chaz720.net - journal

June 01, 2002

Don't let go. Anytime that you want I'll be here in your arms, silently holding on to the girl with the charms. But if there comes a day you should turn your heart away... I'll be down on my knees, beggin for that girl to stay. Don't let go. Anything you desire i will set at your feet, with a kiss in the air for the gods to recieve. Confrontation's in my mind, and i've been running out of time. Don't let go.

New CDs: Weezer - Green Album, Radiohead - OK computer, The Bends. I've had most of the songs off these cds for a while but I finally just broke down and bought them, it happens what can I say?

Hans got himself a new CD player for his car that plays mp3 CDs. It's pretty nice, it looks good and getting like 160 tracks on a disc is always nice. We both tossed the idea around of getting a 6 disc changer to put in the trunk that can play mp3 cds (so a total of around a thousand songs give or take depending on bitrate) that would be controlable from the deck we both already had. Hans decided he liked some of the features on the new deck in addition to just the added mp3 capability so he went with that. Meanwhile I dropped the news on Bill that such a changer existed and it wouldn't surprise me if he's already bought it. I'm still pondering the idea but it doesn't matter anyway cause they're hard as hell to find anyone who actually has them. I would just order it now but I have some fundemental problem with having three completely different things on backorder at the same time (my camera and the gba lighting kit for those of you who are lagging a bit) So I'll probably just wait. Hopefully it and my laptop are just things that I've had the idea to get but never will because I wait it out...

...I'm so screwed, I might as well kiss that 2 grand goodbye and just give up on myself now :P

I got my windows tinted today... ...about 21% for those of you who understand what that means, for those of you that don't, it's about the same as most SUVs' rear windows you see driving around. It looks nice, the guy over there did a good job.

I was sick yesterday with something or other. Whatever it was it packed a fever of around 101º, a nasty cough, and some stuffed up sinuses. Sounds like a cold, could have been an alergy acting up, I don't really care cause it seems to have run it's course and I can breathe again, three cheers for sleeping all day.

I saw two movies in the past few days here, Insomnia and The Sum of All Fears. Both were very good but I don't think they are the kind of movie you would want to watch over again real soon. They were both pretty long and just had a lot going on but once it was over you felt like you got everything out of it in one trip. Both very much worth seeing though.

June 05, 2002

So long ago, I don't remember when, that's when they say I lost my only friend. Well, they said she died easy of a broken heart disease, as I listened through the cemetery trees. I seen the sun comin' up at the funeral at dawn, The long broken arm of human law. Now, it always seemed such a waste, she always had a pretty face. I wondered why she hung around this place. Hey, come on try a little. Nothing is forever. There's got to be something better than in the middle. But me and Cinderella, we put it all together. We can drive it home with one headlight. She said it's cold, It feels like Independence Day, and I can't break away from this parade. But there's got to be an opening somewhere here in front of me, through this maze of ugliness and greed. And I seen the sun up ahead at the county line bridge, sayin' all there's good and nothingness is dead. We'll run until she's out of breath. She ran until there's nothin' left, she hit the end, it's just her window ledge. Well, this place is old, it feels just like a beat up truck. I turn the engine, but the engine doesn't turn. Well, it smells of cheap wine and cigarettes, this place is always such a mess. Sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn. I'm so alone, and I feel just like somebody else. Man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same. But somewhere here in between the city walls of dyin' dreams, I think of death, it must be killin' me...

I've been on this binge of throwing out old shit I'm finding around my room, in drawers, in cabinets and, when and if I ever get to it, my closet. I must have had some werid primal fear of throwing things out because I have found some of the most pointless crap in my possession. Old magazines, papers from as early as the sixth grade, toys that weren't fun then. I don't get it, I really don't. My method has been assume it's all garbage and pick out the things I actually want. So I reach in and throw everything out of the cabinet and drawer on the floor and look through for things that look worth something. I find books, a photograph or two, maybe a cable I can wrap up and hang on to for later use, and the rest is just all out junk.

I built myself a bedframe this weekend. I looked breifly at Ikea and all they have there is a bunch of beds that were much more elaborate than I was looking for, all I really needed was something to get the box spring and matress (at the time laying on the floor) off the ground about 6 inches so I didn't feel like I was laying on the ground. So I went over to home depot and picked up some 1x6s and got out the circular saw and cordless drill and in about an hour or so I had a bed. It feels really good to build shit, and the bed only costed about 25 bucks and it's the standard engineer's 20x stronger than it ever needs to be. I have this image of my basement in my eventual house and is definately going to have miter, table, and band saws accompanied by an assortment of tools and sanding equipment so I can build just anything I would ever want to nice and easily.

Still thinking about that damn mp3 changer... grr...

Coming up on 32 months that this rediculous thing has been up. It's gone through 4 designs during that time and a complete conversion to script management sometime around february of 2001. I don't know I was just looking at that for some reason. Good times...

June 10, 2002

Gravity-e-e-e-e, on me. Never let me down, gently. Gravity-e-e-e-e, with me. Never let me go, no no, gravity. I don't pull me down. I don't pull me down on me. I don't pull me down. I don't pull me down on you. Ah, don't pour me down. I don't pour me down on me. Ah, don't pour me down. I don't pour me down on you.

/(bb|[^b]{2})/

I forget from time to time how delicate my sleeping schedule is in that sleeping from 3:30am to noon Saturday night would screw me over last night so horribly. Worst night sleep ever.

This weekend was a lot of fun, we spent it down in Champaign because we wanted to take care of the business of getting our subletters moved in. Later Phil drove over from purdue to help celebrate His and Hans's birthdays this weekend. Ben and Scott (the people living there this summer) invited over Kate, Rosie, Lauren, and Katie to watch Meet Joe Black. I actually only ended up seeing the first 45 minutes and the last half hour, but from that much I gathered it was a cool movie, I imagine sitting through almost 3 hours of that would get tiresome, but that's just me. Later when attempting to find something else to do for the night we found ourselves out in the middle of the quad playing football for a while. The teams ended up not being all that even as our team seemed to have the luxury of "being able to see the ball when it was in the air" which was not something afforded by our opponants.

I picked up the Radiohead: Kid A and Gorillaz posters for my room, when I put them up in my room I realized they were even bigger than I remember them being, but no matter, they look pretty sweet where they are.

Sigh, I'm going to get some coffee before I pass out on my keyboard, my boss generally wouldn't care for that.

June 13, 2002

I've got the dungeon Master's Guide. I've got a 12-sided die. I've got Kitty Pryde, and Nightcrawler too, waiting there for me, yes I do, I do. I've got posters on the wall. My favorite rock group KISS. I've got Ace Frehley, I've got Peter Criss, waiting there for me, yes I do, I do. In the garage I feel safe. No one cares about my ways. In the garage, where I belong, no one hears me sing this song. In the garage... I've got an electric guitar. I play my stupid songs. I write these stupid words, and I love every one waiting there for me, yes I do, I do.

Work has been way too productive the last couple days I need to take a break :D

I got the mp3 cd changer and it is awesome. I don't have my main computer here so my supply of mp3s is a bit limited at the moment but the thing just reaks of potential. Something about having 900 songs or so in a little thing mounted in your trunk rings so sweet.

Also, after Matt was like the eleventy-fifth person asking me "are your brights on man?" when riding in my car, I got tired of explaining that the little green symbol was to say my daytime running lights where on and not my brights. So I looked into it a bit, and it turns out that there are orginizations and large groups of people that hate the things because they are really bright and glare in people's mirrors. I guess I can understand that as they are mounted at the same angles as the brights but are a little less intense. Nonetheless they still point right in people's vision when they are trying to drive. I researched further and found that there was no evidence anywhere saying that they were an effective safty device. So I figured I disable mine if it didn't mean any permanent modifications, and if it didn't void any warrenties or anything, it turns out that it didn't do either of those things so I did it. It was kinda tricky though. I looked in the relay center under the hood and found a relay labeled "DRL" so I'm like, okay cool and yoinked it out with a pair of pliars. And that took car of the drls, that was easy I thought. It was about the time I was declairing how easy it was that I realized that now my passenger side hi-beam didn't work. I was thinking wtf? they really don't want you to turn these friggin things off. Not to be foiled that easily, I fashioned a jumper out of a piece of 16 gauge house-wire using a hammer and a pair of pliars and used it to jump the connection where my hi-beams used to run through the relay, and voila, hi-beams worked again. So now I don't have what amounts to my brights on at all times anymore.

Days are drifting by so fast to the point where I look at a calender and go, "wow, I've been working for a month already..." it's almost scary, almost.

June 19, 2002

Well that's been a couple of interesting days, although not very amusing.

At work I have run into the age old problem of browser compatibility. What I intend to do simply makes sense to do using DHTML but as I discovered there are people in our department who still insist on using netscape 4.x. I asked my mentor how long they were planning on using it if they have already been using it for four years, and he said he wasn't sure. If I can't find a solution that doesn't sacrifice functionality of my program then we may actually get those people to at least migrate to netscape 6.2 where the stylesheet support isn't half-assed, and the half of the ass that is there has got a big wart on it. Oh well, don't get me started again on old browser versions again, I'm sure it i'll be fine.

So Rosie, Hans, and I are going to play golf after work today and we haven't played in a while so we decided to go to the range. I remember Medinah has got a nice range and it's all the balls you can hit til your hands bleed, so I said hey lets go there to practice. So I'm pulling up to the gate at the enterence to the club and the gate guy is kinda walking across the path and this is what the conversation sounded like

Me: hey, can you drive all the way out to the driving range?
Jackass: no.
Me: Oh, where can you drive out to?
Jackass: nowhere.
Me: I'm sorry is the range closed?
Jackass: yes.
Me: When did it close?
Jackass: It is closed, this is a members only club.
Me: *sighs* I'm aware of that (pointing at member sticker)
Jackass: Oh uh, sorry about that yeah you can drive anywhere-

Well, whatever, as rosie said apparently my saturn isn't high class enough to get in there. So we head out to the driving range and since there are no signs anywhere, and last I remember you could drive out to the driving range, and with confirmation from jackass at the gate that you could drive anywhere I had no reason to think you couldn't... That us until I actually got out there and realized that that road gets really narrow really fast. I decided at that point it would just be best to just ask someone there once we got our clubs out of the car. It just so happens Les Dowick was out there and I asked him, "hey is the car a problem?" he said "well I don't care but you're not supposed to" so I explained to him that I had hardly even been out there since back in the day when you could drive out there and as I'm doing so some other guy kinda adds from several yards away, to most likely what he assumed was Les telling me off, the fact that you can only drive to the pool parking lot. So I apoligize and move my car off and park by one of the buildings off the main road next to a couple other cars that were there and walk my ass all the way back to the range. (this has been a terrific visit so far...)

Well on the bright side I was hitting them pretty well and I didn't have any more unpleasent encounters. But probably mostly because I didn't have any other encounters.

So after that and dinner we decide Rosie's house is the destination and we are leaving from hans's neighborhood. and some guy on a cellphone in an Acura MDX (again, don't get me started with the whole luxury SUV thing) comes flying around the corner into the one way enterance part of the intersection almost hitting Hans's can and Hans yells "hey watch it jackass this is an exit". The guy slams on his breaks, gets out of the car and comes over to Hans's car getting in his face yelling the arguement that he's bigger than Hans so that makes him exempt to silly idylic rules like fucking one way signs and any criticism that one might recieve for disobeying said signs and almost causing an accident. So as we realize what just happened Rosie and I undo the seatbelts and get out of the car, not making an advance on the guy or anything, just kinda more to make it obvious that the guy is making an ass of himself. And the guy points at me and asks if I've got a problem and I just asked, "Uh, did you run into him?", he said no, so I said, "Then what are you doing out of your car?" he just kinda ignored me and as he was getting back in the car I think he said something like "you people better watch yourselves" and rosie just shouted "yeah whatever, just next time try using the enterance." and the guy finally left.

The thing that's got me wondering is what the hell must have happened to this guy today that would make him act like that much of a lunatic. I hope he had some excuse and he wasn't just a fucking raving psycho, of course that's just a hope.

Well I like to end with good news so I got some for ya. I got the afterburner light kit for my GBA and I got it installed almost flawlessly. The only thing that isn't perfect is that there are a couple little specs of dust on the inside of the outermost plastic screen protector. You can only see them if the screen displays all black so it's not really a big deal, and all the layers that are laminated together are done so without a spec or a scratch, and that's the important part. I'm not gonna mess with it unless the cover gets scratched up and I want to replace it anyway (which nintendo sells a kit to do for a few bucks) but for now it doesn't matter. So yay, the results are that the gameboy is now playable :D and I don't even need to find one angle to look at it, it looks great from a variety of angles. Some people say that this finally brings the gameboy to the level of play the gamegear offered. I completely disagree, the game gear didn't have half the graphics power of the gameboy advance, that and the gamegear's 6 AA batteries only lasted two hours where as the GBA w/light gets 10 hours from just 2 AAs, that's about the same power consumtion as a discman, and is very acceptable imho. Oh well I'm rambling now bye.

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