Old
News: September 26, 2003 to October 10, 2003
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10:40
a.m. [GMT-8:00]
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10 Oct.
2003 (Fri); Post #386
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Spent
6 hours driving and taking pictures and picking/ editing pictures...
oy. Yakima's nicer than I thought it was. Benton City I've been
to before. Wanted to stop and snap landscape photos a few times,
but I was on the clock. The pictures below (except the pumpkins)
were taken at the property locations, just in different directions.
Phill, Hanwool, Ryan, maybe Justin, and I are going to go see the
9:40 pm showing of Kill Bill tonight at the Carmike. Anyway, my
pizza just got here (from Lil' Brick House Pizza - the new place
next to Hayden's).
The pumpkins Phill and I got.
A view from somewhere in Benton City.
A view from somewhere on Summitview in Yakima.
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10:40
a.m. [GMT-8:00]
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10 Oct.
2003 (Fri); Post #386
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Yesterday
I went and bought burger-makings at Yokes. Cooked the patties on
my George Foreman grill; very good. I like my burgers with tartar
sauce on them. At about 8:00 pm, Phill and I went to Yokes to buy
pumpkins. Get this: pumpkins are only 9¢ per lb. there and,
because their scales don't go over 30 lbs., the most you can pay
for a pumpkin (whatever the size) is $2.70. We each got an extremely
large pumpkin. I'll post pictures later.
This morning for breakfast I used the hotplate I got from my grandma
to grill some mushrooms, zucchini, and Polish sausage. Then I mixed
in two eggs and some black pepper (I don't know how to make omelets,
or I would have done that). It was very good. Had it with some of
the orange juice Drew/ Ryan left here last week.
Now I'm gonna take a shower before I drive out to photograph some
properties in Yakima and Benton City.
Cheeseburger with lettuce, ketchup, Dijon mustard, and tartar sauce.
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9:44
p.m. [GMT-8:00]
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7 Oct.
2003 (Tue); Post #385
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So
I was asleep for just an hour, having a weird dream where I was
in a Super Mario video game, when I was awoken by a phone call.
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Me: |
Hello? |
| Kid: |
It's
still hot. |
| Me: |
Pardon? |
| Kid: |
It's
still hot. |
| Me: |
What? |
| Kid: |
Oh.
Oops. |
Anyway,
then I had an appointment with Patty Cooper (Bill's widow), so I
was at her house for three hours and change installing stuff on
her PC and showing her how to use her new scanner. It's really amazing;
it does a 200 dpi full page scan in less than 3 seconds (had to
install a USB 2.0 PCI card to take advantage of its great speed).
And it can scan slides and film negatives, which most scanners can't.
A new Law & Order: SVU is coming up, so I'm gonna go watch that.
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1:04
p.m. [GMT-8:00]
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7 Oct.
2003 (Tue); Post #384
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From
a Penny Arcade post by Tycho late last night:
What should I see on CNN Money this morning but
an announcement by Vivendi Universal that Half life 2 will be
delayed until April 2004, reportedly so they can rewrite the code
that was stolen. Curses!
Argh. Why do they need to rewrite the code just because it was stolen?
To stop ppl from using it to hack and cheat, I guess...? If that's
the case, they should just leave it alone and concentrate on getting
the game out, then release a patch later on for that purpose.
Let me spend the time it takes you to rewrite playing through the
single player missions and having LAN games. So far the release
date has gone from September 30th to February 04 to April 04. All
in the space of about two weeks. At this rate, HL2 should be out
sometime in the 2040s.
A quote from a very recently posted message on the Transhuman Space
list:
If it helps, I had this conversation with my friendly
local game store owner (who's also a huge TS fan), and while he
was sort of in agreement, he also rolled his eyes and said "You
are _so_ a Duncanite."
It made me laugh. Signing up for the Transhuman
Space list is easy, even easier if you already have a Yahoo
account. There's some really interesting messages on there. Sounds
like a PBeM campaign may be starting up. Another super-neat THS
link: the TeralogosNews
Archives. I kept overlooking it every time I pulled up the THS
web site. Good stuff.
Anyway, I'm tired. Gonna go read some THS stuff and take a nap.
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10:59
p.m. [GMT-8:00]
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6 Oct.
2003 (Mon); Post #383
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This
is a historic day: I've finally moved my web site to a paid hosting
service and have claimed my own personal domain name. The new URL
is www.hjo3.net. I'm tempted to design a new template in honor of
this event, but my desire is tempered by the recent discovery of
a nasty Dreamweaver 4.0 bug that prevents me from applying changes
to all my templated HTML files simultaneously. Anyway. Eventually,
I think I'd like to switch the site over to some PHP system or something,
if only to reduce the odds of producing errors mucking around with
the code every day.
Here's another picture from Sunday's scenic flight; Ice Harbor dam.
(I found a combination of image filters that really cut through
the haze.)
Ice Harbor dam from 2,000 feet.
Don't forget to update your bookmarks! www.hjo3.net!
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6:30
p.m. [GMT-8:00]
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5 Oct.
2003 (Sun); Post #382
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At
4:00 pm, Drew, Phill, and I went on this airplane ride around the
region (out 'round Burbank, Ice Harbor dam, West Richland, etc.).
It was really cool. Our pilot was this guy named Justin Wolf. He's
also an instructor there at Bergstrom Aircraft. Anyway, it was pretty
cheap, only $69 for all three of us (max capacity for the plane
we used). We saw this fire over near one of the railroad tracks;
you could actually see the flames. Pretty neat. Here are some pictures.
Walking out to the plane. You can just barely see the Medistar
helicopter coming in to land in the background (upper right). |
Our shadow while taking off. |
Drew looking out the window. He and Phill were in the back,
I got to ride up front. |
Instruments, gauges, dials, switches, etc. According to the
altimeter and speedometer, we're going about 130 MPH at 1,900
feet. |
Richland and the Columbia. |
After landing. |
For
some reason, my domain name hasn't propagated yet. Gonna contact
the guy at Comic-Host about it.
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8:06
a.m. [GMT-8:00]
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1 Oct.
2003 (Wed); Post #381
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I got
this really great web hosting deal from some guy on the Anandtech
Forums; 100 MB storage + 3 GBs in transfers for $1 per month. And
I'm gonna get a domain name through Namecheap,
so expect to see something like www.hjo3.net in the next several
days.
Okay, have to go shower and get ready for school. It's a lab day!
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12:04
a.m. [GMT-8:00]
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30 Sep.
2003 (Tue); Post #380
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Finally
set ObjectDock up the way I like it on my main system. The only
thing it doesn't have is a digital clock readout (the only clock
docklet I can find is the one that simulates an analog "handed"
clock). I think I might use Samurize for that though. Anyway I really
love it. In fact, I put up a screenshot (link under the thumbnail
below).
Okay, it's late and I have to get up at 7:00 am tomorrow to go switch
my laundry over to the dryer at my parents' house. None of my desktops
have ever looked this good! And I didn't have to use stupid XP!
BTW, I'm thinking of moving this site to another hosting service
(I'm using more than 90% of my allotted Geocities space). Right
now, I'm think of using 3-95.com
($3.95/month for 300 MB space plus 4 GB xfer). They also have this
$8.95 for 6 months plan that I might be able to use. I doubt I go
over 1 GB in transfers per month... (This was a kinda scatterbrained
post.)
Full Screenshot (1280 x 1024,
PNG) [476 kB]
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12:53
p.m. [GMT-8:00]
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29 Sep.
2003 (Mon); Post #379
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Classes
so far have been pretty fun today. In my Unix class, we finally
got our login stuff so we can, uh, log in. I spent most of the hour
playing with ObjectDock,
surfing bookmarks off my thumbdrive, and playing the nerdy linux
text games through PuTTY.
Then in Novell, Drew and I palavered and complained about how slow
XP and the NetWare stuff was (NWADMIN32 literally took 20 minutes
to start!). Phill was absent. He and Drew both PayPal'd money to
me for Wendy's meals we bought Friday night.
Oh yeah, Phill's site
is finally back up. Or at least it was (I just tried it and
it seems to be down again). It's been down for like a week or two.
Anyway, I have a FS (For Sale) thread
going over at Anandtech FS/FT. Basically, I wound up with a nice
new heatsink that I have no use for. Finished the Mars section of
In the Well. The Mercury, Venus, and Inner Belt sections were pretty
brief (not that there's much to say about those... i.e. Venus —
what can you say about a mostly-useless planet with lots of acid,
800 F surface temp, and 90 atmospheres of pressure?).
Seems like everyone's got thumbdrives now; even this Jamaican woman
(who I wouldn't have thought was very tech-savvy) in CS222 had one.
Hah. But they're great. Now if only everyone would have front-mounted
USB ports, or desktop hubs, or keyboards with hubs in them... some
of the lab computers don't have USB ports on the front. Very annoying.
Gonna read and see if I can take a nap before my 5:00 CS224 class.
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8:47
p.m. [GMT-8:00]
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28 Sep.
2003 (Sun); Post #378
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LOTR:
Return of the King trailer (25 MB, Chinese subtitles). Watching
10-8 on ABC right now. So far it's pretty good. Had grilled cheese
sandwiches for dinner.
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3:58
p.m. [GMT-8:00]
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28 Sep.
2003 (Sun); Post #377
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Had
a weird dream last night. I was running through the streets of some
neighborhood in Pasco (like a block from the high school) and I
started jumping. Each jump went longer than the last until I finally
figured out I was flying. For some reason, in my dreams there's
always some trick to flying, something you have to concentrate on.
In this one, it had to do with sort of pushing the air below you
with your hands and keeping above a "stall speed." Anyway,
I tried to see how high I could go but something bad happened and
I fell out of the sky into this barn way out in the middle of nowhere.
Someone I knew was there, but I can't remember who it was. Then
all these gray zombies start tearing through the walls and they
caught me and started ripping chunks of my legs off (the chunks
weren't bloody or anything though... it was like my flesh was the
same color as my skin all the way through and it had the consistency
of cheese). While this was happening, the person I was with kept
fighting off zombies, then said it was too much work and left.
That's when I woke up. I was really confused and it took me like
a minute to realize I was in my room and the beeping sound was coming
out of the alarm clock. I think the whole "zombie" thing
might have been because I saw a House of the Dead trailer on TV
last night. Anyway.
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2:18
a.m. [GMT-8:00]
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28 Sep.
2003 (Sun); Post #376
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Okay,
I finally beat Final Fantasy Tactics Advance! 44 hours, 52 minutes.
The final battle was pretty hard; it took me five tries. I mostly
just used three good characters (ironically, when I got to the end
of the game, I didn't realize it until too late and two of my best
characters — a Viera Sniper and a Moogle Gunner were in jail
at the time). The primary team was made up of a Baanga Templar (using
a good spear and the Cheer Sacred Technique), a Nu Mou White Mage
(probably the most essential character, if only for Curaga and Auto-Life),
and my main character, a Human Ninja (he has an attack value of
410 and the Double Sword support skill, so he gets two normal attacks
per turn; usually doing about 120 dmg each). There was also a Baanga
Warrior, a Baanga Monk, and a Moogle Animist in the group. They
were pretty worthless... their main purpose was cannon fodder, soaking
up damage to buy time for my Ninja and Templar to attack Remedi
(or, rather, the thing she turns into... Li-Chung or some name like
that).
Anyway, once you beat the game there's a ten minute "movie"
where you get to see what happens to everyone and all that. You
also get a little yellow star next to your save game and can continue
playing with "expert missions" turned on (they're Rank
7 and higher). Kinda neat.
Been reading the Transhuman Space source book, In the Well. It's
very good. High Frontier got a bit old after a while (I started
losing interest when I got to the Vacuum Cleaners section). But
the detailed history of Martian colonization and terraforming (in
In the Well) was really interesting. Okay, it's late and I have
to help build fence tomorrow.
Scene from the final battle in FFTA.
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11:49
a.m. [GMT-8:00]
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26 Sep.
2003 (Fri); Post #375
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As
I'm sure you all already know (via Penny Arcade, Slashdot, or whatever),
the Matrix:
Revolutions trailer is out (BitTorrent).
After watching it, I really do have high expectations for the third
film despite my relative distaste for the second.
I'm pretty far on Final Fantasy Tactics Advance now. Right after
you find the fifth crystal, the difficulty of the game really seems
to spike. Suddenly my uber-powerful Sniper and Fighter aren't as
effective in battle. And the laws! Argh, there's so many
of them. Things are worse now than when the [spoiler] Judges still
worked for the palace. Anyway. The classes I'm working on getting
now are Gadgeteer, Alchemist, Defender, Assassin, and Sage. I've
gotten most everything else except Ninja. The human totema was brutal;
when I finally beat her (on the third try), my entire team was dead
except for Marche (Fighter), and he only had 22 HP left.
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"From
now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with
which I will not put." — Sir Winston Churchill
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