Really been neglecting the journal lately, but it's been hard to get motivated. I spent another weekend doing nothing, mostly. I have the jones for a new computer real bad, but the first couple days of online research and shopping just brought me down.

At first I was looking into the standard Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP, Micron etc. They've been around a while, have a reputation for quality, good support, etc., and offer monthly payment plans. But they tend to be a little pricier than necessary, and even the best of the build-your-own options isn't quite as flexible as it should be, forcing you to buy things you don't need (speakers, modem, WinME, etc.).

And forget local stores. The prices aren't good and the systems aren't really what I want. If I want maximum control over what I buy, obviously I need to build a system one piece at a time. I'm not sure I'm going to save a lot of money this way, 'cause shipping is a considerable expense. But it's been years since I've owned the kind of computer system I want, and this time I'm going to make sure I have something I'm happy with.

Been poking around [H]ardOCP and other overclocking/customizing sites and I'm wanting to go that route. A funky case (blowhole maybe, fruity translucent no), an overclockable mobo/CPU, and The Heat Sink That Ate Tokyo. Water cooling would be fun -- ever since the Serial Experiments Lain scenes with the creepy gel coolant stuff keeping Lain's Navi running, I've kinda wanted to try that myself -- but it's expensive and though you cool off the CPU itself better, you wind up generating more heat inside the case.

Went to Best Buy last night to buy Bust-A-Move 4 (Steph can't wait for Christmas), but for no fathomable reason it was $40. I bought Gran Turismo 2 instead (since it's down to $20) and am already back in that mindset... practically every car I see on the road, I wonder how well it handles and weather it's modelled in the game. Heh.

The Mechwarrior 4 test is one of the things that's driving my desire for a new computer. Graphically and gameplay-wise it blows away every other 3D mech game I've ever seen. But I want more weapons and equipment and stuff to tinker with :)

Sometimes I miss the days when MTV actually played music videos... though considering what passes for pop lately I guess it's not such a bad thing that they don't anymore. "Fear" is the coolest thing I've seen on TV in a while though, aside from MST3K.

The show is really less about hauntings than about facing one's fear of the dark and unknown. Everything in the show is keyed to build that fear up and then make the contestants face it. It doesn't really matter whether or not that old prison is actually haunted -- it's the mind that's haunted. Perception is more important sometimes than reality. Once the idea is planted that something is moving down the hallway toward you in the darkness, or that there is somebody under that tarp on the electric chair, it's hard to get the rational part of your mind working again. All you want to do is run, hide, be somewhere else, preferably one with lots of bright light and friendly faces.

Would I participate in this thing? I dunno. It's a far worse psychological torture test than any other game show out there. But would I watch it again, oh yeah. Looking forward to tonight's episode. :)

Another short entry... but the first edition of the list is here. It was more difficult to put together than it had any right to be.

When I arrived at work this morning I found Moe dead. I'm not broken up about it, but I haven't decided whether or not to get another betta.

More snackoo arrived today. "Pudin" Pocky, Tenkei chocolate-filled marshmallows (these things should be illegal), Fujiya milk candy, Kaki No Tane rice crackers, Kanezaki Milk Karintos (sort of a fried dough thing that I could easily get hooked on), "soda" JYU candy (imagine Sprite-flavored Sweet Tarts), and kinako (not very good) and orange petite daifuku. Mmmmm.

I realized that the little icons I've been putting up on the sides have taken a lot of time, and have mostly been keyed to subject rather than mood and are thus kind of redundant. Does anyone out there think I should keep doing them?

Ah, the sounds of feline strife. There's not quite as much of it as there was the first day, but Amber and Kyoko have not yet reached an accord. More like a general cease-fire punctuated by the occasional raid.

At first Amber was the aggressive one, but my cat has launched a couple of attacks of her own. I think Key has staked out my room as her territory and is determined to defend it against Amber. Even if Amber is just lying in the doorway across the hall. Even if Amber is on the other side of my closed bedroom door.

But at least Amber has stopped cornering Key and growling at her, and Key has stopped stalking Amber wherever she goes. It's been less than a week, so I'd say they're doing pretty good.

I'm doing okay myself. Kind of lethargic, especially yesterday, but hanging in there.

Trying to start my annual birthday/christmas list. I've been doing this for years and feeling weirder about it each time. I don't like asking for things, and there just seems to be something odd about telling people what it is you want. Especially when you have to tailor the list for practicality and price. There's not much I want that's easy to find, not expensive, that I don't have to pick out myself. Unless it comes from Amazon.

I don't even have a lot of computer games on the list this year... none so far in fact. That's what comes of having too slow a machine at home.

I'm sure I'll come up with some stuff, though it may not extend far beyond my Amazon wish list :)

Funny thing is, I'm not even reading as much as I used to. It's been some time now since I've stayed up 'til 4 AM reading. Usually my eyes won't stay open long after I crack a book open. It might have something to do with the lack of tinting on these lenses, or maybe I'm just tired.

I don't really have anything against ketchup. I just don't like it that much. For that matter, I like very few vinegar-based things. My mom's 3-or-4-bean salad is the only specific exception I can come up with offhand.

Looking back, I don't really have that much journal stuff to catch up on. It just seemed that way because there were so many times recently when I didn't feel like and/or didn't have time to write.

One bit of journal lag that can easily be remedied is in regards to another experimental MP3 I cooked up a few weeks ago. Have a listen to Werks: the song that says "Hey kids, math can be creepy!"

Speaking of creepy: that skeletal tail that I bought at the KC Ren Fest. It didn't bother me at all when I saw it, when I bought it, when I wrapped it around my hat and wrote it, or when it was lying on the other bed in the hotel room that first night I had it.

But when we got home I hung it up on a nail next to the door of my bedroom, it started to get to me. Seems a bit silly now, like Steph's Bloody Mary myth. But it freaked me out at the time. Maybe it was due to watching Autopsy 6 before bed, but I was just drifting off when I felt something bite my left foot. This was pre-Kyoko, so my first thought beyond startlement was that Amber had gotten in my room somehow. But a lights-on search proved that to be false. Second thought was, it's that tail. Why I thought of that, I don't know, but once I did I couldn't get it out of my head.

Of course I probably scraped the top of my foot against the roughly textured bar at the foot of the futon, but it was too late for reason. Panic had set in. I lied there in the dark obsessing over these strung-together bones and thinking about a certain necklace connected with a friend's misfortune a few years ago (more on that below).

Finally I manage to calm down and almost get to sleep when there's this big boom that resonates through the house. I freak out again, decide that there's no way I'm going to sleep with these bones in my bedroom, and take them out and drop them in the corner of the kitchen. Restful slumber ensued.

The noise? I'd bet money it was Jeff's broken computer chair. The central post slips off the thing that's supposed to support it and it bangs the floor. Heh.

Now the tail is sitting on a shelf at the office and I have barely even thought about it since. I'd say it's harmless and I was just freaking out. But while I'm telling ghost stories...

In my pre-Simu days, I once took a trip from Orlando to a small town near Pittsburgh where the Pennsic War is held annually. I rode up in a Lumina APV towing a trailer that was 70% recycled materials (i.e. some junk duct taped together with an axle and a hitch). Morgan, the owner of the van and the head of the SCA household that 4 out of 5 of us were attached to in some way, had recently acquired an allegedly Native American necklace at a con, which included (among other things) a talon from some raptor and the skulls of mice. She had removed the skulls 'cause she had been told that was bad mojo, and restrung the rest of it.

It was ugly.

Morgan hung this thing -- and I call it thing the same way I would call a used diaper or a plate of rotten meat a thing -- on the rear view mirror. Where it hung over the engine. Which developed severe water pump trouble and blew out.

She was a little unnerved by the coincidence, and wrapped the thing up and put it in the trailer. Right over its right tire. Which blew out.

Okay, I don't know any really good ghost stories. But when I think about how to deal with cursed items in MMORPGs in a way that's much more interesting than the standard "you can't drop it" mechanics, I think of that thing.

Here she is unveiled, so to speak. I've decided to call her Kyoko (KEE-o-ko), and I've managed to find and install the drivers for my digital camera again. (Polaroids don't seem to work with standard TWAIN drivers, they don't publish their software on their website, the software doesn't run on NT or Win2K, and only the ones built this year have USB ports. I don't recommend them at this point.)

Kyoko seems to be getting along better with Amber. Amber is the boss, but at least they can be within a few feet of each other without the growling and hissing and threatening... sometimes.

Gallery is updated. Site search thing is set up.

That's it. Short entry. I have stuff to write about backing up in the queue, but I'm tired.

We have a new roommate here at the new house. Say hello to... uh... well, hm.

We stopped by PetSmart this evening on the way home and I adopted a cat. She's sort of a miniature version of Amber: same fur but shorter, smaller in size and squeakier in voice. Chibi-Amber! Two years old (supposedly) but small and kittenish. She's very sweet, but her friendly advances have been rebuffed by Amber, who's even now making weird growling noises at the little dear.

Ooops, on second thought the newbie is doing a little growling and laying back of ears herself. Though when I pick her up and carry her a little ways off, she starts purring again. Now hse's curled up at my feet. Awwww.

Anyway. The shelter had named her Missy, but I can't call her that. Makes me think of (A) a certain person who once welcomed people to Genie, and (B) a manic Yorkshire terrier-mop we had years ago by the same name. I'm not sure what to call her though. The first thoughts were Chai or Muffin, though I'm leaning more toward Java or Bean at the moment.

With your help, maybe I won't have to name my cat after a food item. If you have any suggestions I'd like to see them on my message boards :)

After doing some online research and taking a couple of online quizzes, I think it's a reasonable guess that I have clinical depression. Of course that's not as good as a doctor's diagnosis and I'm not treating it as such, but if it helps me understand and deal with it then it's useful. I'm going to give St. John's Wort a cautious try for now.

The SimuCon 2001 site is published. Obviously there's more to do as the schedule firms up, but now we're concentrating our web efforts on another project.

Susan, I wanted to be an astronaut. Then I realized that required lots of hard work as well as being in good physical shape, and decided to be a music teacher instead (emulating one of my childhood heroes). Sometime in high school I came to my senses. :)

I realized that would probably involve dealing with kids, and I'd have to take courses on <gasp> singing in college. So I figured I'd be a programmer.

Ack... cat on keyboard! I think she's trying to tell me something... no, Netscape doesn't support the <mrowr> tag.

(This was written away from home over the weekend... I had planned to add to it but I'm too tired.)

Here I am in a hotel room near Kansas City, writing this on my Palm and a new GoType keyboard. I've been wanting one anyway, and the need for some therapeutic writing gave me an excuse to buy one.

It's not as comfortable and easy as a regular keyboard, of course, but it does make touch typing possible.

Anyway. About that therapy.

I have some kind of emotional problem: an occasional, temporary loss of the calm acceptance and sense of humor that I usually approach life with. This has happened a few times in the past. It's always sparked by stress of some sort combined with an inability to solve the problem that's bothering me most at that moment. And yet that source of stress does not account for the intensity of the frustration and rage I feel about it. It rarely seems like the stress is the cause, but rather a catalyst igniting an already volatile substance.

When the anger burns out, despair is the next stage. That's the point where one part of me wonders why I'm getting so upset about something that isn't really that important in the grand sheme of things, and the other part of me wonders why I should live. I don't seriously think about suicide, but I do think at that times that life requires too much maintenance. Like I just want to stop treading water and drown already.

But as inconvenient, difficult, and painful as life can be, death is more so. And from the lowest level of my biology to the highest ideal of my religion, I have a duty to live. So I live.

And later, when the despair has calmed down to numbness and then contentment and joy return, I'm glad I didn't do anything terribly stupid. :)

This has usually been something that lasts a couple of days and then fades before I realize it. This time I thought it was the same. I thought last Friday and Saturday was it and I was back to normal again by Sunday afternoon.

But this week we got our computer upgrades at the office, and as I wrote, it's disruptive to have your PC taken apart and most of its hardware and software replaced. And it did not go smoothly at all.

Tuesday we were assembling hardware, and our drives were backed up. Wednesday we made the switch and installed Win2K and started reinstalling software and drivers and stuff. Thursday we got our stuff restored from tape and I was still dealing with drivers, setting up Outlook and Outlook Express, etc. At the end of the day I was back in full-blown frustration mode, though when I left I figured there was only one last small thing to take care of before I was back in business.

Friday, however, my machine began crashing in all kinds of nasty ways. I spent the day uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, barking up the wrong tree, and basically failing to get anywhere with anything. It was a test of patience I just didn't need.

I almost pulled out of going to the Ren Faire this weekend so I could just use the whole time to cool down and reflect and try and sort things out. Instead I just insisted on getting this keyboard first so I could write and clear my head in the meantime. Hopefully I'll have a great time at the Faire and be ready to face the evil dead computer on Monday without having a nervous breakdown.

I found a useful philosophy in an unlikely place:

This device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation.

I think I'll need more than cleverly stated goals to take care of this problem though. A little troubleshooting might help. Is this a cyclic/periodic thing or is it set off by a certain kind or amount of stress? Can I catch it when or before it begins and head it off at the pass? Is it something with a medical cause that can be treated? When I get home I intend to look up info on manic depression (now caled bipolar disorder if I remember right).

It isn't related to not eating or sleeping right. It isn't a brand new thing either. I had some emotional instability when I was a kid. My parents took me to see a psychologist, who prescribed some drug or other, I don't remember what. But on a later visit he made some comment to parents to "make sure he takes his pills, that'll shut him up." They dropped him like a hot potato. As I matured I got much better, but I've still had some notable episodes where frustration just builds up to a breaking point and I lose it.

The KC Ren Fest is a nice one. It has the great variety of merchants that the Sarasota Medieval Faire had, but plenty of space so it's not overcrowded. The weather was nice and cool, a little rainy in the early afternoon and storming as we were leaving, which I prefer to hot dry weather for this sort of thing.

I escaped without buying a drum, which wasn't easy since there were a couple of merchants with lots of Middle Eastern and African drums. Sadly a lot of them were not very good quality and/or out of tune, and one of the shops displayed its djembes and ashikos in wire racks that made the drums uncofmfortable to play and probably damaged them. Still, if Steph hadn't dragged me away I might have inquired about the price of a particularly tall (close to 5 feet I'd guess), slender thing that was either a klong yaw or something closely related. It was easily the deepest drum I've ever played, though at those sub-bass frequencies it takes a lot of volume to make an impression, and I think it would have gotten buried in a group of drums. It was all boom and no snap.

There was a merchant selling fur, beads and bones, and I bought myself a skeletal tail of some kind. Not sure what, as it was just labeled "large tail" as opposed to "small tail." Could have had a kangaroo spine and tail, a savannah monitor spine and tail, any number of horns and skulls... though the skulls kinda creeped me out. A rabbit skin or the tail of some unidentifiable animal doesn't stare at you.

S'Kra Mur fans will be happy to know that the tail is long enough to drag the ground. ;)

Got my final bill from Mooville Apartments. I haven't seen such a list of trumped-up BS since... maybe ever. "Sticky dark substance spillage living room carpet $15" when I know that carpet was clean enough to eat off of before I left. They must have poured some coffee on it while bending the blinds on the patio door ($20). Wish I'd taken pictures before turning in the keys.

The good news is that I only had to pay 6 days of rent before someone took it over. 6 days! This is me doing the Happy Dance. My rent is now $273 a month less. It's true that there are some extra expenses I wasn't dealing with before, but I'm still gaining here. The roommates are happy too since I'll be pitching in my share of rent now. Whee!

I know I've said "computer addiction" is not a serious thing compared to real, chemical addictions. But when your computer is taken apart, the drives formatted and a semi-unfamiliar operating system installed, it's pretty disruptive and it tends to make one snarky and short on patience.

It takes a lot of effort to set up a computer to one's own personal tastes and restore all that software, settings, shortcuts, preferences, etc. so it's comfortable again. There is something profoundly annoying about not having that little toolbar with web editing and graphics shortcuts in its proper place, and having the Start Menu come up with large icons instead of small ones. Gah!

I was just about to write that I was mostly recovered from it, but I just found that I'm not set up to receive inter-office email yet and I can't because I don't know my own password because I've never had to use it.

Steph and Jeff and I have sworn repeatedly never to move again because it's too much effort. I'm feeling the same way about computer upgrades right about now. There goes my good mood. I want to break something.

Mooville's hitting the KC Ren Fest this weekend.

Bad mood the past few days. I started to write an entry about it but gave up. On Friday I let my frustrations with Dreamweaver and Netscape get the best of me, but that wasn't the cause, just a catalyst. I was already... hmm, probably "discontent" is a better description than "depressed."

A little music therapy helped a bit -- I got a spring drum Friday at a local drum shop. I was good and didn't buy the klong yaw or other large-scale noisemaking contraptions.

The spring drum is pretty cool, if not universally useful. It's a small round double-headed drum with a sound hole on one side and a spring attached to one head. Shake it and it sounds somewhere between a cymbal roll, thunder, and some kind of plumbing accident. Tap on the spring and it gives a snappy metallic twang. Play it like a drum and it sounds like a crappy little drum. Heh.

Which comes first... a new cat, a new drum (ashiko or klong yaw or something else big and deep), or a computer upgrade? I installed Diablo II on my home machine and it crawls. Walking into a room with 4-5 creatures is painful, and every new creature I encounter causes such an interval of disk thrashing that I have time to go upstairs and see what the TiVo has recorded. The cheap temporary solution is, of course, to not play Diablo II on that machine... but I've been really wanting a faster computer for at least a year, probably two. This one (an HP Pavillion 8250) doesn't, from what I can find online, overclock. I don't like being locked in to 266 MHz, but nor do I want to spend the money on a new motherboard and all that entails. Mumble.

And speaking of TiVo, the mood was finally lifted by MST3K. Unfortunately, I have both the Pumaman theme song and the Chicken Dance song stuck in my head. Save me!

At first listen, I was a little disappointed in "From me flows what you call Time." I was hoping it would fit "Mom" to a T. I thought it had its moments but did not have either the cosmic quality or the endless rhythym that I would have expected.

But now I'm listening to it at home, with less distraction, on a considerably better sound system than my work PC, and it has jumped up a few notches. I want to listen to this piece with headphones, lying down in the dark, watching the inside of my eyelids and seeing what happens.

Right now there are a couple of sections I think are too tense, and I can't help thinking they would have come together better had Takamitsu not locked himself in to a 5-note scale (lots of 5s appear in this work for Buddhist symbolic reasons) and if those danged steel drums were replaced by something a little more snappy. But there's a theme that comes out every once in a while that really does fit what I was looking for before I heard the piece, and those moments more than make up for it.

Heh. Can you tell I've never tried to review modern classical music before? :)

There's a church sign that we pass by on the way to work which always has some kind of moral saying on it. Sometimes we find fault with it, sometimes it's okay. The recent message: "forgiveness is the final form of love."

I don't agree. To look at love as a one-dimensional thing is flawed in the first place. The love I have for Vivaldi, for dark colors, for my lizards, for dark chocolate, for my family, for Seshat, for my friends, and for "The Hunt For Red October" are not merely different stages of the same thing. I'm sure we use that word "love" too much.

But then forgiveness itself is has many different gradations. Some of them are an immediate reaction, not a "final" anything -- if I have a typo in this entry, you'll probably forgive me because you know how easy it is to do. And some forms are so significant that you just stand in awe.

Modern Christianity has a strong emphasis on forgiveness that other religions don't. This doesn't mean that other religions are unforgiving or that Christianity goes too easily on transgressors, it's just an issue of point of view. To me, forgiveness is just a natural part of justice and how things work.

BTW, the image above was from 3BP, a site which almost asphyxiated me this morning. Where else can a free-lance riter get chewable razors or see-through windows on April 32?

Is it okay for a son of Seshat to dislike Melvil(le) Dewey? If the man were alive today, he'd speak l33t. Among all the advances in library science, he also tried to reform the spelling of English words, with results that are painful to read. Petroski quotes him quite a lot through part of his book, and every time I see those block quotes I cringe.

I am amazed by TiVo. Really. I was not a TV watching kind of guy, because I'd much rather read a book or play a game than channel surf. I have never liked the idea of watching TV even when there's nothing good on, or using it just for noise. I know that's unAmerican of me, but oh well.

But this is different. You can browse through the menus and tag stuff that is worth watching. It makes you realize just how much good stuff actually is available on TV (cable anyway) amidst all the crap, if only it was there exactly when you wanted it.

This isn't the ultimate online library of TV-on-demand quite yet, but it's the next best thing. I'll add my voice to the chorus of people saying it completely changes the way one watches TV.

Paid my brief yearly visit to Archon. Having fallen out of the fan scene years ago (pretty much when Simu took over my life <g>), I look at it as a chance to see some art and buy some books and maybe other stuff. Which is what I did.

"The Book on the Bookshelf" is pretty interesting so far -- the evolution of bookshelves throughout history, and how it interacted with the physical forms of books (driven by economics and invention) and with the architecture of libraries. It's even linked in with things like the design of computer keyboards. We take for granted the typical bookshelf arrangement we know today, and that makes one realize just how much else we take for granted. (In fact the author has written a similar book on the pencil...)

I'm going to have to look into the history of libraries a bit more I think. Like the proverbial tourist said when she saw the ocean for the first time, "Ya know, it's bigger than I thought."

We celebrated Johnny's 300th birthday or something ;) at the bowling alley this weekend, thus confirming that I really do suck at bowling. I have the excuse of not having done so in 10 or 15 years, but still. Like many sports, I feel completely awkward and foolish doing it, which doesn't encourage me to do it more so I can get to where I don't feel stupid. If it wasn't for hanging out with friends, and the fact that I wasn't the only inexperienced klutz in the group, I would probably have had a rotten time. As it was, it was okay.

It did bring back memories of bowling when I was a kid. Not that I liked it a lot then either, but I was fascinated by the workings of the alley itself. In my memory it was sort of a strange industrial gothic mechanical ballet, with a lot of seemingly unnecessary moving parts, the same blue-green undersea light that shines through between escalator steps, and dark mysteries that reside beyond the gutter and down the throat of the ball return whatsit. I used to wonder what sort of strange caverns the ball went through down there, like the Ancient Egyptian idea of what the sun went through on its mysterious subterranean journey from the western horizon back to the east. I also imagined people wearing headlamps and working down there in those depths, keeping the machinery running. Hmmm.

How did a sport like bowling evolve, anyway? I mean, it's pretty easy to imagine hunter-gatherers playing something football-like, prehistoric kids trying to see how far they can hit a rock with a club, and so on. But when the sport requires a perfectly level and flat and smooth floor, a perfectly balanced weighted ball with finger holes in it, and either some fancy engineering work or a lot of manual resetting of pins, just how does that come about?

Brad McQuaid says in this interview that technological advancement in the next five years is going to open up new horizons for MMORPGs:

Faster CPUs, more RAM, and more hard drive space will allow game developers in general and MMORPG creators specifically to create incredibly realistic looking and detailed worlds. And these worlds will change - a dynamic, living world is one of MMORPGs' holy grails, but in five years, we'll all be a lot closer to that goal. I think you'll see landscapes changing before players' eyes, and I also think you'll see players finally having real influence in terms of game play… I'm talking about player-run governments, cities, armies, etc. What we're doing now will seem very primitive.

And here's my rebuttal:

Pblblblblblblblblt.

Technology (and very large art budgets) is going to allow better looking graphical MMORPGs in the near future, certainly. But game design problems that have faced us ever since the first teletype MUD are not going to suddenly go away just because we'll have gigahertz machines to play on.

I'm not saying the kind of thing that McQuaid is forecasting will never come to pass, but that it can only be the efforts of game designers, not of hardware manufacturers, that can make it happen.

But I also think today's "holy grail" features are going to be tommorow's MMORPG equivalent of lens flare. In other words, "who cares if the game sucks, it has       insert feature here      !" The emphasis should not be put on individual features, but on making a unique experience that grows with the player and keeps them interested for a nice long time.

Found a fix for the forgetfulness of GeoBar; another undocumented aspect of installation is setting a registry entry to the directory where your plugins are kept. Supposedly this is mentioned somewhere in the "Read Me First" file (which is really a version history, not help for the new user or a list of known bugs) but I didn't find it in there. In any case, I'm using it again and so far, the lesser idiosyncracies have not driven me away. There's a handy shell-switching app ready to go though, so the old familiar Explorer interface that we know and don't quite love is ready to step in at a moment's notice.