What better way to relax after a weekend of fence building and a night of assembly coding than with a smooth game of Aztec?

That game is hard. Damn hard. In the above screen, I've been trapped and the ceiling has decided to start dropping on me. After all these years, I forgot to use the dynamite to blow a hole in the wall or floor and ultimately met my demise. :)

I agree -- the worst part of Aztec seems to be the keyboard layout. I'm convinced that it's actually random. I used to play Aztec for hours.

We've reached a time where luck is irrelevant. Greatness is now derived solely through consistent work, practice, and ultimate dedication. At this point in history, accomplishments are exposed, experienced, and measured only through hard work and repetition. Just a mere N years ago, there was still room for chance. Luck still played a role. Coincidence and fate have died. Luck is dead. Exposure and appreciation are the results of life's work. This wasn't always the case. 100 years ago, you could go out walking in a jungle, trip over some new species of slug, and you would get a huge write-up in Rainforest Quarterly. It's all been done before. You have to work your ass off nowadays for recognition...and even then, it's not assured. What was the last thing you created outside of your job or school? When was the last time you built something, by yourself, for yourself, and not because you had a deadline or it paid well or a semester was ending...but because you were curious or passionate or desparate? Go do this now please. Thank you. *These statements do not make any implications regarding quality.

So I've been snacking on this dried squid from Thailand that we picked up yesterday at the Asian market. It's this really great stuff that's all stringy and salty and jam packed with flavor. Did I mention that I quit smoking? It's quite hard to quit without eating everything in sight and becoming a complete fatass...but I digress. This squid got me thinking about salty candy... In high school, there was this foreign exchange student from Denmark or Holland or the Netherlands or something. He brought over a bunch of salty candy, and I think most of it was licorice. When I was in Germany, I really got hooked on the salt licorice, which is pretty difficult to find here in The States (you know, where they take black wax, remove all traces of flavor, mold it into a twist, and call it licorice). The most intense thing I think I've ever tasted in my life was a candy from this exchange student, Georg Boye. He had some bags of hard candies, all of which apparently had "edgy" names and cartoon characters...like one that translated to "dog turds" and another that translated into "piss ants". Piss ants. From memory, this was the strongest, most ammonia-salt-flavor-per-cubic-millimeter ever! Like chewing on boxer's smelling salt kind of strong! Delicious. So I've been trying to find these things for years. I have no clue what the original candy names were or who the manufacturer was, or even the country of origin. So yeah, not too much to go on. If you happen to be reading this and know what these were called (in Danish?) or who made them or (gasp!) where I might actually be able to buy some, PLEASE let me know. I would be forever grateful. And we played croquet with the cuz on Sunday. I forgot how much I enjoy croquet...although I admit that it's difficult to play when you're a recovering cig addict -- all you think about is lighting up. Fuck that fresh air. I want a smoke. It's been like 64 days. I feel fairly good. Update: Maybe, just maybe, I'm getting closer.

All the ladies get saucy when they eyeball my burlitude! If only they knew what the future holds. Gonna buy me a truck and do some backyard wrastlin fer sure! Boring update: I finally got around to modifying the weblog. The items were previously sorted in ascending order, with the most recent article being '1'. The downside to this approach is that new postings would "shift" all the numbers of the other articles. Sure, that's fine for viewing -- but bad for search engine crawlers and bookmarks. Doh. So it should be fixed today. Big money for the best 500-word essay on the definition of "They be trippin out the flows".

I almost ate a spider this morning. ...and I'm not even kidding.

Today, I put up a little stats page for the evil habit. Yay. Track my progress. Just keep in mind that progress is inversely proportional to frustration level. Here's to friends. Remote and close. Online and offline. Cheers.

As promised, I put the linkpile sidebar up. The things I put up already arent't too relevant...so it should get better (whatever that means) as time progresses. Now I have a nice empty space along the right-side of my page...just waiting to be filled with...uh...something. It'll happen, give it time. I've come to realize that even though I frequently hate my site and the content and the layout and the maintenance...it could really be much worse. It's actually developed nicely over the years, I suppose. I just have a difficult time giving myself credit for anything. They're having a big block party thing next door. The rawk is loud. I'm going to eat some Mexican food with the 'rents in a little bit to get away from the trash.

Well, it's a slow and somewhat steady process, but maybe the new noisybox.net lab-slash-office is starting to come together.

I've been listening to Interpol. A lot. I suppose they have a lot of exposure (actually, I have no fucking clue), but damn if I'm not feeling it. I think I've decided to go see them when they play here in the next few months.

And so Lubbsucks. And Tex-sux. And the book says we may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

I started writing a little linkpile sidebar for the entire site. A quick and dirty way to escape my mutterings. No clue when it will be done, but hopefully it can serve as a dump for me to throw things that I find interesting.

So I tried and tried but just couldn't bring myself to go a month without posting. Two days short. Oh fucken well.

We moved into the new place. Only here can you catch a few glimpses of the final days of noisybox.net in it's previous location. What a clusterfuck. It makes me realize just how tiny that room really was.

I ordered some lights from a really cool company and they ended up sending me some nice little extras...including some anatomy postcards and some Nightmare Before Christmas arrow-thru-the-head party hats. Neets. I thought the postcards were so damn cool that I had to make a nice frame for them.

It's been hot as all fuck up in the Northwest. I'm serious. Insanity. I cannot even remember the last time I saw a drop of rain. I feel like I've been sweating for a month straight. The computers in this room generally keep the temperature at least 10degrees or so hotter than the rest of the house. Just wonderful.

Oh yeah, and by the way, don't mess with a man on The Patch.

Not that you even noticed, but the noisybox.net server had some serious downtime yesterday after I decided to dick with kernel modules from a remote location. Sure enough, panic...hang. Doh. More down time expected in the next few weeks as things get hectic. Hopefully I can provide a little warning.