before eBay and Google merge? You saw it first here...

My Thunderbird has an easy way to switch SMTP servers! I love it! Outlook move over.

Thanks to these sites:
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=106&vid=122&category=
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Multiple_SMTP_Servers

WE've got about a month left of school, and I've started the whole studying-thing pretty intensely. I'm studying a classroom from 9-11pm every night, as well as leading a study group (for Lab) three times a week. I'm loving it, too.

In Seminar, we are deep into Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, in Lab we are studying Newton's Principia... Music Theory is going pretty well, too - our professor has developed her own system of analyzing music, and it is truely brilliant and mesmerizing.

Math has been somewhat boring this year, but we are now in the basics of Calculus, which is always fun. Leibniz and Newton are fascinating to read, about how they discovered "The Calculus." I've got some of the old books out, and I'm going into some of the more advanced Calculus that I used to do, prompted by the class to rediscover it for myself...

In Theology we have moved to Thomas Aquinas's treatise on law (contained in the Summa), and it is interesting as well, though I was more interested in the purely Theological readings that were the bulk of this year.

In Philosophy, Aristotle's Politics seem more accessible (practical?) than the Ethics, about which my opinion is somewhat undecided. I have a paper to write on it that is due soon, so maybe that will help evoke or codify my theory or theories on that work.

So that's my current academic life in a nutshell... as far as it relates to my class life...

I've ... been ... studying.

Either I'm becoming a chocolate klepto with realizing it or someone slipped a Hersey's kiss in my pocket when I wasn't looking, because I just found one there.

from Thomas Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century

I got shot by a BB gun three times yesterday. I was on the roof, firing airsoft pellets at a few people on the ground, who were firing back. Suddenly, JF appeared, armed with what looked like a pellet rifle. I shot at him a few times, and he tried to pick me off the roof, but I kept ducking below the fold, and then popping up and shooting at him from a different location.

I popped up one time, looking to fire at him again, and he was gone. Suddenly RF, who was up on the roof with screamed, and I turned to my left. JF was on the stairs to the roof. He leapt to the roof, and pulled the rifle to his should, Eastwood-style. I fired at him, and pulled the bolt back, reloading the chamber. Suddenly I heard the crack of him firing and felt the impact in my side.

"Get down, get down," I yelled to RF, and I dove behind an air duct, firing the pistol as I dove. I belly-crawled up to the vent, peeked over it, aimed, and fired, but he had a bead on me. As I ducked behind the foot-high vent, I attempted to peek under it, through the two-inch gap, but as I did, a BB went flying through that gap and hit my forearm. That was too close to my eyes, so I became angrified, and, covering my face with one arm, I leapt up and charged JF.

He fired once more as I was approached, and hit me in the ribs, and I was too close to him. I through my pistol down, and tried to catch him. He evaded my lunge, and sped off down the roof. He ran past the air duct, and I slowed down, skidding sideways slightly because of the gravel. He grabbed the chimney, pulled himself around it, and leapt to the ground. I was only one step behind him, or I would have leapt on top of him from the roof. I leapt down behind him, chased him across the street, and tackled him. And that was that.

All in good fun. I think we should try paintball guns next. Those would be good in an urban setting, and we could get the kind that dries into a powder and then washes away.

Let me explain this a little bit.

Easter vacation.

A week off school.

400 miles to my parents house.

And since my lil' brother took the car, I've got to thumb a ride to my own home.

Which didn't prove to be too hard, sincee, this girl happened to have a truck, a free weekend, and acrazy streak.

So we threw our bags in plastic in the bed, gently placed our beer in the back, and crammed all five of us into the cab. That's right, one guy and four girls in TEENY-TINY little Toyota Tacoma.

And thus we proceeded north.

Somewhere's near Pismo Beach, the girls in the back where I was were playing "corners," and I was talking on the phone.

The car careened right around a turn, and they shoved me in the ribs. I quickly grew tired of this, and fought back, bracing my left elbow on the quarter window (in the extended cab).

I pushed with all my might, and three things happened:

1) My elbow busted the glass, and the window exploded outwards

2) My arm stretched out through the glass, and my hand released the cell phone

3) My brother, who I was speaking with on the phone, heard screams, screeching, the great noise of the wind, and then silence

My phone met its end at 90 mph on Highway 101, just south of Pismo Beach.

Epilogue

So we cleaned the glass out of the car and the bed, and duct-taped a pillow in the window frame to stifle the noise.

We fixed the window in San Fran later on in the trip... And I got a "new" cell phone, stolen from the cell phone donations box at my local Cingular store...

This girl pinched my butt tonight with salad tongs.

Coming soon...

I'm going to bed. I'll have to come back tomorrow to get this damn vpn box up and running. It's light out, and I'm going to say the rosary on my way home. I hope I don't get stuck in commute traffic, 'cause the irony of that might just kill tired old me.

Okay, so I've sorted out most of the difficulties caused by my hosting company crashing the server and then install PHP 5.0.3 (or whatever it is now). Even The Genius Tech Blog is looking somewhat normal. I had to do some crazy, middle-of-the-night coding, though.

So it's 4:14 am, I just won a $20-something and a $30-something pot. I've officially moved up to the $1/$2 tables.

I'm sitting in an office waiting for a computer to come back to life... A computer that wasn't even supposed to be worked on today, or broken... It is now COMPLETELY fried.

I was, um, "visited," by a few friends while I was working earlier this evening. After the usual pleasantries, and the much-needed software, dinner, and beer that they brought, all insanity ensued.

We had the office-supply-war-to-end-all-office-supply-wars, with semi-automatic staplers, and white-out, and thousands of permanent markers.

Needless to say, I am tired, covered in sharpe, and have rugburns on my elbows.

I don't know what to say. Life's been insane lately. I'll post my (many) new stories soon.

Bedtime-night-before-last: 5:30 am
Bedtime-last-night: 6:30 am
Bedtime-tonight: Not looking good.

So I haven't been posting for a few days...

But that's just because the days have been so action-packed.

I have a new study habit. I love my new study habit. I think I'll name it "Cuddles" and give it lots and lots of hugs, and beer when its good.

While the government's involvement in family matters is a delicate issue, but... this was just a family ssue too, right?

If you are setting up a society, non-interference by the government in personal matters is regulated by those individuals not breaking the laws of the state.

Removing food & water from a helpless person is murder. Murder is against the law. No one has a right to murder someone else, even if it is with their permission. End of discussion.

Book Game

Here are the rules
1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog, along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it. Just grab what is closest!

Okay, I stole this from Nevermore.

The selection was taken from Your Word, O Lord: Meditations for College Students, written by our own Father Buckley.

UPDATE: My hair STILL smells like smokewood.

CRAZY dreams last night.

A three-day week, and then San Francisco and home for Easter.

And we're going to have a great Kant seminar tonight because I studied my head off.

Now I just need to write that philosophy paper...

Oh yeah, and nekkid blogging at 9:15 am...

I read Kant in my room all day today. I have eight hours of memories of how the sunshine and the clouds looked on the hills...

I also feel a little stir-crazy, like labratory-insane.

I don't like living here.

Man does not live on bread and peanut butter alone.

Unless of course he is in a college dorm...or the navy.

Seeing how the country is rapidly progressing into the so-called "nanny state," where government and regulation replaces common-sense, it seems to me that they should start posting signs...

You know how those little seat-protectors in the bathrooms always say on the box: "Provided by the Management for your protection" ?

Well, I think the government ought to start putting up signs wherever these "nanny state" laws exists that say:

PROVIDED BY THE PROTECTION FOR YOUR MANAGMENT.

Because it fits.

Due to the rather liquid weather we've been having down in in "sunny so-cal," it's pretty hard to find, outside, firewood that doesn't resemble kelp. It also makes it the dangerous season for falling branches, as we witnessed last night, when an 80-pound, six-foot-long section of solid oak fell from 120 feet to the ground, landing about 20 feet away.

But anyways, we camped at a campground that had recently been overflow for the riverbed, so it was nothing but rocks and mud. We ran electric christmas lights off the car, which was having AC "issues," and kept making them blink randomly. We had tea-lights, and lanterns, and wine, and loud swing music. And lots of smouldering "firewood," or "smokewood," as would be more appropriate.

And so, various flammable substances were "applied" to the "smokewood," in order to convince it that it was no longer aquatic matter...

And I still smell like burnt flesh, even after my shower, and my hair (that wasn't burnt off) reeks like smokewood.

DT [on the phone]: Yeah, Yeah...

AM [striking a match, dropping it]: Um...

DT [noticing the match is still burning, picks it up]: Yeah, yeah...

AM [noticing that DT is about to put the match on the fire]: Uh, I would stand back further before...

Six foot column of fire.

I always thought "singed eyebrows" was a over-dramatisation. But it's not. My chin-hairs are severly singed, and I don't have any hair on the back of my hand either. I guess I was talking on the phone and not paying attention when the "firestarter" was applied... It's kindof like a sunburn, but I got it at 9:00 pm...

NEWS FLASHES:

- Roomsound plays at the OBP tonight, 9:00 pm.

- The "gate" down below is campus on campus property, and we are NOT allowed to drink there.

- Four "prefects" thought they were the Gestapo two nights ago, and swarmed up to the rocks, but we had checked out, so there was nothing they could do, punitively. They were carrying those big, shiny maglites, but they were lacking those nifty midnight black, storm-trooper helmets that the S.S. wore.

- I made it through another week.

I've been having a lot of blog-thoughts but I haven't been posting them. I think I fired my brain. Hurmph, "fried." Anyways, perhaps I will post again soon. Pray for my brain.

Been working all night up in Ojai. Got a curfew extension, but that doesn't help with being awake in class tomorrow! I'm just about on my way back now... I didn't study enough, and I put in like 6-8 hours of work, as well as eating two pizzas (with some help from DC and JF), drinking a lot of Mate, and one G&T (for good measure). My back aches from sitting in a weird position for a long time. My teeth need brushing. That's about it on my end. I'm going to say my rosary on the way back, and hit the bed hard, and try my best to get up in time to study and attend class. It's not easy being me, let me tell ya...

We've been having some good times here.

I dumped a bucket of ice and ice water on the "Dean of Students"'s head last night. I also danced on a table in the "coffee shop" until it collapsed under my weight and sent empty bottles flying as I rode it, surfer-like, to the ground.I was accompanied in each of these "stunts" by a different female accomplice.

We had kind of a wild turn-in-your-thesis party for the seniors in the "coffee shop" with $300 of Trader Joe's-bought booze.

It was great.

The word on the street is that the Dean wants to kick my ass.

More later.

I missed winning a $17.5 pot and a $20 pot by clicking on the "call" button and not having it work and by folding - both with 8's - and then I bet properly, and get killed by a bastid sporting pocket rockets. Disnam.

Hey let's design a building, realize that it has to have fire doors on every corridor to meet code, build it, and then pretend that those doors don't exist! Can we say rational...?

So I loaded up a bunch of blogs (my usual daily-reading-blogs) and that killed my interent connection to my two party poker tables. Damn EDGE internet!

The last few days have been awesome in terms of playing music. Last night we were on the beach in Ventura, with a guitar amp plugged into the inverter in my car, running off of the deep cycle battery. We played the electric git (along with a few others) into the wee hours of the night, and then got stuck in the fog coming back.

Tonight we played in Ojai, with DC, AM, PT, and EJ... It was great. A bodhron, harp player, two guitars, and a mando, and a few other vocalists. A few of these songs we can go pro with, unashamed.

Also, I've been having an uncanny experience with getting the same hands while playing twin tables of Party Poker. Two sets of pocket queens?! Arrgh.

I won $50 in the first day, and have been losing it slowly ever since (the last 3 days).

* Yesterday had PERFECT weather. Warm, but a slight breeze that felt perfect, cool on your face, like nature was gently, softly, supplely kissing you...

* We watched The Big Lewbowski at The 'Stein.

* Today it's bloody hot - the Santa Anna winds are blowing, straight from the furnaces of Hell! But the air conditioning units are working overtime inside, and some rooms are so cool you could hang meat.

I'm recovering someone's senior thesis from a corrupt floppy disk, and I love the way that the block-by-block recovery software finds nearly 6 megabytes on a 1.44 floppy! More data than is possible to exist exists there, because the deleted files still exist! There are 96 files on the disk, but it appeared (when it was working ok) to have only one file. I'm not sure what the metaphysical implications of this are, but...

Blogging from my Tablet. Turns out the whole problem with it and why I sent it back was a trivial, easily-fixed problem: incompatible, after-market ram. I've got some things to take up with the fella who sold me it...

It seems to be missing the bluetooth module, and running without that 512 stick of RAM is not cool. However, it did work *very* well yesterday; I put it in the car and put it through it's paces. Music system, dvd-player, gps, all excellant. I just need to come up with a (semi) permanent mount that holds it in place...

I just made $25 real money in the first 5 minutes playing party poker. Can you say hooked?

* After working on a client's laptop computer for an unproductive two weeks, I fixed the problem and promptly ran over it with my car within an hour.

So, I've got good news, and REALLY terrible news...

* My knees still hurt.

* I missed all my classes yesterday, but I was on-time and awake in my 8:30 am Lab class this morning. Does that count for something?

AAAAAIIEEEEE!

"Yesterday," Part III (March 6th)

After dinner, still at the F's, we somehow got tangled up in a little "engagement."

Three of us (Neoteronous, NailinCoffin, and myself) were pinned in a room. Guns were scare, but I had a plastic BB gun, and NailinCoffin had some kind of dart gun.

There were two doors, the south one going outside, the north one deeper into the house, and an auxiliary room.

"NiC, get that door open," I barked, gesturing to the south one with my loaded glock.

He lithely moved to the door, and deftly swung it open.

BAH-WOOOSH! RF was squatting right outside the door, and covered the whole room with super-soaker fire. NiC, frantically slammed the door, and breathlessly leaned up behind it.

I yanked the doorknob on the other door, and glanced around into the hallway.

PAK PAK PAK! Semi-automatic BB's zipped past my nose. I slammed my door. Surrounded!

It seems like all my belongings are systematically being wrecked, and then compensated for. First my camera, then my snowboards. What's next? It'd better not be my car (knock on wood). Perhaps I have simply over-extended myself materially, and I cannot support having all these material belongings. Thus, they collapse because of their own weight, and I get reimbursed.
Hmm.

In other news, the Chess Club that MG and I started is moving along. The first tournament commences tomorrow. The games are all to be played with our time clocks, and on regulation boards.

I also need new knees. I wore my tennis shoes to class today, because my dress shoes do not give me enough support, and I have doctor-issued orthopedic supports in my tennis shoes.

We also had two out of three classes (the morning ones) canceled today.

So I played chess all morning.

I need to get off campus this afternoon, methinks.

Why do people always ask me "Would you go back to [Kenya]?"

Is the answer to that question some kind of all-telling, knowledge-producing fact?

A few weeks after we left gangs of robbers (twelve of them), armed with AK-47's or equivalent attacked the house that we were staying, and the main house, and beat the crap out of several of the priests, causing one of them to die. A bullet fired from one of the guns miraclously missed a visiting American.

The guards to the next-door compound cowered as the robbers strode through their compound and began their assualt, and were equally ineffective when the robbers strode out again. The security company and the police force were late and pointlessly ineffective. When they went in pursuit of the robbers, they purposely drove in the wrong direction to avoid conflict.

Would I go back? Right now? Yeah, but only if I bring one of these along.

I'll have to think about it for a while, otherwise.

My brain broke today, and I am not able to think very well. Living equals confusion. I have short term memory loss. I am unable to process situations, or numbers. I think I am going to go to bed soon.

I have been sleeping regular hours, and getting regular exercise, and not imbibing tobacco (except last night) or excessive amounts of alcohol. Maybe my body is adversely reacting to "normal" parameters. I dunno. It's not pleasant.

I think sleep and water will solve it all.

And, on top of it, my blog's all messed up (because of my hosting company) and I haven't had time to fix it. There were some other things bothering me, but I can't remember what they were. Oh, and short-term memory loss is bothering me, too.

Dear Sir,

That is all.