Another thought-provoking Slashdot article. Anti-technology/anti-progress types today are not the same as the original Luddites. The Industrial Revolution was very harsh and dehumanizing, but the evolution of communication that we are going through now is enabling.

I just don't get how people say technology is tearing apart communities. It makes communities possible that were impossible or unwieldy before -- and it does not render any existing type of community obsolete. One can build a community based on common interests and friendship without physical limitations.

I also found it interesting that violent crime is continuing to decrease, and yet our society's perception of it is increasing. People panic over things like the Columbine incident, and think that drastic (and generally unconstitutional) action needs to be taken across the board.

People fear, resist, and blame change. But change is how we know time is happening. Things that are lost are replaced.

For those who think seti@home is cool but would rather donate their computer time to research that's much more likely to pay off, check out Folding@home. This isn't about origami or Bruce's car, but protein folding. All kinds of potential applications in medicine and nanotechnology for this knowledge, and unlike SETI, it's something we know has an answer.

Plus it makes a cool screensaver.

In the desktop experimentation department, I've installed GeoShell, another taskbar/desktop replacement. The setup is not too friendly (requires editing the Registry) and it comes with absolutely no documentation. Whee! But it is very configurable and it pleases the minimalist in me, as this is the only thing on my desktop. (Unfortunately I was using the desktop as a repository for files I work on frequently... maybe with a plugin I can find another solution.) In fact, I could close all bars and run Windows "naked," accessing the Start Menu with a right click. Kewl.

For a more intense interface experience, how about OS X on Intel? It could happen...

I had more dreams about the leopard geckos last night. I was trying different kinds of sand in their terraria, which is weird because they've both been on paper towels for months now. Kalila was about as intelligent as Lassie and with the same personality. Hmmm.

I was checking out the cats up for adoption at PetSmart while buying crickets, and thinking. I want a cat, but I want to make sure I really want a cat. The novelty of the lizards has worn off, I've gone into another stage with them and I kind of have to analyze my motives here.

• Of all of them, Kalila is the most active and interactive -- I know I don't regret getting her. She's cool.



• Josephine just sort of tolerates me, and I still kind of resent having to split her up from Kalila. I put less thought into it when I got her than the others. I take care of her because it's my responsibility, more than anything else.



• Poco I tend to waver on. I'm a bit disappointed that he's so unfriendly; I was hoping he'd be the kind of dragon that I could take places on a leash, likes to go for rides in cars, and gets excited I comes back home from work. Instead, he's the kind of dragon that sits in one place for hours and usually gets nervous if my hand gets within a foot of him. Maybe I need to try working with him more, maybe I'm too timid/careful with him or maybe he's just antisocial.
  
  On the other hand, sometimes he can be pretty nifty. It's the mannerisms I think. The bemused way that he looks around. The way he ducks his head and sticks out his tongue when he walks around. The way he joyfully crunches on his pellets or annihilates crickets.



• Moe is a cool little guy, but then the only pet more low-maintenance than a betta is a pet rock.

I have to wait a while anyway before I can afford the adoption "donation" and the pet deposit, so I'll have time to think about it anyway. The main thing is the potential for chaos and destruction that cats have... I mean, how does a fish misbehave? If Josephine goes completely postal, what's she gonna do? ;)

Wisdom from Bruce:

Now, I tend to try hard to live my life in a fashion in which I don't impinge too much on other people.... The golden rule seems to be nowhere more applicable than in dealing with strangers. Therefore, I'm completely without understanding of those who have no clue as to their impact on others...and no concern that they don't.

I was trying to figure out how to express that exact idea last night. In fact, it was inspired by watching someone threading his way through heavy traffic in an attempt to get ahead of them. Of course that merely meant he had to wait longer at the red light than the rest of us. There's a difference between driving fast and driving like you're more important than everyone else.

In some way, respect is recognizing, caring, and acting on the idea that other people are not less important, less valuable, less real, less deserving than you are. This does not necessarily mean everyone is equal, but everyone does deserve some consideration. The road is a great social equalizer as well; a janitor in a Yugo does not have to make way for a 6-figure executive in a BMW unless the road dictates it.

I think Matt Uelman is a forking genius, and he envies Toru Takemitsu. "From Me Flows What You Call Time" sounds like exactly the kind of thing I could get into, so I ordered it from Amazon. First CD I've bought in several months, maybe even the first this year. The title reminds me of "Mom," and the instrumentation is pretty unique... can't wait to hear it.

Anyway. I had been waiting for the Act 2 and 3 music from Diablo to be released as MP3s of the Week, as I thought that was the most powerful part of the soundtrack. I thought that vocal thing in the Harem track really pushed the tension up to a new level in that area, as you race through that first vacant level wondering when you're going to run into the nasty stuff... and the composer just thought the track was goofy. Hmm.

On both my home machine and my work machine I've gone with this flat grey-beige color scheme with no differentiation between title bars and window elements. I think it's kind of soothing, but I want to reinstall and fire up that 3D Color Changer again and soften the highlights and shadows. Why that's not something Windows just gives you control over from the get-go is a mystery...

No more Mooville Apartments. My stuff is out of there, the place is cleaner than it was when I moved in, the keys are turned in, their $50 lease renewal "bonus" is paid back, and I'm in such a good mood that I even decided not to coat the check with a deadly contact poison.

The apartments really are decent (though they do tend to play good landlord, bad landlord). It's just that breaking a lease is a frustrating process, and it's a great relief to be finished with moving and not have all that hanging over my head. Of course, the real Damocles' Sword is still up there swinging gently in the breeze: I don't know when someone will take over the apartment, which means I don't know when the bill for the idle time will hit or how big it'll be. Could be April before I start saving any actual money.

But I'm not gonna let that spoil my mood.

Lots of us are getting back into turn-based games lately. Mike is waiting for Reach For The Stars to ship, Jeff is playing MOO2 again, and I got tired of CyberStorm 2 but reinstalled Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri instead.

I have not raved enough about SMAC(k) on my site. I fear I have not done it justice.

It is not possible to play just a short session of this game. After about three or four hours you have two choices:

• Save, exit, dream about the game, wake up thinking about it, go to work wishing you could get away with playing it there, race home, bolt down dinner and play some more
.


• Just play through the night.

My first game (this time around), I played as the University. ("Industry, science, and technology! Men sticking screwdrivers into things, turning them, and adjusting them!") I got off to a quick start, but the Spartans bred like rabbits and pretty much forced everyone but me into tiny little corners. And then I realized that I was in a tiny little corner myself, I just had vastly superior technology than they did. I had just finished building my first set of 'copters and had discoverd Spaceflight when Santiago finally got tired of my refusal to give away my hard-earned secrets of the universe and invaded me. Big mistake. My combat odds against her troops were something like 12784:11. After wiping out her invaders, I dropped in to her capital city. She left me alone for a while after that, and I built a bunch more bases and won by Transcendence.

(Choppers and drop troops are my favorite combo... I can wipe out all a city's defenders and land in it in a single turn. The limiting factor on this method is how fast I can build units to defend the cities I've just taken.)

Second game is not going quite so smoothly. I'm playing as the Gaians. I have a city on Mount Planet (which I've covered with solar collectors and echelon mirrors) that produces incredible amounts of energy and minerals, but constantly walks the knife edge of hunger. I have a couple of shore cities that get plenty of food but are so mineral-poor that it takes some 60 turns to build a basic enhancement. I have a million and one mind worms doing my bidding, I have not had a single drone riot and never had an enemy appear on my soil, and yet I just don't feel like I'm making progress. I guess it's the slow research combined with the slow individual turns (all those worms and isles roving around on autopilot, and a lot of activity right on my borders, from my neighbors who've been at war since forever). I'll probably restart.

A year ago I wrote about the onset of winter. We've had "jacket days" here lately, it was just downright cold at Wendys' last night, and I turned on the heat in the house. The gas furnace is a strange thing to me (I've always lived in places where it was electric), with sort of a two-stage effect where it heats up for a minute or so and then kicks in with real oomph.

October and November are my favorite months of the year. Given a choice between heat or cold, I prefer the cold. And it's not just because you can always put on more stuff, eat hot soup, drink cocoa, set things on fire, etc. while heat is less escapable. I just like it.

However, when it drops from cold to sub-freezing, it's no longer any fun. I still prefer 10 degree weather to 110 degree weather, but that's a bit like saying I'd rather break my left arm than my right arm.

It's been a wonky day, so with that in mind I present the day's "accomplishment": wonky.mp3. It isn't for or about anything in particular, though I suppose with some rearrangement it might actually work for a DR hunting area or something.

The new house strikes me as psychologically quiet, though it is anything but physically silent. Perhaps sort of in the same way that blue-white looks whiter than white, and Dasani™ has minerals added to it after it's purified to make it (allegedly) taste purer than pure.

So even though all our bedrooms are at the same end of the hall and both my roommates snore like tigers...

Although it's a middle-aged house that creaks and thumps and groans with every step on the stairs and second floor...

Although the neighborhood has an abundance of dogs and old pickup trucks...

...it's still kind of peaceful, in a way that the apartment wasn't.

The Mac OS X beta and Windows Whistler have made what passes for news in the Dave universe. Of the two, I think OS X looks fantastic and I wish I could get my hands on it, but Whistler is the one I'm going to end up with. Macs cost too darn much to buy one just because the shell is pretty... on the other hand, this is the first time I've found myself actually wanting an iMac. Sweet Lady Lovelace, what's come over me?

Starting looking into eBooks online today. There are a lot of free ones out there for the Palm or that can be converted to the Palm; MemoWare is a good place to start.

Project Gutenberg and other sites online have lots of literature that has fallen out of copyright. I wonder how translations of ancient texts work; the copy of Sun Tzu's Art of War that I'm in the middle of was translated in 1910, and I couldn't help noticing that the Ani Papyrus/"Book of the Dead" that I found in various places was the inaccurate Budge translation and not the more recent and accepted R.O. Faulkner. Also I'm gonna see if I can track down copies of the Pyramid Texts and various wisdom literature...

For the first time, I find myself wishing my Palm had more RAM. Vol. 2 of the works of Poe is 578K...

That CyberStorm 2 campaign I started last night is going okay, but not smoothly. Lots of casualties. Cloaking works fairly well so far, except my units will come out of it to fire at anything that stumbles into range during enemy turns. I forgot I could turn off the option to automatically have my units fire at targets of opportunity. Need to use that for a stealthy approach. I can probably take out a base in one turn, if all my HERCs can sidle up to the command center without being detected.

Somehow I bet the final base will have NWave scanners, rendering cloaking useless and quickly turning my sneaky little guys into smoking piles of scrap. We'll see.

I'm only researching missiles, plasma and ELF weaponry, and to make things even more interesting I'm playing as ISI, which only allows 6 units on the field and doesn't get some of the chassis that can really take advantage of this strategy.

Thanks to Gryph, I want to get into archery. I had fun with it in high school gym class, though we were all pretty much humiliated by one particular guy who could nail the bullseye roughly half the time, never missed the target, and tended to make impressive dents in the steel drums that our targets rested against.

I bought a bow once at a yard sale, but it was a sad looking chunk of wood, and I never actually strung it. Probably wouldn't have held up to it.

I did used to throw knives and shuriken. Even balanced throwing knives are pretty tricky. Shuriken are almost as easy as a Frisbee, but you wouldn't want your dog playing catch with them.

Hmm. Crossbow. We have a big yard, at the end of the street, and it would almost be safe for that sort of thing. Hmm.

Kalila just sneezed. Twice. I didn't know lizards could do that. Meanwhile, Jo is sitting on top of her log, lounging almost like a cat, eyes half-closed. Very suspicious.

Having some very interesting discussions lately on the netjer.org message boards -- trying to answer questions that make me ask myself questions. The one conclusion I can come to without going off into Kemetic jargon and making peoples' eyes glaze over is that I care a whole lot more for the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. Sometimes the law doesn't even need any letters.

Starting to put together the SimuCon 2001 website, so that early registration can be really early this time. If I haven't said before that Macromedia Dreamweaver can be a serious pain in the bum, I'll say it now. The more features a product has, the more bugs it has. Something like Notepad is bug-free, but something as "powerful" as Dreamweaver is like a big windshield waiting to happen.

There is nothing quite like the experience of spending 20 minutes figuring out that the library item you just updated refuses to update in all the files that use it is because they are all set read-only for no fathomable reason, when you know if you were using simple includes like the rest of the world does, the update wouldn't have been necessary in the first place. Then losing some work to a GPF, and then finding that the thing that strips "redundant" tags is just a little too eager.

On the other hand, templates are really cool (when they work), and the fact that it renders all the includes and library items and stuff in real time so you can see what you're really doing is great, and the way it catches errors immediately instead of later is handy (as long as you're not pasting in a bunch of HTML that another editor already approved, then things tend to get hairy).

Somebody tell me what my point is, 'cause I don't know.

This title doesn't remind me of Donna. Nyah!

A cold front came through today and it went from nice and warm to chilly and damp. Caught me by surprise too; I'm wearing shorts and flip-flops like it's the middle of summer and not late September or something.

We are mostly moved in to La Casa. Hot water and a fridge, and by extension, actually cooking something in the kitchen and taking a shower without driving over to one's old apartment first, go a long way toward making the place feel more like home.

There are still boxes of stuff to unpack and set up sitting around everywhere, bigger piles of junk and boxes in our old apartments, and we're still running into basic things we forgot to move or buy. Amazing how much domestic junk we depend on. Shower curtains, laundry detergent, paper towels, trash bags, microwave ovens, nails, can openers, tuning forks, plasma torches, etc.

I may now have the largest collection of low-wattage light bulbs owned by any private individual in St. Peters, MO. Parallelling the mathematical tension inherent in hot dog vs. hot dog bun packaging, my lamp needs three bulbs, which are sold in packs of two. 40W daylight spectrum ceiling fan bulbs are not very bright, and neither was I for buying them. Oh well.

I find myself wanting to buy more stuff, but first I must find a place to hang the Wind Chimes Of Doom. Bwahaha.

Grave of the Fireflies was a sad film, but I didn't feel any strong emotional reaction to it. For whatever reason it didn't really trigger that sense of tragic injustice that other films have done. I don't know why not, when Rob Roy, Saving Private Ryan, and Edward Scissorhands did.

It was horrifying on a personal scale though, so maybe I was trying to hold myself away from it emotionally. I'm not sure I enjoyed watching it. I wouldn't say I endured it, because it was a well done movie and it kept my attention, but I don't think I want to ever see it again.

I'll watch Princess Mononoke again though. Oh yes.

I'm playing CyberStorm 2 yet again. It was familiar and available -- isn't that how relationships usually rekindle? (Sitting there in the crate right next to my computer after I set it up, while all my other games are in the office or not yet moved from the apartment yet.)

Maybe it hasn't been long enough, but it's just not as gripping as it was the first two or three times. I've already laid plans to specialize in short-range weapons next time though: fusion bores and plasma flamers and thermal chain guns and ELF whips and the like. I'm not sure what the best configuration and strategy is for that, especially when attacking a base that has those nasty turrets that disable legs. Opportunity fire makes approaching an enemy unit risky when you don't have a range advantage. Even if you can swoop in swiftly, do damage and get back out of range again during your turn, you still take a pounding. My best bet may very well be cloaked tanks.

Or maybe I'll "cheat" and use long range air support to back up my melee units. Hmm.

Okay, now I'm interesting in playing again. Off I go!

I feel kind of like I did after my first airsoft game: so tired I want to sleep for three days, too sore to stand up (nevermind walking), and dirty like I'll never be clean again. True, I have no welts on my face or thorns in my butt, but if there's a part of my body that doesn't ache, I haven't found it yet.

We are moved in. Mostly. Each of us still has boxes of junk to be hauled over, and more stuff that isn't in boxes, and lots of cleaning to do at the old place. I'm not going to kill myself trying to get that done today, after yesterday.

Yesterday (for me anyway) began at about 10 AM, packing up a few more things, preparing to move, and making a trip out to the house with a computer and some chairs and stuff. We couldn't get the U-Haul until 2:30, which is when the real "fun" began. I'm glad I have such lightweight furniture. I wish everybody did, or at least everybody who am I living with now. :P

The going was pretty slow, because we're all out of shape geeks not used to carrying sofas up booby-trapped stairs. We have this mirrored wall thing that somebody at some point in time must have thought was a good idea. It's composed of a bunch of 8x8 mirrored tiles that aren't evenly set and are broken in places and demand a tribute of skin and blood off the ol' knuckles once in a while.

We finally got "done" at about 4:30 AM, and because I didn't have the energy or ambition to haul my futon frame upstairs and assemble it, I just stretched the mattress out on the floor and slept like I was in a coma.

We still don't have gas or a fridge, and it was a bit of a chilly night. But I woke up very warm and pleasant, since my window faces the sunrise and has no curtain or blinds. It wasn't until I left the solar heat and my bare feet hit the bathroom floor that I got a cold shock. (Note to self: bring the carpety floor thingies on the trip back.)

Did I mention we don't have gas? Which means no hot water. Which means I spent a 16 hour day of moving stuff without having had a shower yet. I think if I went outside and rolled in the dirt, I'd probably feel cleaner. Luckily there's hot water at the old apartment, and I'm bound for it now.

Taking a break from packing and moving stuff to sit here in the office, get off my sore feet and write this before getting back to work. Actually, I haven't done much today except move Poco and deliver some much needed supplies to Jeff. We've run into a few snags in the moving process:

• SW Bell changed their minds about letting us insist on self-installation, and wanted to hit us with the big up-front fee we were trying to avoid in the first place. Jeff canceled with them and found another service that actually resells SW Bell, won't hit us with an installation fee, but we do have to buy ourselves a router and we'll probably go a few weeks with no access.



• Best Buy goofed, first failing to move our fridge from the showroom to the warehouse, then selling it to someone else. The delivery guys who brought our washer and dryer thought the fridge was backordered. We'll get a better model of fridge to compensate, but it won't show up until Tuesday or Wednesday.



• The gas company's computers are down, and they couldn't even tell us whether there was someone scheduled to come out that day, much less what time.

Anyway. After I finish writing this I'm going back home, finishing packing, and possibly making one more trip to the house this evening.

Suz, I couldn't tell you where Krispy Kreme is either. My sense of direction is really bad. I just don't have that automap in my head like other people seem to. :) I need to drive someplace myself at least twice before I can remember how to get there, and that's when I'm concentrating.

I was worried today that I'd get lost on the way to the house without somebody to guide me, but I guess it's become a habit since I made it okay. Though I had to think for a minute about which way to turn on the way out. Central School Road is a right turn going to the house, so it has to be a left turn going from the house.

I know Krispy Kreme is over there somewhere. Just not how to actually get there.

Last night's dreams were more mundane, but still memorable. My friendly leopard gecko Kalila (as opposed to her belligerent sister Josephine) developed the ability to change her size at will. For a while she was small enough to sit comfortably on a penny, but she later grew to the size of Steph's cat Amber, who she had a brief tussle with. Upset by the confrontation, the two-foot long Kalila then climbed up my arm to lick my ear.

As I write this she's looking around with an expression of happy curiousity on her face. She does that a lot now that she's here in my cubicle at work.

Jo just spends most of her time sitting under her log, scowling. Of course now that I said that, she just turned around to watch me. But there's a certain look in her eye that says "I don't like you, and when I get big enough, I'm going to bite your head off."

Poco is not happy with me right now, either. He rode to the new house, in the short glass terrarium in the passenger seat of SqueakyCar. He took an interest in the stuff passing by, but his claws (which are getting pretty long) can't get any purchase on that glass surface, so he was sliding around and body-checking the sides of the terrarium like a hockey player. Once I set up his cage and put him inside, he sat there catatonic for several minutes (he thinks predators are around and if he doesn't move, they can't see him) before scooting over to the corner to sulk.

I've almost, but not quite, given up on Dropout. I'll have to settle for beating Steph at... Bust-A-Move... uh, Stackers... maybe Devil Dice... hm, those games are with my family in Florida. Doh!

But I've gotten re-hooked on DX-Ball 2, and after this move stuff settles and I get myself a working credit card again, will probably buy the Memorial Pack.

As Nakht points out, tonight's naming ceremony is a big deal. Wish I could be there for it, but I'll have to settle for finding them out via email or boards later.

I haven't written here about what my Kemetic name means to me, because I don't think most people would get it. Let's see if I can communicate it to some degree at least:

Ankhkaseshat ("who causes the ka of Seshat to live" *) is not just something to call me just because Dave doesn't sound Egyptian enough. It's not some kind of mystical secret thing that gives people power over me (that idea does appear in Egyptian myth, but we don't go looking for that kind of trouble). It's not just a tag to identify me by, but like DNA, it is a part of me that describes who I am. To receive that name was to learn a lot about who I am, what God thinks of me, what's expected of me, and even the reason for my existence. And it gives my fellow members of the faith a hint as well.

So anyway, I'm excited for my brothers and sisters, and it'll be great to find out their new names. :)

* to oversimplify a bit, the ka is the spirit, distinguished from the ba or soul. For example, to pay respects to an ancestor is to "feed his ka." In my mind, the concept is bound up with other peoples' memories of a person, so I believe that a ka can go dormant for a time but be revived by history or other means. So there are lots of interpretations and ramifications of my name, but I'll leave them as an exercise for the reader :)

And now I've spent way more time than I intended to on this "break" and I better get my butt in gear.

I remember last night's dreams a bit better, but they were pretty odd. In one of them, I had just found out something that a lot of my friends already knew: on September 11 I was supposed to be incarnated in... well, some other person I haven't mentioned on this site yet so far. I was pretty worried about that; for one thing I knew in the dream that that date had already passed. For another, I wondered what the heck that meant, anyway. Was I going to lose my own identity, or just plain disappear, or somehow lose my value because there would be two of me? That other person has a pretty dominant personality and if they were going to absorb me, that could be a very obnoxious me running around.

After waking up for a bit, wondering what that was about, whether I could learn anything from it, and asking myself a couple of odd questions (I suspect I wasn't really 100% awake), I went into another dream. I was exploring a typical Middle Eastern style marketplace, except it wasn't located in a desert town but on a big sandy beach. I remember arguing with one shopkeeper (complete with turban and big beard and John "The dog's name is Indiana!" Rhys-Davies voice) about whether he really had MiniDisc players for sale. To prove it he showed me this purple translucent iMac-styled thing that looked like a cassette player. I wasn't convinced, so he shrugged and showed me to a big cardboard box full of used MDs for sale. I started flipping through them, just as I'd flipped through collections of old floppies the other night. There was apparently some really neat music there, or at least I thought from the handwritten labels on them, and I picked out several.

(Actually that part was familiar to me, since I've had plenty of recurring dreams of shopping in giant disorganized flea markets or stores for electronic stuff, musical instruments, and occasionally weapons.)

The next scene was in a huge beach house, with a bizarre floor that belonged in a video game. Sort of an odd 3D grid where different squares were at slightly different colors and elevations, the kind of place you wouldn't want to try to navigate in total darkness without shin guards and kneepads. To complement the bizarre architecture were lots of indoor pools, wet bars, guys with scimitars, veiled women lounging on pillows, and a dwarf who was leaning against a wall in every room that I went through, snorting and making fun of me for getting lost inside the house.

Yeah.

Band name of the day: Skunk Dumper.

We signed the lease. We got our keys. We broke the bathroom sink. We found out that we are supposed to be able to open both sides of the double door. The repairman was on the way as we headed off to Vista Grande, home of the Cheesy Burrito and the Charcoal Quesadilla. We realized that the new place is a lot closer to Schlotzky's and Krispy Kreme. Ooooh, Krispy Kreme.

Taking off work tommorow to do more packing, 'cause I didn't get as much done in the evenings as I had hoped. Might even begin moving some stuff tommorow that isn't suited for truckage, such as the computers and shrine and dragon.

According to this psychologist, female atheletes are judged more on looks than athleticism. Personally, I don't think this is any more true for females than for males. Consider Pete Sampras's record vs. Andre Agassi's, and then consider their TV careers. Or anybody's record vs. Agassi's.

Tennis has never been a good example of sexual equality in sports anyway. Up until just recently, female tennis stars never wore shorts, but short skirts that are practically designed to flip up and show us more. It's for "athleticism," right? While I'm a much bigger fan of women than of sports, it just seems kind of ridiculous to me. In fact I remember some dirty old man being interviewed during Wimbledon TV coverage a few years ago, when asked how he thought tennis fashions should go in the future, he said "perhaps shorter skirts, with nothing underneath." Gimme a break! :P

Besides, I think Anna K. has kind of a strange face. Martina Hingis is better looking, and I've always been a fan of Steffi Graf. ;)

I wonder what kind of search engine hits this one is going to spawn. Heh.

I love random name generators. The Zone has one for account names; other people reported that it has a penchant for mollusks, but in my hundreds of samples all I got was BlankMussel and AvengingMussel. Instead, it offered me some cool abstract juxtapositions that are kind of inspirational in their own way:

• Addressed_Poem
• JovialBridge
• AdoptiveObject
• AerialFan
• Bicentric_Sum
• Blocking_Zero
• DifficultWater
• Bloodier_Sine
• WintryIntegral

But it also gave me BlubberVermin, BeefySleet, and BeachlessGravy. And, as if to tie in to the section above... Banged_Gymnast.

I thought Suz's mood indicator thingy was a good idea, and immediately wanted to rip... er, emulate it, which is the highest form of flattery, right? But I wanted a unique gimmick, and I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation of saying "Edit Level: I'm Not Telling." :)

Bar graphs, I thought at first. But while looking for the little musical note icon thingy I hit upon the idea of using little 64x64 icons that are as inscrutable or as revealing as I want them to be.

At least one good thing will come out of this: after a couple of months I'll be very, very familiar with my collection of dingbat fonts.

It also occurred to me that I should archive my "Now Playing" stuff just for posterity. I'll experiment with ways to do that, next time.

I've been having more and more dreams of living in Egypt, doing scribe stuff, talking to various Names of Netjer and my akhu. Unfortunately it seems to be fragmentary and incoherent, and I don't remember much when I wake up.

It's got to be at least partially influenced by daytime activities and thoughts. I've been reading Meeks again lately, and last night watched a fascinating History Channel documentary about the construction of the Hoover Dam. So one of the few things I remember about last night's dream was at a desert construction site of some huge project, taking notes for the foreman: none other than Ptah. Whee!

So yesterday Steph inquires after a copy of "A Day in the Life of Bleeds." If I remember right, it was a board post on GEnie. We've been quoting the "Blah blah Bleeds blah BLAH blah blah!" line for some time now, and it would be nice to read the whole thing again.

Cleaning out my closet last night, I was sorting through boxes of floppies when I found all my stuff from the GEnie days. Treasure! Copies of Aladdin (the DOS front end for GEnie that minimized online time for reading and posting to message boards, which I actually used to access the game), archives of group-written stories from the Mercedes Lackey fan group I led for a while, several disks labeled "GemStone," as well as an encrypted copy of an old journal (possibly older than the one I've been going over on the Retro page, though I do remember the encoding scheme), a disk labeled "FNORD", and other curiosities.

Part of me cringes a bit at the embarassing stuff I'll find when I go through it all. (That's the nature of the past ― some of it, you just wish would stay back there and not come up again. But it does.) But I'm eager to dig up some of that old stuff, and possibly share some of it.

What election?

Nah, I'm not quite that out of touch with current events, but I'm not a politically minded person and have not been following things that closely. In fact, The Daily Show and other peoples' comments on the web are my main sources of info - and they're probably about as reliable as any. Once again, the system has essentially reduced the democratic process to choosing the lesser of two evils.

I'm a registered Democrat, which you can thank Reagan for. But I don't think much of the available supply of either Democrats or Republicans. If I had to choose between "I invented the internet" Al Gore and "he's a major-league asshole" G.W. Bush, I guess it would have to be Gore... but luckily there are other options. Such as not voting at all.

A few years ago I would have been horrified at the thought of actually encouraging people not to vote, but now, I think not voting is a actually a vote of another sort.

We never know how much influence the President really has on things anyway. The economy has been good to us these past few years, but how much of that is due to Clinton, how much to Alan Greenspan, and how much to millions of different factors that we can't comprehend? I sometimes wonder whether we even need a President. What if Congress just appointed qualified people to fill the roles that need to be filled?

Steph: I really didn't realize it was Bast's festival when I wrote that. These things just happen.

Dave: Uh huh.

Steph: Awww... your Mom doesn't have any festivals, does she?

Dave: no, but Nebt-Het has a few.

Dave's Brain: Who needs a festival day when the calendar is yours in the first place?

• female vaccuum pumping
• rae dawn chong photo gallery
• dragonrealms cheat
• toy of electric powered air plane
• really big geckos
• Maria Conchita Alonso image archive
• crocodile hunter party supplies
• women wearing BDU
• plans for a 224boz
• +nuns +gallery
• anti-simutronics
• Starcraft Kerrigan Pictures
• television embarrasing pics

Your name of Seshat makes you very idealistic and generous, with the strong desire to uplift humanity leading you into situations where you can express your desire to serve others. You want to assume responsibilities and to look after people; however, you can become too involved in other people's problems and tend to worry. Your name gives you a natural desire to express along artistic and musical lines. You desire a settled home and family life, and are expressive and attentive to your loved ones. You must be careful not to become possessive and jealous of those close to you, however, as you could attract losses and unfortunate experiences. If you attach an ideal of service to your life, you could find great happiness and could express a very beautiful, happy, responsible, artistic, and generous nature. The weakness of this name is in worry, which in turn affects the nervous system, creating a tendency to be highly strung or over-sensitive to the thoughts of others.

the digits change so slowly now