I slept for 12 hours today, after the best party I've ever been to. And the only party I've ever "sponsored". hah.

I helped set up for the party all day Saturday, which involved hanging lights and setting up audio gear and getting really dehydrated and sick and passing out on the couch. I got somewhat better just before the party started, but I never felt well enough to eat anything so I went through this monster party on a bowl of cereal and an apple.

Anyway, Holly's place is the best party location ever. And we packed it so full of people. It was obscenely well attended. The two kegs of beer was gone in about an hour and people still stayed until 5am. Frostbyte and Carl brought over their LED towers which were absolutely amazing, Tekfu and all of the DJs were great, the crowd was good, and not a single person threw up. What a great party.

After sleeping off the party exhaustion and finally eating for the first time in 30 hours, I went back to the warehouse and cleaned up for most of today. This involved my first time ever getting to play with a high-pressure water sprayer and (eew) cleaning the toilet used by 400 people yesterday.

Then I finished the boxes for my arcade project for Tuesday's art&technology collision. I just hope the second box's buttons and joystick show up tomorrow, or it's going to be all one-player. yuck. And because of the death of one of my machines, I no longer have a machine capable of running the emulator. To add to the problems, Mike promised me a projector and is currently in New Orleans. So my contribution to the party is in jeopardy. But it could still happen. Who knows.

Why I want to move out, reason #235:

Evan comes home without his laptop. I was going to test my emulator software on it and commented that it was odd that he'd leave his portable computer at work.

He says, "My girlfriend is in town for the weekend, I don't want to sit around on my computer."

To which I say, "Two to one says you'll spend the whole evening watching television."

She says, "What's wrong with watching television?" and Evan chimes in, "Yeah what's wrong with that?"

Call back the bombers, set DefCon 2.

So the first doctor to check me out said "you're going to need surgery. right now." and he whisked me down the hall to the surgery area and handed me off to a surgeon, who repeated the same check and declared that the surgery could wait for more convenient scheduling. The he did this weird Mr. Miagi thing and basically pushed around on my abs with his hands in a way that hurt like hell but when he was done my guts felt a whole lot better. So that was pretty cool doctor magic...

And I'm still in one piece, at least until sometime in the next couple weeks.

In 45 minutes I'm going to the med center for my "urgent care" appointment. I may or may not have my first real surgery ever tonight. And I'm pretty scared.

So my linux box recently went through the computer equivalent of a slow, painful death. Mysterious data corruption and hardware failures were everywhere, and I had to put it down.

Now that I've moved all the functions of the old box over to Polychoron, I'm trying to isolate the problem in the old box. I've got it stripped down to just a hard drive and a video card and it's still causing poorly-documented hardware errors. When I try to install Windows2000, the install floppy tells me that it couldn't install HAL.DLL (the hardware abstraction layer libraries) because of...

error code 7

So that helps a lot... and the Microsoft website helps even less, stopping just short of actual aid. Linux will install but then kernel panics randomly while running such exotic programs as the Bourne shell. I did actually get the box to accept an install of MS-DOS 6.2 and then Windows 3.11, which uplifted its status from paper-weight to eye-sore. Anyway, I know reading about this sort of thing is almost as exciting as having to sit here and swap the disks yourself. So I won't ramble on about it.

But the point is, and you're going to be let down by this because there isn't much of one, that I'm now reduced to swapping out individual pieces of hardware until I find out what's broken.

Jered told me about a cool program called Memtest86 which is OS-independant and does some really thourough testing of RAM. Jered says most weird hardware problems can be traced to bad RAM, so I'm giving this box the Memtest86 works. So far, it has been throwing bit patterns at the memory in various ways for eight hours, forty-three minutes, and five seconds with zero errors. Test #11, whatever that entails, takes forever. Isn't that interesting.

No. No it isn't.

And to continue a string of posts whose content is merely links to sites I find interesting, here's a really well written short research paper which illustrates many of the concerns I have about my classes.

I remember when I first started playing with ReBirth, I really enjoyed the interface and it was a high-fidelity reproduction of the hardware it was emulating. But there's only so much I could do before I ran into the inescapable fact that I hate the way the 808 and 909 sound. Now those wacky Swedes at Propellerheads have come up with the next big thing, and it completely kicks ass: Reason.

It's a hardware emulator just like ReBirth but it has all the various types of hardware that ReBirth was missing. It's got mixers, effects, sequencers, drum machines, digital and "analog" synths, samplers, as well as full midi control, multi-channel out, realtime control, CV patches, and a smart system of interconnecting the various modules.

Now I have to drop out of school because all I'm going to do is sit around making techno all the time. Well actually I suppose I'm safe for awhile because Reason costs $400 and I don't currently have it.

Engrish is brilliant.

So wait, it's an "ex-Bourbon stick chocolate" Lemon Milk flavored Pickle?? Or was that a Bourbon Pickle with Lemon Milk filling? But where does the "chocolate" part come in? Somebody please explain.

This, of course, in the wake of All your base are belong to us. How are you gentlemen!!

Some tetazoo guys and I are now searching for a loft somewhere. If we can find the right place it should be a blast. It will be so nice to leave this place. I'm tired of it. And it'll suck so much to leave my <$400/mo rent... But it's a small price to pay for engaging company and space and maybe a window or two.

A friend of mine wrote a poem about me. Take it with a block of salt, he says.

Logic as still as a fall pond
Leaves drift lazily down, breaking careful surface tension
Small ripples erupt, barely moving still, carefully waiting.
Anticipates the winter, a freeze, still once more.
Snow dusts over new tension as ice cracks.
Breaks apart, groaning under himself.
Thaws, and trickles slowly into itself once again.
he is motionless, anticipating still.

So I hobbled my broken ass over to Wing Tsun today to see Sifu Jeff and Siheng Mike. Said hi to everyone and got my student grade 1 certificate that I earned last November. I'm so annoyed that I can't be taking Wing Tsun right now.

So for valentines day, Greddy was going to rappel down the side of Burton-Conner and tape a rose to the outside of his girlfriend's window. Alex and Greddy were on the roof rigging up and I was down below with a radio watching for cops. And ther was nothing I could do when the dorm security showed up on the roof. So I took a walk. Oh well, it was a cool idea anyway.

[secret bunny ears]

Forgive me, barber, for my hair has grown. It has been four months since my last haircut.

Snatch is a fun movie to watch. But what is the damn song in the trailer?? It's not on the soundtrack and I want it.

Lock your doors and bar the windows, the Mousercam is once again operational. For the first time in four months it is actually delivering live images, and for the first time in over two years, it's refreshing the image more than once a minute (10 seconds now). Way to go new linux box!

Bigtime server rearrangement. Wanker (my linux box, the apartment-net server) was really flaking out and it was time to put it down. I have this NT box, Tesseract, that has all of my best hardware in it but since I got my laptop, Tesseract has just been sitting around. So I spent all of yesterday pulling the 5+ GB of useful information off of Tesseract and burning it to CD. Now I've eviscerated Wanker, made some hardware changes to the box formerly known as Tesseract, and a new linux super-box is born.

Polychoron, welcome to the family.

Finally, with the death of Wanker, my fourth-dimensional geometry naming scheme is uniform. I'll probably put the name Tesseract back into service when I do something new with the old linux box. Chances are it'll become a Win2000 box and serve as the controller for my Arcade Machine project.

My favorite horror story is "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe, it has been ever since I read it. If you haven't read it, you should. I especially like the first line,

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

OK so maybe it's not the most catchy first line ever, but it's much more funny when you live, like I do, with a guy called "Fortunato." It makes me chuckle maniacally and think sinister thoughts whenever he insults me.

...and then I reach for some bricks and a bottle of wine.

Jered, Geo and I are going to go downtown and measure the resistance of the federal building. It's coated in aluminum, you see. And this sort of testing is important. Really.

So due to recent blogger weirdness, there haven't been any updates in a few days. What have you missed? Well... Z got subpeona from the FBI to divulge information about his webserver. Also, he improved his super-toiled to now offer a strobe light in addition to blacklight. Not only does urine glow in blacklight, but it doesn't come out in a constant stream. Who knew?? But the disco urinal is pretty damn cool.

In the last four hours, membership in my Railgunners listserv has tripled.

I've been Slashdotted.

And those comments. Geez. Everyone on the net is an idiot. I swear.

"before i started reading slashdot posts, I used to think it was a community of really smart people. now I know better. it's basically just like MIT." - jforbess

My friend Geoff lives the life that people stereotypically associate with MIT.

There are at least 20 computers in his dorm room, and they're all on. And he does stuff with all of them that blows me away. I wish I was that computer-savvy, he's amazing.

Anyway, enough of that. 6.270 is tomorrow. Wow. Ethan of Fugure formlerly of Ojamoj played my show tonight. He's hillarious. It's a shame he's leaving for San Diego soon; He won't be able to play my show again basically ever. And I love love love his music.

The show tonight was sort of a comedy of technical errors on both our parts. It took me 30 minutes to find the right combination of cables and adapters to get his signal into the station, and then his sampler seems to have been missing about 3/4 of its samples, leaving his music to be played with the default sampler sounds, which were uber cheesy. I thought it sounded very minimal and fun, he was basically furious but in a fun way.