Chaos Terminal

I might be selling my laptop soon. (Thanks, but I already have a buyer). Should I drop 2 large and get a new Dell? Even with the money I will get for the old laptop, that is still a paycheck and a half! Here are my requirements for a used laptop:

• Pentium III (thus, 450MHz or better)
• 256 megs of ram
• 5 gig hard drive
• 14" or larger LCD screen that supports at least 1024x768
• DVD drive
• 10/100 network port
• A working battery!
• All for under $750

If something like that shows up on eBay, I am all set. These guys just might have something I am looking for...

Posted by Mike at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments

There just might be a chance for the rest of the West to catch up with the Wings, but don't hold your breath.

Posted by Mike at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments

I just found them so they aren't going on the side bar just yet: Aversion (punk and indie news)and Faction Radio (post punk, indie, emo and punk internet radio).

Posted by Mike at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments

Note to self: stop linking to Pitchfork. There is something about the singing of a soft, little girl voice that will transfix me on the spot. It is vaguely reminescent of, what seems to be, a previous life. I cannot explain what it does to me; I feel at peace. I can close my eyes and feel that I am floating through an opaque peach sky, weightless.

Saloon is doing this to me right now. Make it hurt.

Posted by Mike at 6:52 AM | Permalink | Comments

Alright, Fark got me. The headline Crack found in 2 shuttles, NASA grounds the whole fleet had nothing to do with drugs.

Posted by Mike at 5:27 AM | Permalink | Comments

God damnit, Hasek is retiring. We better pick up Cujo while Legace matures or the Wings aren't going for the cup next year.

Posted by Mike at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments

One of the oldest questions in history is, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" One of the oldest answers to that question was given by Aristotle, who stated that it was, in fact, the chicken. The philosopher postulated that while a chicken is an actual chicken, an egg is potential chicken. Since actuality always precedes potentiality, the chicken came first.

Posted by Mike at 6:08 AM | Permalink | Comments

Neverwinter Nights is out! A friend, his girlfriend and my roommate all bought copies on the first day. Thankfully, I got to play for about an hour yesterday. The single player mode is a bit dry so far, but I only played for an hour! I really can't decide whether or not I like it.

The interface is a bit clunky due to the Sims-esque circular navigation. If you haven't played either of these games, the navigation starts by clicking on an object (right-clicking for NWN). The click brings up circular icons in a circular pattern around whatever you clicked. You are then required to click on one of these circular icons. If there is more than one such level of navigation, a new set of circular icons in a circular pattern pops up. If not, then your selection has been made.

Belanger and I discussed the merits of this game and decided that multiplayer games with a DM on an isolated server are where this game will shine. People are going to start making modules soon, too. This could be the next Counterstrike.

Posted by Mike at 5:19 AM | Permalink | Comments

I saved myself $100 yesterday!

I bought a fairly nice Sony CD Walkman last summer (the previous version of this model). I only used it probably 30 times since I bought it, mostly working out. Back in the day, I would bring a CD player wherever I would do homework, but now I just bring my laptop. Well, sometime last semester, something in my CD player broke. The lid would never stay shut. If the lid is open, the player automatically turns off.

Yesterday, I probably killed two hours just looking at new CD players. I finally decided on this one since it is a Sony, thin, and can play MP3s. Yes, it's in girly blue, but I like girly blue! (You should see some of the shirts I have...) Before ordering it, I thought I might as well try to fix my old player. How could it hurt? I was going to buy a new one anyway! I ripped it open, moved the lever a bit and it worked! Well, by "worked" I mean the lid would stay shut. I got all excited and decided to go work out, just to try it out. After changing, getting a Nalgene bottle ready and downing some Creatine (you think I am joking?), I tossed some batteries into the old player. Nothing. Press play. Nothing. Sigh.

I ripped it open *again*. I couldn't see anything wrong, though I did have to disconnect a cable to reset the lever. I reseated said cable. Nothing. Just then, I noticed a little piece of plastic sitting in my lap. How it stayed there for the fifteen minutes between when I first opened the player to when I noticed it is beyond me. I figured where it went (another lever that pushed down a little button when the lid is closed) and wham. I was off to the CCRB listening to Trail of Dead.

Posted by Mike at 5:57 AM | Permalink | Comments

The Register offers mad linkage today:

• Monday night at the Single's Club? Apple's Real People


• Sun's low-end server fight with Intel


• Sun delivers Cherrystone UltraSparc-III servers


• Apache admins screwed by premature vuln report

I would attach some insightful commentary, but I just got swamped at work.

Posted by Mike at 6:05 AM | Permalink | Comments

Perl is frustrating me. Stupid websites are frustrating me.

Whenever a site doesn't include a feature I need, I usually end up including it for them. OpenBSD.org doesn't have a search engine, so I fired up ht://Dig. Now, a certain music review site lists old reviews alphabetically. What a mess! I am trying to use perl to spider through the entire site and dump most of the info to a database. The main perl module for web data harvesting is LWP, but it took me about 3 hours to get it installed. It has 35,836 different dependencies and it just would NOT install on an OpenBSD 3.0 box through CPAN. I finally got it to work using CPAN on a 3.1 box. I should have tried the port first, but oh well. More to come.

Posted by Mike at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments

In my opinion, once you hit the age of 22, no one will still consider you young. 21 is an odd age: you are old enough for almost all responsibilities but society does not consider you an adult. This summer I will hit 22 and it is about time to start saving for my retirement.

With the little research I have been doing so far, there have been two main points driven into me:

1. Diversify your portfolio.
2. Have a 6-12 month cushion in liquid assets in case of emergency

Most households have less than a years worth of income in total wealth. (Actual values: Income: $42,148. Wealth: $40,200.) How scary is that?

Posted by Mike at 4:53 AM | Permalink | Comments

Personally, I always thought that vegetarian food was more healthy for you. In a browsing spree, I ended up at the Jimmy John's website. I used to get their #6 (basic veggie sub) all of the time, but switched to the #5 (the Vito, an Italian sub comprised of salami, capicola, provolone, veggies and vinaigrette) after my first taste. The site has nutritional information. The Vito weighs in at 24 grams of fat and 562 calories. The veggie weighs in at 35 (!) grams of fat and 671 calories. When I first started eating at Jimmy John's my freshman year (4 years ago, sigh), I always got the Gargantuan. 46 grams of fat and 892 calories. Ooops.

Posted by Mike at 6:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

And again. LiveJournal should not be used for such dirty, dirty histrionics.

Posted by Mike at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments

Please, make it stop. If these girls had nuts, I would headbutt them there.

Posted by Mike at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments

Even better? Ok, I have ping-ponged between HTML 4.01 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict about 4 times now. Basically, I couldn't have the page be both valid XML and be parsed by PHP. Well, just adding a

<?php


header("Content-type: text/xml");


?>

helped it get through the validator. The page works in Mozilla, but IE 6 shows it as raw XML! Forget it, I am going to stick with HTML.

Posted by Mike at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments

Did you know that you still need to pay parking meters after 10 PM? Did you know that there are handicapped meters? (I bet you know where I am going with this one). Laura is sick and last night she asked if I could bring her some sorbet. I parked on South University (in Ann Arbor) about three blocks from her apartment and right between an ice cream shop (Stucchi's) and a store (Village Corner). I got the sorbet, dropped it off, visited for about 15 minutes and went back to my car. In my door handle I was greeted with a $75 fine!

I am pretty sure I will be able to appeal this ticket.

1. I am still not sure if you have to pay a meter after 10 PM. Most university meters are only checked until 6 PM.
2. I had no idea that handicap-only meters exist.
3. Since I didn't think I had to put money in the meter, I didn't see that this was a handicap-only meter.
4. I was getting ice cream for my sick girlfriend!

Posted by Mike at 4:27 AM | Permalink | Comments

And, once again, and .

Posted by Mike at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments

The new design should be live for everyone now. Old versus New, what do you think? It does not work in Netscape 4, but that was expected given the large amount of CSS involved.

Posted by Mike at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments

Point of the following story: We gambled and won!

Eric's sister decided to go to Joe Vision last night to see game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Since Eric is leaving for Alaska on the 18th, we have been trying to hang out as much as possible. The two of us decided to meet his sister and her friends down in Detroit.

Since we left just after I got home from work, I was starving. We both thought of what quick and cheap restaurants were on the way from Ann Arbor to downtown Detroit. One restaurant shone above the rest: White Castle! There is a White Castle at Telegraph road just off 96. Obviously, you can't go to White Castle without getting burgers, but we also caved into the novelty of Chicken Rings. They are tasty and easy to eat; the perfect food.

While there, this fairly large female bus driver asked us both "How do you keep your feet so purdy?". I said something about how my feet weren't 'purdy' and that they were also burnt from being out in the sun all day yesterday. She didn't care, as she continued to comment on our toes and heels. Foot fetish in a White Castle, I know.

Back to food: between the two of us, we had 8 burgers, 9 chicken rings, 2 orders of fries and a couple Cokes. During the first period at the Joe, my stomach was in a raging battle against said food items. I won, if only for the fact that I didn't have to poop at JLA. That is a decisive win against White Castle.

Posted by Mike at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Comments

If you can see this, you can see the new design.

Posted by Mike at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments

Plans for the evening? Why yes, thank you:

• Two year anniversary dinner around 6:30 PM
• Wings game at 8 PM
• Miles from Home, playing at the Blind Pig around 11 PM

There might be other plans tonight, but I am trying to keep this blog rated PG-13.

Posted by Mike at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments

Two years!

Posted by Mike at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments

NHL.com: Igor Larionov is 41. Chris Chelios is 40. Dominik Hasek, Brett Hull and captain Steve Yzerman are 37. Luc Robitaille and Steve Duchesne are 36. Fredrik Olausson is 35. Nine Red Wings players are older than Carolina Hurricanes coach Paul Maurice, who is 35. Detnews.com: Yes, the Wings have the NHL's oldest roster. Scotty Bowman is 68. Carolina Coach Paul Maurice is 35, younger than nine Wings players.

Posted by Mike at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments

Squid/2.3.STABLE5 is poopoo. Hopefully this installation of Squid/2.5PRE7 works better.

Posted by Mike at 5:04 AM | Permalink | Comments

Eric and I had planned on playing street hockey with the same bunch of people we played with a couple weeks ago. Some of them were still learning to skate; none of them had played street hockey for more than a couple months. Needless to say, the games were fun and low on competition. Today, none of them could make it. Knowing that lots of people play at Elbel field, we headed down there. About 8 guys were playing and there was an 9 year old boy trying to keep up with them. Seeing such a group, we knew they couldn't have been too good. Turns out, they were all better than the two of us, but we held our own.

After an hour and a half of playing, a few more guys showed up. Slowly as these people started to sub in, Eric and I noticed how outclassed we were. I thought they were just good amateurs with a cocky attitude. When we finally left, Eric told me he found out that they were on the UMich hockey team! Man. No wonder.

Posted by Mike at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

After the heat of the past few days, this evening breeze is amazing. I think a cool breeze is one of the most relaxing feelings possible. It is so relaxing that I feel more at peace.

Posted by Mike at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Comments