So here’s some USB devices we can all use.

In other news, Japan is actually insane and i will have to go there. I will, of course remember to bring the largest USB hub ever dreamed of by man. I mean you never see this kind of stuff for Firewire, i guess we all know which standard won the “high-speed universal connector” war.

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Which Extraordinary Gentleman are you?Hell yeah, Nemo. Back up off my squid submarine, bitches!So yeah, I’ve gotten the car fixed. As it turns out the damage was significantly less than i thought, being mostly superficial. I could have really driven it to work the next day had my father not shown up with a hammer. He managed to flatten the hood back down but doing so moved it out of alignment with the hood-catch-thing. This, of course left my car with a hood that doesn’t close. We were able to jimmy something together with a cord, but that’s no way to drive a car. My dad has connections though, so we were able to get the thing looked at by a friend of his, and fixed the same day. Also repairs totaled $20, so I’m in business.

I am looking for a new car though, as this one is even more dented now. Who knows, i may be able to get a cheap corolla and start making car payments again. Whoo-hoo.

Asian porn arrived in my mailbox today. I don’t have to tell you how surreal that is. Is isn’t even porn really, more of an artbook all based on this Minori Aoi girl. I do have to say she is adorable, but mostly… you know… naked. It isn’t something you can keep on your coffee table for instance. I mean between this and the free lesbian comic that Amazon sent me I’m wondering what the hell i would have had to do to get free porn when i was 14 and needed it. I mean i had to shoplift the shit in the olden days.

Well, that certainly got way too personal.

Errr… I also managed to pull a halfway decent microprocessor (by 1983 standards, and my cheapass standards) from that busted video editing crap. We will see what i can build with the thing, who knows, we may have a more powerful robot solution in the offing. At the very least it has more inputs than the Basic Stamp. I think i may have to try my hand at building a CPU and RAM daughterboard that plugs into a motherboard that is loaded with expansion slots. Basically re-invent the ATX form factor for a 8086-grade processor (32 bit, but barely!). Now i just have to work on how i would want to build the thing. I mean can i use 30 pin ram? Do i have to use EEPROMs? All this and more in the next exciting adventure!

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MOTHERFUCKER!

Things i’ve lost today:

• My car.
• A metric fuckton of money.
• Hope of leaving my job to go back to school.

Yeah. So i’ve been in a car accident. The guy two cars in front of me slammed on his brakes, then the guy behind him hit his, then the woman behind him hit hers, then i hit mine. Unfortunately my tires suck (being cheap ones bought while i was poor almost a year ago) so i squirted under her bumper and “dimpled” my hood. Also my grille is staved in, and my car now drives “funny.”

Finally, my insurance does not cover collisions.

I don’t need to tell you how annoying that was.

This entry was going to be about trying to convert my calender display into CSS from tables (an interesting project, to be sure), however now i’m wallowing in self pity. Anybody know a good body shop that works for free?

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So, MT version 2.62. Lets see how this works, then i can get out of here (work).

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So here we go on something of a fantastic voyage. It all started when i decided to check my phone bill online. See the phone bill had been something of a thorny issue for a while now. When we lived in the apartment i thought that my brother wasn’t getting me his half of the bill money fast enough and thusly took it upon myself to “teach him a lesson” by not paying the phone bill on time and getting it cut off.

This was a fucking stupid idea. Seriously. It gives you all kinds of grief getting it turned back on (especially without a phone to call on to get service connected), and then you get condecended upon by the customer service mandroids when you call back and explain things to them. Then problems start.

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See when we lived in the apartment we had a 931 exchange. This was all well and good, but when we moved, apparently the 931 is not good for the area we moved into. There we had to get a 790 number. Here is where it gets complicated. Bills are tied to number not to subscriber, and when we transferred to 790 the bill for 931 remained active. For some reason it was just duplicated to 790. In other words we went from having one $57 bill to having two. This sucked, because i connected to the ePay thing and tossed them $60, thinking this would turn everything back on. Turns out not.

The $60 was applied only to the 931 number, and not to the new number, meaning that 790 stayed disconnected. When i called, the guy on the phone had no idea what i was talking about, and because my cel didn’t have that picturephone feature, i couldn’t draw him a picture. However, i thought that i had gotten through, and that everything was dandy.

And everything was. The phone worked for a while, and still works now, but when i went online today to check on my phone bill, i apparenly owe bellsouth over $90. Including $57 that was due five days ago.

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I call the phone company then to complain and get someone else who can not only not follow what i’m saying, but then transfers me to somebody who has nothing to do with billing. Then i get transferred back to billing, and finally get some proper answers. Guess what happened. No, i’m afraid you aren’t even close. See when i payed on the 931 number and had the money moved to the 790 number, they then apparently moved the money back to the 931 number. Then, because they hadn’t fucked things up enough the issued the $60 back to me as a credit! I tried to explain that i don’t live at that apartment anymore, and that they had just sent my money to a stoner. But they don’t know where the check is, and if it has been cashed or not. I told them to just cancel the damn thing and put the money back on to my bill. Then she told me she couldn’t do that and would have to call me back. So far she hasn’t. And my bill is getting later every day. If it lapses i will well and truely beat somebody down.

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Take the RESET quiz, by Setsuna.

Yo, my dark past is behind me. Damn it is good to see well-adjusted manga characters. I wonder if it is too late to jump on this RESET bandwagon and grab the doujin from Chats.

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“Why!?!…STOP..STOP!!”
- #3 Kenai

Which Battle Royale Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I haven’t done one of these in a while, and i thought i’d take one from Chatty. I wish everybody would stop changing urls all the damn time. Now i feel like i’ve got to go back and change both Chatty’s and Jason’s URLs to reflect their new sites. Bah, a pox on that. The chance that somebody would take http://www.winternight.org and turn it into porn is a little higher than ppp.dardan.com, so i think i can live with the broken links for a bit.

So i payed that parking ticket today. For those of you that don’t know i openned the Altoids tin i keep in my coat and discovered that in addition to the lighter, pliers, and tiny tin cross (you never know) i had a parking ticket from November for $7. Apparently i bought a money order, got a stamp, and then had a very vivid dream about putting everything in an envelope and mailing it to the Dept of Public Safety. For what its worth i think the part where i inflated like a balloon and floated around the city should have clued me in that i wasn’t remembering reality.

So i went up to the police station, explained myself and then proceeded to throw myself on their mercies, which turned out to be quite mild. I only had to pay the $5 late fee. All told a four month late ticket only ran me the first penalty. I swear the thing threatened multiple penalties and taking my car away and all that, but nope. Just a bit of money that i actually payed in cash. Mayhaps the slow printing of my reciept was a penalty, or perhaps its just an Okidata thing.

This weekend kicked ass. How much XP did i get, i think i was in the shower and out the door before i could get the number (not that it would matter much as i have no player’s handbook. The thing just looks so fruity with all the gems and stuff). Ah well, i think it was funny that my rogue did all that damage, we will definatly have to make that a monthly thing.

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Wait, there’s a 10 in the morning on Saturday as well as on the “week” proper? Ugh, i had no idea. I don’t know when I’ll be getting up there, but i think that 2 would be about the earliest. I have no idea why this week has been as demanding as it has, but still there it is. I thought yesterday was Friday, even with all the evidence to the contrary. This was a problem as i didn’t set my alarms this morning. Somehow i managed to wake up at 6:45 though, and was only five minutes late to work. I still am completely unsure how i managed that, it was lucky though.

I’ll be packing another issue of “Last Order” and a hard drive, we’ll see what we can do about these boxen, hopefully at least one of you people will be running by the end of the weekend. And by that i mean running well. Hell I’ll bring Red Hat 8.0 and call you all wussies who won’t switch to the Open Source OS. Not that i have yet, but i have a dual-boot drive in the works.

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So yeah, i’m all about sleeping right about now. It has been one hell of a day, and i stayed up too late yesterday. Work was normal but a bit taxing, then there was the dateiversary tonight. Not that it was taxing in the least. On the contrary it was more fun than i usually have, and lord i love that woman.

She liked the gift i got her (or rather that i let her know that i had purchased), see i signed her up for three years of Cinefex , and as she was always borrowing mine, she was overjoyed. Then she gave me my gift and i had to be scooped up off the floor in puddle form. See she got me a fully functional automated R2 unit. (Smaller than “scale” but it responds to voice commands and bleeps at you when you say “Hey R2!”) And something you probably never would have guessed about me, but i’ve always wanted an R2. Since i saw the movies as a wee sprat i’ve been wild about that droid. Seriously, an R2 unit and a functional light saber and i’d be happy beyond my wildest dreams. So without the technology to craft really short lasers, this is as good as its going to get.

There is just something about walking into your room and seeing a foot-and-a-half tall R2 sitting there. I grin like an idiot every time.

Then we hit The Melting Pot, which for those of you who don’t know is a chain fondue joint that was voted “Most Romantic Place” in Columbia by the local free weekly. I hear it beat out last year’s winner (the back seat of a Camaro) by only a small margin. Anyway people underestimate fondue. You wouldn’t think that it would fill you up, eating a little bit at a time, but i find myself more full after leaving that restraunt that any other, i have to say.

And we located the most perfect chocolate fondue known to man. See, it is called the Yin & Yang, and consists of dark and white chocolate, actually arranged in the Yin Yang. I find it to be the most perfect because you can (for a while, before it mixes completely) choose whether to dip into the dark side or light side. Mmmmm… fondue Force.

Anyway, i’m tired as sin and being way too cute with the personal information. Long story short i’ll be coming up to Florence Saturday, what time do you people want me to show up?

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And like all Wednesdays, I spent part of this afternoon at the local comic store dropping some hard-earned cash on this and that. Among them a good pile of comics and an RPG suppliment.

I got the new Powers, and i won’t even bother to tell you it is great. Bendis is still stringing me along with the literal bombshell he dropped last month, and damn but i’m now saying “It wasn’t enough, i need more Powers!” Damn that is one hell of a comic, and like always he manages to turn the whole superheroe genre on its head, but maintain a storyline and make the whole thing more than just an experiment in fiction.

The new Eden’s Trail was bought too. I’m not sure if i enjoy it, but i bought it anyway. What they are doing with light is impressive, atleast. The way that they are showing almost everything that is outside in this burned yellow tone makes me think of Pitch Black (the Vin Diesel movie), and i did enjoy the lighting on that flick. The rest of the story… well, its a bit Trigun, and the guy is either Korean or a veteran of self-published doujins. The explaination there is that he tends to leave a lot of the action “between panels.” Where another artist would take a few extra panels to set stuff up, or devote an entire page to one panel, he has about eight or more per page. That’s a solid reminder of somebody who either had to pay out of pocket for each page, or is from Korea. I’m not sure why, but all manhwa (K-spelling of manga) that i’ve read seem to be heavy on the panels-per-page count. I don’t know why.

There was an issue of “Lady Constantine” though, but that is just because Joanna rocks all ass. Seriously, not buying that would be like not buying the “All Flesh Must be Eaten” book i bought.

Which lets the zombie out of the bag. I also bought “Pulp Zombies,” an expansion for AFMBE. Damn but it rocks. That was never a consideration though, it had to be bought on principle. I mean just look at the damned thing. Warning, the page is hungry for more than brains, it wants all your RAM for its javascripts too. Anyway, the descript as “Two Fisted High Adventure” should clue you in that your ass is about to be kicked. Seriously, this is Nazi zombies, undead Gangsters, and the men (and women) who take them down. Soon as i get the core rules i am so playing this. The only problem is that the core rules are about to be revised (in March) so dropping the $20 on it now would be a little silly.

I mean damn though, mentalist powers, detectives fighting zombies, its CoC without all the death and insanity. I might be able to make a character who could span multiple campaigns with this… Damn i need to get up to Florence this weekend (we’ll see what the ‘rents and woman want from me), that D&D character is starting to gather dust for god’s sake.

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So yeah, you want to know why posting slowed down after last thursday? Well see there’s a little issue with Lam Tang. We’ve actually lost our lease so to speak on the Academy proper. It is somewhat shady really, as the lease holder just passed the lease on to a friend of theirs and then told Sifu that he’ll have to leave immediately as they want to knock the school down in order to build a parking lot. Seriously, i’m living The Goonies.

So in order to stay afloat my teacher had to get a job other than teaching kung fu, and we have to start renting space in gyms. We have also stopped accepting new members so my woman got out of this easy. With the whole working thing sifu has also had to condense all the classes down to two nights a week, so its all one big Group class now. As another bonus classes have extended to two hours. So yeah, i’ve been beaten to a bloody pulp.

Its damn good to see that i’ve been getting my money’s worth. I wonder if Chatty kept up her martial arts…

Other than that not much has happened. I tried to do laundry on Sunday and found out that my dryer doesn’t work. It spins but doesn’t heat up, so it misses the whole point of the “Dryer” thing. Oh well, i’ll be getting that looked at, and the parents will be footing the bill, so its all good. I can still mooch off my ‘rents and woman for laundry space.

I’m still noodling around with the robot project, but it is in design phase right now, nothing more to say. Hopefully something interesting will occur to me so i can post tomorrow. That zombie over there just wants to be your friend, by the way, he doesn’t want to eat your brain or anything…

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