well. first post from my new computer haven at home. i've finally managed to get everything set up, all my old files transferred from the crappy old laptop i've been borrowing from my dad for the past year & a half, and am beginning the process of installing all those applications that i don't (but should) use on a daily basis.

it's been a rather uneventful day here at casa de bipolar. didn't get a glimpse of the puffin until late in the evening due to the alcoholic stupor he found himself in after last night's festivities.

thanks go out to tim for the link to the nocturnes he sent me. there are quite a few really good pics in the different exhibits there, check 'em out. oh, and as tim pointed out, it really isn't a goth site.

also, from the nocturnes, i found this little gem. what can i say, i'm a sucker for anything science related.

kerry blessed us with an update today, and while i've been enjoying her cryptic little two to four line posts, it's nice to see something more substantial.

and finally, here's a nice little rant on rockout.org about the enraging practice of video & DVD publishers who try (often, successfully) to sell us the same thing over & over again.

yeah.

well, for lack of something better–more meaningful–to post, i'll post some news items that're probably only of interest to me.

Amiga's about to release version 3.9 of their classic OS, and there's a petition to attempt to convince Amiga to give the nod to the development of a PowerPC native version 4.0.

in other Amiga classic news, Cloanto has released Amiga Forever 4.0–a classic Amiga emulation suite, complete with everything you need to emulate a classic Amiga from the workbench 1.0 days to workbench 3.1. for those of you now toiling away on your PC, Mac, or Linux boxes who long for the days when an OS didn't require over 200MB just to install, and when computers were actually fun to use, get yourself a piece of computing history.

in modern Amiga news, Amiga has released version 1.01 of their new SDK for linux and windows systems, as well as specifications for official AmigaOne systems.

there. now that that's all off my chest, on to other things.

yes. i failed to meet brian's challenge to post every day while he was gone. but i did get our home network setup, complete with that blazin' DSL connection that he's been gushing about since getting home.
it's good to have him back though. i'm relieved that his plane didn't fall out of the sky on his very first flight ever.

can't wait for paul to bring that dune tape over for a marathon viewing. i loved the Lynch version, and paul seems to like this one, so i'm sure it's gonna be great. (or was great, depending on your point of view)

i'm tapped.

technically, i suppose this post is being made on the 4th, which means i missed yesterday, which means i've failed brian's challenge to me to post every day while he's away. of course, for me it's still sunday (in a way) so perhaps this could count as sunday's post.

i've got DSL in full effect now, little home network in operation, internet connection shared between mine and brian's computers, now i get to see (soon) if i can work my magic on Jess' lil iMac. the unfortunate side effect of all this swanky new computer equipment is a completely empty wallet and bank account. i've–once again–overextended myself and now have to face probably a week with very little food.

i've gotten a couple of brief, cryptic emails from brian, which probably means that he's having a good ol' time up there in chi-town since he's not wasting his time writing posts or emails to his friends.

hung out with paul and brax last night, watching an entertaining movie about a guy trying to make a movie. kind of a cool laid back night.

it doesn't really feel like sunday should be over yet, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that i didn't wake up until 6:00PM on saturday and 3:00PM today. i've really gotta fix my sleep schedule.

we observed World AIDS Day yesterday by joining many of our weblogging brothers and sisters in the Day Without Weblogs campaign. i've personally been blessed with not having to endure the loss of a friend or loved one. i was touched by the number of personal stories i found when checking the sites i read on a daily basis. i look forward to going back and reading them more closely over the weekend.

i spent the past several days tinkering with some leftover computer hardware from work, and have finally cobbled together a useable system. the most amazing thing is, i've even managed to get the DSL modem installed and working. hopefully in the next few days i'll be able to extend the scope of this high speed mutha all over the house. we're going for a full-on internet-connected home network.

so, since i've got this blazin internet connection, a snappy new (to me, anyway) computer, and i'm still up at 7:00am, i figured i throw a quick post up.

managed to get brian to the airport in time not only to catch his flight, but to sit, have a brew, and attempt to calm his pre-virgin-flight nerves. haven't heard from him yet, so i'm hoping he's alright. i'm sure nanette's taking great care of him.
      as much as i'll miss his crazy antics while he's gone, it'll be nice to have my room to myself again for a few days.

it was nice this evening to get to see the puffin, who i haven't seen since saturday or sunday… tonight we mourned the loss of dedden's very uncomfortably over beers at a place called "the back door" which, while having an amazing assortment of frat boys, sorority girls, hippies, and old people, didn't really seem to have many of our type of people. in fact, i think it was pretty much just us.

well, gotta get back to phase two of this high-speed internet plan–installing a network card and making all our computers communicate and cooperate.

that's 1, brian.

[ i've just realized that that paragraph about dedden's and the puffin is a horribly executed run on sentence, but you know, so what. ]

well, i'm at home now. thankfully i had enough foresight to find out the 800 number for my ISP before leaving the 'ville, so i can post for all you lovely people to read.

enjoyed the ride down immensely, what with the new MP3 CD player I got and all. it's a little quirky, but it does well enough i suppose. earlier today i scoured through my mp3s on my computer at work and pulled out just enough to fill a cd, which i think came out to about 165 songs. slammed them all into the root directory of the disk, deleted the track numbers from their filenames, and pretty much wrote them to the cd in alphabetical order. the funny part was that, with the player set on random, the first hour was pretty much Billy Idol, Liz Phair, Chris Isaac, Beastie Boys, NIN, & Bloodloss, then when i see the first signs for Princeton, it suddenly becomes Kid A time. three songs from Kid A–almost consecutively–played me in on the last leg from the parkway to my parent's house. i was excited and amused by how appropriately the mood was set. another funny observation i made was that, despite the number of Mudhoney tracks on the disc, i don't recall any getting played. apparently hour four would have been Mudhoney hour if the trip had lasted that long.

walked into the house, gave my mom and my little bro a hug, then pretty much just submitted myself to my brother's always animated discussions. i see a lot of myself in him, and then there are other things that he's not managed to avoid like i did when i was his age. i walk back into his bedroom (which used to be mine, ages ago.) and hear Hank Williams, Jr. playing on his stereo. i informed him that i was going to take him to Wal-Mart (the only thing that passes for a record store in these parts–that i'm aware of) and buy him a cd or two. i've decided that Kid A is at the top of my list. (paul will love to hear this.)

after somewhat settling in, we set up the laptop, logged on, chatted with brian (& paul, very briefly) for a bit, started doing some remote setup of the new x:13 server (soon, soon), and had what was basically a warm-up round of political discussions with my little bro… a mini version of the large discussion/argument i'm likely to have with my father tomorrow night after all the guests leave. thankfully, my brother's only 13, and still has quite a few years to figure things out.

happy smallpox and genocide day to all you turkey (& mock turkey) eaters out there.

g'night.

in an altogether unsurprising, but unexpected announcement yesterday, the russian government has said that it will deorbit the lame Mir space station, dumping it into the pacific ocean this coming february.

i say unsurprising, because as we all know, the station has been plagued by problems for the past several years; it's unexpected because i had thought the station had been purchased (leased really) by the russian MirCorp. apparently though, MirCorp has not fulfilled certain contractual obligations, leading the russian goverment to make the deorbiting decision.

so much for some "lucky" person getting a chance to spend a week in space. and i was so looking forward to humiliating myself on TV for an entire season, then dying in an absurd space accident involving cheese paste.

well, it's official. SyncIt is one of the best tools i've downloaded in quite some time. it's almost totally unobtrusive, (all you have to ever deal with, directly–after setup anyway–is the little system tray icon…), and it works like a charm. imagine my surprise when I opened up Netscape today and actually checked my bookmarks, and found that they'd also been whipped into shape by SyncIt! I haven't used netscape's bookmarks in ages, not since I (ugh. groan.) started using IE on a regular basis. And, not really having read the instructions to the program that much at all, i'd just assumed it was going to work its magic only on IE… silly me.

so anyway. it's pretty damn cool.

**update 12/17/2004** it's also pretty much defunct. see bookmarksync on sourceforge

god this week has been rough. i haven't really felt awake almost the entire time. i'm not sleeping enough, and when I do sleep, I don't sleep very well. I'm gonna have to start exercising, cut down on my smoking, start eating right… damn sometimes i feel really fucking old.

here's something i've been looking for for a while now. with SyncIt, you can centralize your bookmarks, synchronize them automatically each time you edit them, and best of all, it doesn't interfere with your normal browsing activities. they have a client for Windows, and a pre-release version of the client for Macintosh.

**update 12/17/2004** SyncIt is no more. Bookmark sync client and server software have been released as open source and are currently stagnating at the bookmarksync project on sourceforge

(ie. a quick update to yesterday's update for people who actually may, for some reason, care)

after setting up the permalinks (the little "PL"s you see at the bottom of every post) last night, i realized that it was going to horribly horribly break all the fancy-shmancy JavaScripts I'd written to protect the integrity of bipolar's frames. after quite a bit of frustration and discovery, i think i've finally gotten the problems licked, and made a few improvements to the original scripts in the process. so, permalink away!

in the event that anyone is not familiar with weblogs in general, or blogger blogs specifically, basically the permalinks provide you with a direct link (including an internal anchor tag) to a post in the blog's archives. this way, you can reference a specific post, and not worry about it getting bumped off the front page and yada yada yada.

if anyone has questions about how, what, or why I've done certain things certain ways, i'd be more than happy to discuss it with you. if anybody wants to see the javascript code (which i've moved out into include files) just email me (click the "m@" at the end of any post).

mothers against drunken scripting

I'm excited I get to see my sister again. she's been gone away all summer, after visiting me for one day after her year-long trip to France. Now, she's coming up for a visit for one day and I'm taking her to the airport tomorrow so she can go to France again. I'm beginning to think the only way I'll ever get to hang out with my sister again is if I go visit her in France. not that that would be a bad thing, mind you.

I've also realized today that I'm going to have to do some more crazy javascript crap for these pages, since anybody trying to link to our archived pages is going to get bounced out to the main pages (only if you try to access them directly, otherwise, as long as you're in the frames, everything'll work fine.) got some thinking to do tonight.

i wonder if I can code javascript while drunk? we'll find out.