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.

So the spanish-language movie rental places are very weird. I happened to be in front of one this evening. Picture a lot of posters with mean looking guys holding guns. Lots of guys with guns. The central theme seemed to be guys with guns. Revolvers, six-shooters, machine guns, pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Picture them. And then picture some burly-ass manly man holding one or more. That's right. Dudes with guns. I think I could probalby script one of those flicks. So, I've concluded that the absolute worst and best thing ever created is pure-data, otherwise known as pd. Forgive me if I sound like memepool here, but "If you have ears, you need to check out pd". It's an obsession. Goddamn that thing is rad slash insane...and I never thought I'd say this, but I wish somebody would have shoved that app down my throat while I was in school. I would have learned a lot more...that's for damn sure. Oh yeah, and I posted pictures from the house we should have in less than a month. Yeah, the pictures suck, but go look anyway. It's gonna be home. I think I confirmed today that noisybox.net will most likely have one or more days of downtime, and will also be reduced to a 640k upstream. Such is life. If a better option comes along in the future, I'll probably take it...but for now, I think that it's the best we can do.

Today ioctl() (the debut album by Infiltration Lab) is released for general consumption. Some of you will be getting CDs in the mail. Listen or ignore. Still no updates on bookmarks, lube mole, or the doggie toy device (which I think I've named carebear). Time is limited. House buying equals time suckedness.

So I've been working on some code related to bookmarks. Specifically, Mozilla bookmarks, XBEL, and a php interface...with ways to convert between the formats. I'm actually pretty happy with what I've hacked up so far, but nothing to release yet. Check back soon I suppose...as time allows. I've also been thinking a lot about peer-to-peer systems lately, and I'm in the process of putting together some thoughts on it/them. It might make a good article one day...if I can ever finish it. Again, no general availability, just something I thought I'd mention since I've given it a small amount of time. And lastly, I hacked apart this insane little doggie toy. It was originally a bear that had a little blob circuit and 6V worth of button batteries and made a growling sound. It got much better once the batteries got low. So I gave it a new home inside what used to be an ultrasonic mouse repellant (btw, don't ever buy one of those, they REALLY don't work, trust me and the mouse that sat under it). It make some interesting noises now. Handheld noise. No page yet, no samples or images yet, maybe tonight I'll throw something up.

First, a huge thank you to the maintenance guy who turned the sprinklers on the construction workers this morning. It's nice to see those bastards get a liquid dose of annoyance! I've had to put up with this construction for too long, so I take comfort in their displeasure. I [finally] saw the Matrix 2 yesterday. I went in very open and attempted to avoid reviews or spoilers from anybody. Overall, I thought it was great. It's difficult to follow up something as groundbreaking and [now] cliched as the original -- but I think the brothers pulled it off. I should really buy the game, but I just don't think I have the time for it now. And I've been doing some reading on the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP). Very interesting stuff. I really think that we might start to see applications using this in the no-so-distant future.

I finally got my late birthday present mounted up all pretty. You see, there's a story here...

In high school, I believe, I was working part time doing construction cleanup to make some spending money. On a trip to the dump, I ran across this beautiful piece of glass, apparently from an old school phone booth. Every phone booth I had ever seen used plastic (I'm sure, as an afterthough by the phone companies after all the glass got smashed to bits!), and the youthful f0n3 phr34k4r in me took an immediate liking. I asked the guy at the dump if I could take it, he agreed, and I took it home.

It was always my intention to get it framed. Obviously, I didn't spend my hard earned construction-bitch money on an expensive frame. No. Instead, I stored the damn thing and never did much with it. Recently, I thought about the sign. I though it had been lost or destroyed in The Long Move to hell, er, south Texas. Apparently it survived and my mom had Larry build a beautiful box frame for it! Best. Present. Ever!

So anyway, I have no clue how old the glass is. I'd guess that it's at least 20 or so years old (did they still make glass telephone booth signs in the 80's?), but honestly I have no clue. I'm just going to hang on to it because I like it.

The box frame is perfectly suited to backlighting, but I haven't done it yet. I would really like to do some overly complicated battery-powered white LED with built-in off timer thingy (you know, to avoid the whole long wire thing), but that's for another time.

Physical SPAM is so much cooler than email SPAM. The other day this company sent me a funky pen that said ILAB and had my home address on it. Apparently they think that I need to buy a bunch of pens to promote my "business". It had to be from a web snarf, because I really don't even use ilab anymore, even though the older domain name still works.

And lastly, Stacy bought me a pug buddy a while ago. His name is Kip. I love that girl.

So I went and saw Pigface on Monday. It was a really good time, although I think the playlist went by way too fast...and I'm not exactly sure WHY they didn't do at least one encore. The live version of AutoHag was absolutely insane!

After the last 2 shows I've been to, I feel it necessary to explain some things for would-be concert goers. Some people just don't seem to understand how to play nicely at shows:

1. If you ate Greek, Italian, or Indian before the show, chew some fuckin gum.
2. Wear a shirt with sleeves. Leave the shirt ON.
3. Take a shower and wash your hair at least once in the week prior to the show.
4. The pit != "Fight Club" (although this one is arguable). Really though, I just can't understand why somebody would pay a ticket price to basically roam around throwing elbows and fists and generally trying to fuck people up, all the while ignoring the show. Save some money and find an alleyway.
5. If you're tired, my shoulder is NOT a place for you to rest. My shoulder is not a convenient holder for your devil horns. My shoulder (or hip or leg or face) is not part of some magical crowd surfing ladder.
6. Pushing a crowd of people forward at full strength is retarded. Similarly, pushing a crowd of people backward at full strength is equally retarded.

...and I've been dicking around with a Linux install on my main desktop machine. Debian in fact. Not for the faint of heart. It's a weird transition, but the more I use it the more I seem to like it. If Linux (and I use the term broadly here) had a tagline, I think it should be something like:

Linux: Free software that's a bitch to set up.

Really, things have come a long way, they're just not quite there yet. I mean, there's no way that your "average user" (whatever that is) is going to install Linux and dick around with different versions and dependencies and problems. But the great thing is, once you do manage to get it set up, it's actually quite nice. Rock stable. And yes, there are actually some better programs over here.

So far, I've had great support for all my devices, including a USB printer and scanner, my ATI AIW Radeon TV card, weird USB-mouse-through-kvm-to-ps2 setup, NTFS partition mounting, etc. All great support, once I figured out how to get them working.

Ok, sure, most mainstream games aren't supported...but I guess that's a reason for keeping a Windows partition around...but I really don't seem to game that much anymore.

So some guy (apparently also named Jason, email origamiman64@juno.com) sent me email last night. He says that he built a version of the "DOS Matrix" screen saver thingy (although he wasn't exactly clear, maybe he was talking about the simulated console screen saver, I dunno). He was even nice enough to attach the executable and tell me that he would send the source. So, "cool" I think. I write him a nice little email back and explain to him that I like the idea, but that I'm not going to run a random binary and that I'd like the source to compile myself. The email bounces. Doh. So I give him the benefit of the doubt and try again today thinking "Well, maybe Juno was just doing maintenance or having downtime at 3:30am". No luck. It still bounces. How totally suspicious. I wonder what that program really contains...Update: I took a brief look inside the file with a hex editor. It appears to be what it claims, tho I'm still not gonna run it to find out. If the person who sent it to me happens to be reading this, please send me the source from an email account I can actually reply to!

Well, Stacy was certainly right -- 6:30pm is a strange time to take a nap. I suppose that's why I'm up twiddling my thumbs now at such a horrible hour. Bored. Ag. I don't think I'll be doing that again anytime soon. I suppose I'm a wuss.

I've hated Microsoft Excel for some time now...and I just thought I'd share reason #427,665 to hate it. The default behavior for new documents creates 3 sheets. In the majority of spreadsheets, people don't use or need the other two sheets (most Excel documents turn out to be a single sheet). In fact, I'd speculate that the average Excel user doesn't even know that there can be multiple sheets in a single document. Hey! Microsoft! This behavior is totally unnecessary! It forces me to go over and check out the other sheets, just in case somebody put something over there surreptitiously. You'd think it silly if MS Word created 3-page documents by default, right? Then why this Excel craziness?