chaz720.net - journal

February 01, 2001

i know a movie star, i've got her plastered to my wall, just like we're dear old friends, like she already knows me, she's as perfect as she seems, lifts me right out the mezzanine, i finally fell in love, i'd been waiting forever... four, three, two, one, when at the barrel of a gun, keep my head way down, stay out i'll stay in, half dead half numb, she's enough to make me warm, it's all so safe and sound... lie back and fast asleep, if you could see what i could see, drip drop a lovely dream... goddamn you movie star, can't you just play a minute more, we'd be the best of friends, you could stay here forever... four, three, two, one, when at the barrel of a gun, keep my head way down, stay out i'll stay in, half dead and half numb, she's enough to make me warm, it's all so safe and sound... she will be sweet on me, just like a mystery, it's not so hard to see, if i'm not mistaken, she comes from far away (far... far away), gets closer everyday (everyday), and all that i can say (can say), she's all i want and all that i live for... four, three, two, one, when at the barrel of a gun, keep my head way down, stay out i'll stay in, half dead half numb, she's enough to make me warm, it's all so safe and sound...

I have, at least for now, labeled my first useful php program finished. It allows rosie, joel, and I to post news directly to the kellhounds news page on this very server. I may decide to make my own guest book/comments page for this site, that might prove to be entertaining.

I'm kinda sad tonight, cause my 15th story window is covered in ice and i can't look out over the city. Having the city there is almost surreal now. I just look out the window and there it is, I can see from beckman (marking the north end of campus) to the south farms. And when I look at my building from the streets I can see my apartment, and I try to picture myself seeing myself on the street looking up. I don't know why. Anyway having this block of a ice for a window just kinda takes something away from living on the 15th floor.

Time for my random 4 hours of sleep

February 03, 2001

With the XFL making it's first kick-offs today I already have some doubts. I was very disappointed in the game playing, the players weren't all that great, and there was nothing extreme about it. I don't know what they think they are doing, but you can't paint the football different colors and add a crappy camera that runs along a big cable and expect people to buy that's it's extreme. Here's what I see happening:

from each team there will emerge one really good player, and one player that runs his mouth off every five seconds to the camera man. These may or may not be the same person.
There are going to be a lot of seemingly important people getting "injured" to create a drawn out drama over the course of the season, and these people will inevitably come back "with a vengence" against the team that caused the injury and score 1 million points against that team.
Vince McMahon (or whatever is name is) will publically can at least one ref a week for having made a bad call, thus showing "he doesn't put up with anyone's bullshit"
Countless sex scandels between players and cheerleaders, erm wait no that's NFL sorry

While I do like the idea of the XFL, I think maybe the idea I liked wasn't the same idea as they had for it. When I was thinking XFL, there is one thing that came to my mind, NFL Blitz... you all nkow what I'm talking about, here's some things that I think should happen in the XFL before I will watch it with any regularity:

First off, get rid of the long ass quarters, make them 10 minutes, I wanted to jump out the window when absolutely nothing was going on.
require 30 yards for a first down
in order to be considered down, the tackler has to pin you for a three count.
forget the goalposts, no extra points? how about no field goals either, you get 6 or nothing.

I think this would actually make the XFL interesting to watch. Sure, the skirmish for the football at the begining was very cool, and the no fair catches thing is pretty cool, but that's really the only difference. I think that for a new football league to be successful it will either have to copy the NFL very closely, or do something almost completely different, this inbetween crap is going to fail imho

When that guy got called for a late hit out of bounds, I just said extreme my ass and turned it off.

February 04, 2001

Everyone sees the world from a perspective that they choose. People can have a perspective as wide or as narrow as they wish. But the human mind is fragile. "A sunny day makes you happy", "A rainy day makes you gloomy", "goodbyes are sad", and "reunions are joyous". If enough people say something the human mind will adapt it into it's perspective. But this is nonsense. How can we tell who we are? We observe others, the differences we observe between our perspective and that of others is who we are. We have every quality imaginable minus the qualities that everyone has. We are a subtraction problem. We are a difference. We are a deviation from the mean. But if there is no one else, then what are we? Do we posses all qualities? No. Without anyone else we are not a subtraction problem. There is no math to be done. There are no numbers to work. So this means through other people we try to learn who we are. We define ourselves. We must be happy with ourselves. If we define ourselves through other people, then other people are all reminders of who we are. If we get close to someone, we must prepare to be reminded of who we are. We must love ourselves. If we do not love ourselves then others will remind us who we are and we will hate them for it. It is impossible to love another if you do not love who you are. And so the ultimate challenge of the human mind, is to finally convince itself, that it is not hated.

That is what Neon Genesis Evangelion is about.

February 09, 2001

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you. Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand, Vanished from my hand, Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping. My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet, I have no one to meet And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you. Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin' ship, My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip, My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels To be wanderin'. I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you. Though you might hear laughin', spinnin', swingin' madly across the sun, It's not aimed at anyone, it's just escapin' on the run And but for the sky there are no fences facin'. And if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind, I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're Seein' that he's chasing. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you. Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind, Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach, Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, Let me forget about today until tomorrow. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Ryan is up to his evil one line poetry again :P

Where is my hot water?
-RS

Today marks the morning of the last day of an incredibly long week, but it's not over yet, I still have a few miles to go before I sleep. Between Mallard (an online web-homework system) crashing when I try to submit repetative homework that must be completely correct or you have to do it all over again, pages of circuits to design for engineering, and dozens of differential equations to solve, I'm about ready to fall over on the sole fact that standing up is too much work. Oh and goodie! I have a cold too!

I do take some recourse in the fact that there was a thunderstorm last night. It's been far too long since we've had a good thunderstorm here, and it was muh welcome. It has actually been raining all nigh and is still raining now. Melting away all the snow that has been sitting around for a month now. I wrote a couple entries during the week that were realyl short that I got inturrupted during the middle of them so they made even less sense then the average entry of mine, so those were discarded. I think the fact that Penny-arcade has finally come back to operation has made me a little bit happier about the online community as a whole. Seeing as Counter-strike has practically moved on with just a fraction of the interest that it once had, and Something Awful Is now run by someone who just plain isn't funny anymore, it's just getting hard to find good sites anymore. Joel seems to have grown addicted to anime as every aim message he starts conversations with is some story about renting, watching, or tradgicly missing some episode of Tenchi. I suppose I would be one to complain though, as my aim conversations usually start with, "okay try logging into my new page now". Sigh, is there any hope for progress? I just need to try and have a good weekend, assuming my health will let me.

February 10, 2001

If you have always been perfect at everything you've tried to do, you probably aren't trying enough things...

February 14, 2001

Well, Joel's site is back up in all of it's previous glory with the wonders of perl behind it this time. All a website really needs is perl or php and the content will just flow by itself. It's easier to type into a form and be thoughtful hten it is to type into some boring text editor like notepad or emacs

So all this webstuff has kinda been drifting from me, I have spent a lot less time in the past week "actuvely" at my computer, by actively I mean talking on irc or aim and typing entries for this. rather I've had said programs open and I've been talking to people that stop by, or watching basketball games, or just genreally not paying attention. Drawing, doing homework, all kinds of stuff, so this is my excuse for not having updated in 14 cajilion days (I like that number it sounds big)

I got to thinking over the last few days as to why I write in this journal. And it isn't an easy answer. Naturally as time has progressed, I have kept it for various reasons. I started out inspired by joel, I used it to vent about work, and how much everything kept going wrong all the time. After a while it progressed into my way of summing up my actions and some thoughts for the day, It was a real live journal. Then at one point, It became a medium of communication with my friends. It was my way of reaching everyone on the same level, both individually and as a group, and tell people what I thought about things people did that affected me (or didn't effect me) basically, I was speaking as a third party about my life. Then it went the way of most depressing novels and it found pain in everything, I was depressed about the way life looked and could be found here. Then as usally occurs when you are both bored and somewhat depressed, I started anylizing life more. Started thinking about people and such. Towards the end of last summer as I became involved in cartoon making and such, it became a comedy site, making people laugh made me happier so it was mostly a joke site. I remember in september having literally so much I wanted to write about that I couldn't even fit it all into one entry, and I would have to break it up over days, I had so much going on that I didn't have time to write it all down, it was crazy, I had thoughts during the day, and I would look foreward to elaborating on them. Lately it has become an E/N site. with more of an emphasis on the nothing. My mom sends me e-mails now if I don't update it in a while and asks why I haven't cause she wanted to read it. Tonight Joel tells me to update my fucking site (well actually he told me to update my turkey, but since I'm so smart I decerned that he meant my site... I hope or else I look really stupid, of course this aside is now so long I probably look stupid already, oh well I'm choking) so I feel like I have some duty now to write on this site... harumph.

Nothing particularly outstanding has happened between my last entry and this one, but perhaps I can take a few moments to better explain my last entry. I suggested that if you have always been perfect at everything you try, then maybe you haven't been trying enough things. The reason I say this is simple, I think I need to fail a little more. I do well in classes, I can do webdesign, I know computers in general very well, I am developing cooking skills, I can draw, I can be witty, I can be poetic, I can speak publicly, I have a perfect driving record, I can design circuits, I can do impersonations, I can solve problems, hell I was a heck of a retail employee for 7 months, but I can't just ask someone if they want to get a cup of coffee. I can face it, I am a shitty risk taker when it comes right down to it. I'm not talking about sky diving, I'm not talking about trying new things, I'm talking about people. Sky diving statistically works, it doesn't scare me. Trying hobbies and stuff like that doesn't scare me either, I have nothing to lose. But never having experienced any great failure, I don't know how I would take it, I think I am scared of myself in a way. Maybe I simply don't know myself as well as I thought I did. Maybe everyone is a chain with a weak link waiting to break. I have new friends at college and it's great, I love them to death, but... I don't think I've made any new friends since I've been here. I think they've picked me more than the other way around. I am talking with people day in and day out, but I never go out of my way to talk with them more. And this kinda bothers me.

About the cup of coffee thing, I have no problem talking with people, I joke with everyone I can. I love laughing, and I think if we can't laugh about something in all our hours of class each week, we would go insane, so I like to lighten things up. But I joke around with people that I have no intention of talking to in the near future better than I joke with people as a way of getting to know them better. And once again, I am leading myslef along a path that will take way too longto get into tonight, I'll just have to save some of it tomorrow :)

February 15, 2001

Okay, well brief little thing I'd like to talk about before I get some sleep here, I got a busy day tomorrow getting ready for, come to think of it, my first test of the second semester, and of course it would have to be in my hardest class. In the next week and a half I have a test in every class :/ Oh well, ece, econ, and physics are going to be mad-easy cause I know the material like the back of my hand (casually looks around for back of hand) oh there it is! thank god i was worried

Oh, and just as a little thing to look foreward to, I -may- be redesigning my entire site from scratch involving new layout, information handling, and archiving. JUST MAYBE, so don't be surprised if maybe there might be a major change in the style of the site in the next week or so, assuming tests don't prevent me from doing said possible work.

So on to my point I wanted to talk about... There is a class of mine where we have a discussion section where we bascially work on problems for a couple hours, and we are made to explain things to each other and generally learn from the whole experience and then every now and then the TA stops by and makes suggestions/draws large red lines through your work and says "no." So I, unsuspectingly, sit down at a table with these three people and start working, and this is bascially the people I am dealing with...

we got a guy who's great with calculus and math but doesn't seem to understand physics too well, so he must be fed equatoins and say here work these out.
next we have some girl, a cs major, not that we should hold that against her, but... she doesn't actually read any of the problems she just just scans for numbers, and then types them into her calculator and then randomly writes down some other number, when I tell her how I think we are supposed to solve the problem I am met with, "you don't know what you are talking about"
some guy who is spending way to much time agreeing with above girl. And too little time thinking with his brain.

So the TA walks by every few minutes and starts drawing red lines throuh person 2 and 3's papers and none through me and math-man. Suddenly, they become very interested in what we have written down.

What did I observe, I think that there is sometimes a problem with being too confident. You have to watch yourself from being stubborn if you get too confident. As all things in life it's like a balance, too little confidence and yo can't accomplish anything, too much, and you turn into a stubborn ass around those who are smarter than you. And there are always people smarter than you in some aspect :). goodnight

February 17, 2001

The Difeq test went well in my opinion so that is good. I did get my quizes back right after I took the test, two As and an B, that's a good sign :). Usually it averages out. My prof is showing the slightly bad side of having a laid back teacher... He showed up 10 minutes late the day of the test :/. Oh well, he apologized for it, and after three weeks this is the only math class that I've actually -prefered- to some of my other classes (like econ, god what a dreadful waste of time).

I've spent the last 30 hours doing a lot of nothing in several categories. But on goes the "phping" and the new site is coming along quite well. Like I said before, look forward to it sometime next week. I actually feel like this is going to be a huge improvement, so in that sense I am more motivated to complete this.

February 20, 2001

I'll sing myself to sleep A song from the darkest hour Secrets I can't keep Inside of the day Swing from high to deep Extremes of sweet and sour Hope that God exists I hope I pray Drawn by the undertow My life is out of control I believe this wave will bear my weight So let it flow Oh sit down Sit down next to me Sit down, down, down, down, down In sympathy Now I'm relieved to hear That you've been to some far out places It's hard to carry on When you feel all alone Now I've swung back down again It's worse than it was before If I hadn't seen such riches I could live with being poor Oh sit down Sit down next to me Sit down, down, down, down, down In sympathy Those who feel the breath of sadness Sit down next to me Those who find they're touched by madness Sit down next to me Those who find themselves ridiculous Sit down next to me Love, in fear, in hate, in tears Love, in fear, in hate, in tears In love, in fear, in hate, in tears In love, in fear, in hate, in tears Down Down Oh sit down Sit down next to me Sit down, down, down, down, down In sympathy Oh sit down Sit down next to me Sit down, down, down, down, down In sympathy Down

Well it's been a few long sleepy-tired cruddy days lately. It looks like I have something interesting to do for spring break now. My sister got kinda blown off by her roommates when they decided to just stay home and work rather than go do whatever it was they were going to do. So long story short, I am now going to have a car and a week with nothing to do... let's go drive somewhere. And while we're at it, we can bring friends along, so it looks like joel and my sister's friend lindsay are gonna take a ride down to St. Pete FL, where we can live with my grandmother who has a place down there (if it's okay with her :P) and go to the beach, go parasailing, go out to eat, oh who cares what for a while. As an added bonus, we are gonna stop in Athens GA and hang out with my other sister for a while. It prooves to be a lot of fun. A hell of a lot more fun than sitting around would be anyway.

So I was playing some counterstrike with my roomates... It's really nice cause we can play with at most a 20 ping to each other, and kevin and I had beat the living hell out of eachother to the point where we didn't actually want to show our faces anymore, so we both pulled out grenades and well, you can see the results for yourself very entertaining. Later, some guy on irc relayed me the joys of really messing with server variables. we set sv_airaccellerate to -10... okay now let me give you an idea of what this actually does.. if you jump, and then hit any of the directional keys, you go flying the opposite direction at like 400mph. note: only do this on wide open maps. we were playing on assault and did this and I wound up flying 400mph into a wall, and lemme tell you, it stings a bit.

So the new site is coming along, I got a bunch of other sections converted over, and now in front of me lies the oh so daunting task, of essentially fixing all the links that I have made to screenshots and photos and what have you in this entire journal.. so that they all reference the new locations of the photos/screens, and so that they will use my soon-to-actually-be-written image viewer thingy-ma-jig. I can't hardly wait, I don't know about you all.

February 21, 2001

Alright yay! once again if you are blind you are wondering what I'm taling about, but since there is no font-family: brail; in css2.0, you probably aren't wondering what I'm talking about. So the new site is up... yeah... you can see that okay moving along

It's snowing outside, the f^*&ing groundhog lied to me again. there is signifigant accumulation outside when not three days ago I was wearing a t-shirt outside and I wanted to take it off it was so nice out. so you know what time it is...

small, lonely, fragile flakes fall from the sky
each one delecately crafted to it's own chaotic perfection
each develops it's own charcter and life
HOW DO YOU LIKE THE TASTE OF ROADSALT ASSHOLES?!
-RS

we were having a discussion today about which is better and should be masters of the universe Electrical Engineers or Computer Scientists. And the argument of choice (whose choice I have no clue) was which person would be most likely to create a learning AI. My thought was that any True learning AI would be modeled off the human brain. Initially there is no software "installed" on the human brain, but rather its biological, its physical, composition lead it to write it's own "software" essentailly from scratch. Thus I think the hardware aspect would be vastly more important than the software aspect of any true AI. Whereas rizzuh and lungfish felt that CS would be the all-imporant factor as they felt that a learning AI would could be written to run on a 486 if it had to. I contest that the very architecture of any existing production computer disallows any such program to be able to realize anywhere near the potential that a computer that developed its own software would.

I saw a documentory on a man who built robots. I'm not talking about those things that police control to defuse bombs with, those aren't robots, I'm talking about fully autonomous creatures. He developed one creature that "lived" for serveral months in a forest where he placed it. He built them simply and effectively, he didn't use any digital programmable circuits at all. The entire circuit was analog (CSers hide in corner when they hear the word analog) and the robot was able to find it's way to light from any position, it could recharge it's battery during the day, and it used infrared to get around at night. If it had "extra" power it would go to try to find a more stable source if there was one. IT could right itself if flipped over, it could take shelter from heavy rain, and he found it walking along, as I said, months later, and it was still in good shape, and it was still walking along, just like the day he released it.

I think that learning computers will follow the same principles, they will be fundamentally simple, and yet have vast capabilites for expansion. If you build an architechture that will inheirently fill in the program for itself, you do not need to give it anything to start with. Are we a long way off from doing anything like this? who knows for sure, but I can bet it will first occur in a EE lab, not a CS one.

February 24, 2001

I am still living with your ghost Lonely and dreaming of the west coast I don't want to be your downtime I don't want to be your stupid game With my big black boots and an old suitcase I do believe I'll find myself a new place I don't want to be the bad guy I don't want to do your sleepwalk dance anymore I just want to see some palm trees Go and try to shake away this disease We can live beside the ocean Leave the fire behind Swim out past the breakers Watch the world die I am still dreaming of your face Hungry and hollow for all the things you took away I don't want to be your good time I don't want to be your fall-back crutch anymore I'll walk right out into a brand new day Insane and rising in my own weird way I don't want to be the bad guy I don't want to do your sleepwalk dance anymore I just want to feel some sunshine I just want to find some place to be alone We can live beside the ocean Leave the fire behind Swim out past the breakers And watch the world die.

I really need to stop sleeping away my Saturdays like this. Okay I haev about thirty projects for htis site I am trying to do at once, and none of htem are getting done cause I've been sitting around playing counterstrike and Red Alert 2 all night =/. We did win our kellhounds game on the other hand so that is pretty shweet, we have a couple more coming up in the next days, so it's sure to be a fun weekend. The kitchen and it's surrounding area (the apartment itself) are a complete mess per whom it doesn't really matter, but before I go to bed I'm cleaning it up cause as depressing as it is to go into the kitchen and not really have anything you feel like eating, but to go into the kitchen and see the bowls and cans where someone else ate just what you were looking for just adds insult to injury. So I hope to clean up what I can now and then I guess I'll see if I can make a run to sams sometime this week, ah good ol sams... I recieved kind of a disparaging e-mail from a lawfirm that I think you should all take a look at.

Subject: Property Repossession
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 11:28:10 -0600
From: Mr. R. Seegle -esq "seegle@seegleandcase.com"
To: Ryan Simpson "champu@chaz720.net"

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am contacting you on behalf of my client, Mr. Cats, who has filed a complaint of non-payment against a one Ryan "champu" Simpson. Apparently you have failed to pay the appropriate fees for several bases manufactured by my client.

Make no mistake about it, all your base are, in fact, belong to my client. and he wishes to use whatever legal means he feels necessary to reaquire them, including, but not limited to, the take off of every zig.

For great justice,

R. Seegle
Seegle and Case, Attourneys at Law

The man sounds pretty serious, I don't remember ever recieving any base from Mr Cats, but apparently he wants them back. This is probably just a big misunderstanding. Let's hop it clears up.

It turns out that a ton of people went home this weekend for whatever reason, so it's been really slow going around here the past couple of days. I still have outstanding tests so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and let you know what's up when everything is all said and done. night, I'm going to sleep.

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