the plan was originally for me to go down to DC, then lani and i would take a bus to richmond, anthony and kim would drive up and we’d all hang out with some of lani’s friends. had we actually planned ahead, that might have happened. unfortunately, we didn’t quite have the foresight to get in touch with the friends in richmond before we were ready to leave. when we couldn’t get ahold of them we decided that it wouldn’t be quite as much fun to go to richmond without knowing that we had somewhere to crash.

<p>as a backup, lani and i decided to just rent a car and drive down to Chapel Hill and hang out with anthony and kim there. while the backup plan ultimately succeeded, it was not without its flaws. primarily, we underestimated the difficulty involved in renting a car. despite calling ahead and reserving one, we ended up spending two painful hours at the counter of the rental place waiting for them to get the paperwork together and find us a car. we ended up with a crappy silver ford escort with no cd-player but by that time were were happy just to get out of there.</p>

<p>the rest of the trip went relatively well. we only got mildly lost in north carolina for a few minutes. then we met up with anthony and kim in downtown chapel hill for dinner. while we were eating, some guy in a spiderman costume wandered through the restaurant. then, later, in the parking lot of a supermarket we stopped at to pick up some wine, we saw some guy riding by on a unicycle. kim assured us that guys in spiderman costumes and on unicycles weren&#8217;t everyday occurrences in chapel hill and that things were just weird because we were visiting. </p>

<p>then we went back to anthony and kim&#8217;s little purple house in the middle of nowhere to have a quiet evening drinking wine, talking, and watching videos. kim showed us an interview with Alejandro </p>

<p>Jodorowsky (the director). i&#8217;m not sure if it was something he said or was just translated oddly but he used the phrase &#8220;_____ goes straight to my balls.&#8221; meaning roughly &#8220;_____ really pisses me off.&#8221; we decided that this phrase definitely needs to be worked into our slang vocabulary. eg, &#8220;Budget Rental Cars goes straight to my balls.&#8221;</p>

<p>we also watched a tape anthony had of Bill Hicks&#8217; last public performance before his death. it was filmed in london in 1992. interestingly, all his commentary about Bush and the US government&#8217;s habit of giving small countries weapons and then going and blowing them up is still entirely relevant and timely ten years later.</p>

<p>in the morning we went and said hi to the llama (i&#8217;m not sure i could have talked lani into driving all the way to chapel hill if i hadn&#8217;t remembered that they lived on a llama farm. the promise of llama&#8217;s was an important motivational force. although apparently they&#8217;re down to just a single llama now). then i insisted on going to a waffle house for breakfast (what&#8217;s a trip to the south without going to a waffle house?). it was cheap, greasy, and filled with rednecks; the experience was complete.</p>

<p>traffic going back into DC was scary but we managed to make it alive.</p> 

Yes, indeed it was a fun filled eve last friday at madame x. I started with two chocolate Martinis (yum!!) and then moved on to citrus infused vodkas and other concoctions server martini glass style. The cake (thank you Stephanie!!) was a dark chocolate cake with dark chocolate icing on the inside surrounded by a 1/4” layer of solid white chocolate as frosting.

<p>Friends gallore; good times were grabbed, squeezed, and wrestled to the ground for a three count. This created my only problem&#8230; waking up for a wedding the next morning.</p> 

i’ve finally gotten around to writing another theme for thraxil. if you go to your user page and edit your settings, you can now select the ‘barebones’ theme. it’s basically just thraxil with no styling whatsoever; stories aren’t posted on the main page, just their subjects with a link to read the rest of the story. most people probably won’t like it but it could be useful if you consistently visit the site from a slow connection or an old browser that doesn’t like CSS. mostly this was just an exercise to demonstrate that theme selection does actually exist and work properly. expect more to come in the future.

<p>since i now have a <span class="caps">WAP</span>-enabled cellphone, i may even get ambitions and make a <span class="caps">WML</span> version of thraxil so i can read it on my phone.</p> 

some days i just love technology.

<p>i got my tax return a while ago and my first instinct was to buy a new computer; put together something top of the line and expensive. my current machine is an old celeron 400 that i&#8217;ve had for almost 3 years now. unfortunately, i have student loans and credit card payments and stuff so i knew i couldn&#8217;t really justify spending all that money on a new computer. but if i didn&#8217;t do something to make my machine faster, i&#8217;d be more and more tempted to go blow a wad of cash on new hardware. </p>

<p>so i spent some time digging around through all the specs of the hardware i&#8217;ve got trying to figure out what i could do to improve performance the most for the least amount of money. i filled it up with <span class="caps">RAM</span> last summer when prices fell through the floor so memory wasn&#8217;t the problem. anything more than a trivial processor upgrade would probably require a new motherboard (which would probably require new <span class="caps">RAM</span>). speeding up my hard-drive would require either moving to <span class="caps">SCSI</span> (expensive) or <span class="caps">ATA</span>-100 (requiring a new mobo or at least a controller card).</p>

<p>really, what was killing my system the most was the graphics. my computer came with one of those evil onboard <span class="caps">ATI</span> Mach64&#8217;s. turning on 3d acceleration for that card actually makes things slower. so i picked up a cheap ($50) GeForce2 MX 400 card.</p>

<p>wow. what a difference. before, i couldn&#8217;t even load tuxracer; it would seriously take several minutes just to render the title screen; 3d graphics were out of the question. now it smokes. X windows even loads almost instantaneously now.</p>

<p>it&#8217;s probably a pretty sad commentary on the age of my computer that a $50 upgrade can just about double the performance. it&#8217;s also not exaggerating much to say that the graphics card has just about as much processing power as the rest of my system. on the positive side, i&#8217;ve now extended the lifespan of my computer for quite a bit longer.</p>

<p>while i was at it i picked up a wireless keyboard and mouse so i can take full advantage of my projector. i can now relax on the couch and work on the computer (or play tuxracer). </p>

<p>the keyboard i got is a logitech itouch keyboard. it&#8217;s a pretty standard black keyboard with a nice feel to it and about a dozen assorted buttons and controls on it. it comes with windows software that&#8217;s supposed to make all the buttons do simple things like take you to a web site with just one keystroke. most interestingly, it has a volume knob and play/stop/ff/rew keys which look like they might actually be useful.</p>

<p>after some experimentation with <tt>xev</tt>, i confirmed that the extra keys were just sending keycodes in the undefined range. with some <tt>xmodmap</tt> tweaking and help from <a href="http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:tdeheWhqpvoC:xmms-shell.sourceforge.net/">xmms-shell</a> and i now have all the buttons working in linux and bound to things that i find useful. i&#8217;ve even got a &#8220;thraxil&#8221; button that takes me directly to this site. :)</p> 

i just went to the buddhist meditation center in barre, ma. there was a silence observation in place so i couldn’t actually talk to anyone. nice peaceful place though. reminded me of northern maine:no one to talk to, nothing to distract you, lots of nature, men in orange robes… i thought there would be an actual temple there, since that’s where “the next karate kid” supposedly took place. no dice… my search continues.

last night, Gerard turned 0×1D. a significant portion of the people in the office along with other friends of his managed to throw a surprise party for him. i was really impressed that we got as many people as we did without the surprise being blown; i didn’t even realize it was intended to be a surprise party up until right beforehand.

<p>so we all gathered at Madame X, a little bar in the west village, with a cake as one of his friends brought him there under some pretense. between madame X and some other bar that we ended up at later, we pumped him full of birthday cake and martinis and peer-pressured him into doing various embarassing acts (unfortunately, we didn&#8217;t have any recording equipment so there will be no future blackmail).</p> 

so i finally made it to the Giant Robot store. my pilgrammage is complete.

<p>i had to walk around in West LA, not knowing if there was a difference between Avenues and Boulevards.  My sister told me that the address on their page said Ave. but the one i could find on the scant bus map was Boulevard. I guess people use them interchangeably in LA.  You&#8217;d be lost in Northern Virginia, but i think they do that on purpose so they can christianize you or use you for target practice</p>

<p>anyway, i finally bought Sleepwalk (Optic Nerve 1-4 collection) after pouring over many a review.    Eric (one of the makers of Giant Robot!) noticed me browsing and asked me if i was a fan.  i had to admit that i hadn&#8217;t read any yet.  just the reviews.  the guys at GR are were pretty nice and gave me a poster for the new Optic Nerve collection coming out in the summer to fuel my future addiction. i had to leave after insisting on pictures and announcing myself as the paparazzi of GR.  good thing i can hide out in DC.</p>

<p>but i read most of Sleepwalk on various forms of transportation from LA to Claremont, and i love it.  i&#8217;m already a fan.  sometimes it strikes a little too close to home though.  close to home is good.  a little too close to home is creepy.</p> 

my old ericsson T28 cellphone has been having issues lately and, in the last week, has pretty much ceased functioning altogether. so i figured it would be a good time to upgrade to the new T68 which has all kinds of neat features like a color screen, WAP with email, a web-browser, and IM, bluetooth, and an IR port plus much better battery life.

<p>it is, unfortunately, not a cheap phone. to get a large discount that brought it down to a price i could afford, i had to sign up for a new contract. that meant that i get a new number. so if anyone reading this has my old cell # written down, change the last 4 digits from 4299 to 1299.  sorry about the inconvenience.</p>

<p>and of course, if you don&#8217;t have my number at all, just email me. with this phone i can now read my email (and send it) from anywhere.</p> 

my sister woke me up at 1:30am last night. (which was actually good, because i found 4 mosquito bites that weren’t there before i went to sleep. this lead me to shut the door (no screen) and turn the thermostat to cool against my stingy roommate’s request.) she had to call me to deliver the story of how she was standing in line for something and randomly started talking to the guy in front of her. as it turns out he goes to bates, which leads to, “oh really! my sister went to bates!” at this point the conversation usually ends when person B has no idea who person A’s sister is, conversation dwindles to the sound of toes-tapping and the occasional sigh “ummm”. but as it turns out, the guy is actually neil who was good friends with my good friend and ex-roommate Parv. i spent a night with him observing midnight madness from the “under age scenic viewpoint”.

<p>weird.</p> 

Try this day on for size:

<p>1) Started the day designing a stupid announcement page for my organization. I was given one set of directives from one person. His boss gave me a whole different set of directives after I had created a design. Grr. The resulting design by committee is one of the ugliest things I&#8217;ve ever produced.</p>

<p>2) Was heckled by a homeless guy who informed me that I can&#8217;t help being a racist (?!?!?!), that it&#8217;s in my blood. He needs to get my label straight. I&#8217;m an elitist, capitalist. Sheesh.</p>

<p>4) Tried installing <span class="caps">SGL</span> again. The machine hangs while trying to run Lilo. Ugh. When does the next Red Hat come out? <strong>dejected sigh</strong></p>

<p>3) Tomorrow I get to continue with #1</p>