dannyman.toldme.com

In south Australia I was born
(Heave away, haul away!)
In south Australia ’round Cape horn!
(Down in south Australia!)

Augh! Well thank God the end of the year is near! Been workin’ been sleepin’ been bitchin’ been with Asao … eagh, well okay that last bit aint so bad.

Asao may very well be returning to Japan in August. Thing is, it’d take her forever to graduate from here, and she’d have a harder time getting in to grad school and meeting UN age restrictions than if she just went back to Tokyo to graduate from Keio next March.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve found my summer apartment. A nice five bedroom two bathroom affair that’s on the fourth floor and actually has two stories. The living room is very tall ceiling, I like. Plus with so many rooms I may be living with other folks in a communal atmosphere, which I tend to like. The kitchen looks quite acceptable too and for $400 for the summer, I can not complain about the rent. It’s also got bicycle parking, and it’s two blocks from CAB, two and a half from the Union.

Not using so much punctuation you notice? It’s like nearly two AM and truthfully my wrist hurts from typing so much. I look forward to resting a bit after finals, the hot summer spent down here, with me woman, with me work, with me own thoughts. It should be good, I’d hope, a growing experience.

Well, aint said much here for awhile, aint got much to say. Tomorrow is our Signet tour of the machine room with Joe Gross – must remember to buy some film to catch pictures of student cluster. Yum! Meanwhile the wrist hurts and 130 messages waiting in my INBOX, so I’ll cut short here. Yes I’m still alive.

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Dannyman starts at NCSA, among numerous other cool goings-on.

Yah, well after English today, where we had a good discussion about Quentin’s section in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” I wandered on over to ACB as scheduled and proceeded to start on my new job. I spliced my first patch cable today – that’s a 10 base-T connector used to hook a computer on to a network. I guess at least for now my workstation is a Macintosh, but with a little time I can make it useable, or hopefully “upgrade” to something better.

After that first lesson, we went over to ACB to lay some network cable for some Supercomputers that are being installed. Didn’t actually hook them up – I think that gets done sometime tomorrow. Those monsters are outrageous – something like 4G of RAM and some hundreds of Gigabytes of drive space. I saw a guy sliding a drive in to one of ’em, he told me it was a 9G Ultra-SCSI. There was a row in that machine of those. The memory, he told me, is installed in 256M SIMMs … and the machines come in pairs of units each with 32 CPUs. Neat! I wondered later what kind of memory cache those CPUs were treated to.

As I was helping place the cable under the floor – 100M fast Ethernet for now, to be augmented by 800M HIPPI cable later, I couldn’t help but flash over to the future sometime when Asao might be telling the grandkids something along the lines of “Back around the turn of the century, your Grandfather actually layed network cable for some of those ‘supercomputers’ they had at NCSA.” Who knows, maybe I’m a little over-psyched about playing a small part in a historical era. Someday though, I know these very same supercomputers that are so exotic today will seem quite quaint by the standards of a future modern day. I however, will be able to remember the old days when a computer with 32 CPUs or hundreds of gigabytes of storage would have been something to babble about.

After dinner, I got up to DCL where SIGNet conducted a tour of “Node 1” with Charley Kline. It’s an exciting place where cable of all kinds run thick. I understood a good deal, a lot of it was kinda mystical to me. Basically Node 1 is a little bunker where a great many of the Campus’ telephone and telecommunications equipment is routed. Basically a significant part of the campus’ “nervous system” … fascinating. Unfortunately though I accidentally hit the hidden button in my camera that causes it to panic and rewind the film, so no pictures, sorry. Chris should have some on the digital, though to be sure it’s not that visually fascinating anyway.

I’m actually pretty excited about my paper for Rhet 143 for a change. I got a C+ on the last one, which I kind of blew off as a pretty gay assignment. This one though I’d hope for an A. It’ll be on the web too don’t worry, so I’ll not bother to talk about it much for now. Just like to say that I enjoyed “Peer Editing” this morning in class. Actually, I should tell the TA that much, I think it’d do much for her in terms of … whatever.

Speaking of spreading the word of knowledge, I got some most excellent and thoughtful words from Matt Malooly. I agree with him most whole-heartedly. Here is a dude who has much the same beliefs as my own, only he can express them in a more coherent manner. All things in equal opposition, I’ve also been talking with Casey about her Religion, and was even questioned most insightfully on my beliefs by roommate Pat, who is part of the Campus Organised Christian scene. I appreciated his questioning, as for the time his intent was not at all to convert me or anything, but to get a genuine perspective on my beliefs. I was heartening.

Well, I could babble on forever about what a wonderful time I’ve been having of late, how I relish the increasingly busy schedule I face. Well, hey an occasionally Nihilistic guy like myself has to keep hisself outta trouble ya know! But anyways you readers gotta like occasional

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It is such a beautiful day today one would prefer to do no work at all. So I’m reluctant to write here. It’s 6:14PM right now, I’m over at EnterAct working for the evening. I figured I’d write here as I haven’t in a few days.

Yesterday I got a postcard from Detroit! It was from Asao, from the airport. Today I got a letter from Washington DC. Yep, girlfriend again. She’s cool. Said she saw a movie and it made her think of me.

To be honest, I haven’t been thinking of her so much. There’s a bit more to occupy me here. I tried upgrading mom’s hard drive. Oh, it did not go very pretty. Oh well, next time I know better. Fuck Microsoft. But now she’s got Windows95. Caveat: if she wants any of her old data we have to swap hardware around and transfer it on to floppies.

Idea: I think we have that old ‘386 …. it could use a big-arse 504M hard disk!

I got a haircut today. They sort of styled it all funny and whatnot. It don’t matter so much to me since I just wanted shorter hair anyway, and it’s shorter now, so like, there is conclusion.

The A1200 returned yesterday. I don’t know quite why, maybe because it spins up slower, but the second hard drive doesn’t get recognized. Oh well. 700M on the internal should be more than enough. What I want though is my old data on the other partition. It contains what would be the Dannyland Graphics Archives had they not crashed and burned last week.

Asao should be back in Urbana now. In fact I know she is as I’ve received email from my lovely lady. She has much studying to do prior to a bunch of exams net week. Economics and Economics with a little bit of Business Managements and Economics to make things interesting. Poor dear. She’s got nearly four, well now three solid days to study though.

So what do I do with the page from here? Well, I want to write a friends section where friends will be able to edit what it says about them. Look good for an employer if nothing else. I think if I can also get a guest book system going, along the lines of “chat forum” about various topics I could toss out. Ahh, where to start? And where to go? When to end? How to go, where to end? Augh ’tis complicated!

Well, first I think I’ll make a customer error page for Dannyland. Ciao.

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Max is sick. Labored breathing, supposedly fluid in the lungs. Mom took him to an Emergency Veterinarian Sunday afternoon. After some medication and whatnot, he’s doing better, but he wheezes and is not very active. I think he’ll be okay though.

At first though, I was worried. What if he died, you know?

But now I think he’ll be okay. We’re taking him to the Veterinarian this afternoon for a followup exam.

Well, Dannyland is obviously back online! The hard drive was fried. Ouch! Well, bought a new one. Just well … didn’t have backups, so well … this web page is starting over then eh? Dave said he’d let me know later today what he could salvage from cache. I’d pretty much written off but, well …

Got a great deal on the hard drive. Well, not a great deal, but an excellent price. Something tells me there’s a difference. 3.2G for $309! I also bought a 16M SIMM. I saved $20 on the disk by not getting a box. Who needs a box? Well, I think I had forsaken manuals and the like as well, but who needs ’em?

The drive it is replacing is less than a year old. Time to contact Western Digital about some bad Caviar!

Dannyman’s tip of the day:
* 0 * * * is not as cool a crontab entry as 0 0 * * * … I noticed today that it ran my “daily” crontab sixty times between midnight and one. Ooops! Well, now that’s fixed!

It’s chilly here. My hands are cold, fingers really. No fun typing under such conditions, I think I may close for now.

Max seems to be doing better. We took him to the Vet for a follow-on exam. Pretty much it seems he over-exerted his aging heart. He seems better now too. He’ll be on Lasix and antibiotics a while, but he’ll be okay otherwise. He even ran some today, to and from the car.

Mom bought a new hard drive. Same kind I got. I drove the car down to Micro Center. I really like the place. She bought some software too. I’ll be installing Windows95 on a system for my first time when I get home!

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Young man, there’s no need to feel down
I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground
I said, young man, ’cause your at UIUC
There’s no need to be unhappy.

Young man, there’s a place you can go
I said, young man, when you’re short on your dough
You can work there, and I’m sure you will find
You’ll have a pretty damned cool time.

It’s fun to work for the N.C.S.A.
It’s fun to work for the N.C.S.A.
They have everything that the 31337 enjoy
You can work with our NetDev team.

…

I got the job, indeed. I start 2 April. All summer I can work full-time. Hate to disappoint Jessica but I guess I won’t be workin’ at EnterAct this summer! Maybe next summer, they’ll have real cool networks and such, and I’ll be super-qualified to monkey given my 31337 NCSA training!

Checked out an apartment yesterday. It was Stacey’s place … I dunno, I think I’ll keep looking, but for $375 for the summer, one can’t complain much. Considering though, that housing gets ridiculously cheap over the summer, I think I could do better. Morris said cheaper could be found even.

And that NCSA pays … $6 an hour .. no, not whole hell of a lot, but good money by my standards. Full-time for summer .. if that’s real, would add up to $6 * 40 * 4 = $960(?) per month! Ai! Not bad … assuming cheap housing and a non-luxuriant lifestyle, could probably cover tuition with that!

Poor Asao is working her arse off on Econ assignments. Word is she was up all last night and still working like crazy. She’s flying to Washington DC tomorrow for break so she’s like even Xeroxing stuff to work on over break in consideration of exams very nearly as soon as she gets back. Three, I think. We’ll be eating together as I work here ’til 7 anyway, and she’ll be swamped ’til then … we want to spend time together before going our separate ways for a while.

Dammit, I wanna get Dannyland back up so’s I can start writing neat SSI apps. You see the bottom of the page there? Yeah, I’m thinking to write some SSI programs to automatically generate a line that will link between the “previous” day and the next, so I won’t have to type that shit in manually all the time.

It’s about 5:11 right now, I’m mighty hungry … ’til 7? Well, we can go out and eat someplace nice, I can strap on the ol’ feed-bag maybe.

Today I started reading William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”. I needn’t start ’til after break, but might as well get cracking. For some reason I think I may enjoy this book, though I may be horribly wrong. Very difficult stream-of-consciousness. I don’t know, but we’ll see.

Ray is in the lab right now. He’s the guy I’m replacing over at NCSA. He seems jovial about the whole affair. I may have said how their selection was narrowed down to three people, well they went ahead, it seems, and hired two of us, the third being knocked out by the luck, or lack thereof, of the draw, or somesuch. I’m not sure. I don’t think I’d want to know too much what went in to my specific selection. Ray voiced concern that he was wondering where there’d be room for two of us. I ‘haint about to worry ‘though.

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Yesterday is the day the hardware died. I’m going to make a personal holiday of it. Personal holidays off-hand;

Well, among all those hard-hitters, I dunno whether Hardware Failure Day can really catch on. Lemme tell ya what happened.

So like 2:45AM I drop by my room and check on my pine session running on at sasquatch. Two new messages. Oooh, I hit return to read them, and get a message from pine saying that a very serious disk error was afoot, the sort you talk to your administrator about. A disk error of “type 5” and that’s the last I hear.

Well, after some jostling about, dashing an email here and there, I hear from Tom;

Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 05:04:52 -0600 (CST)
From: “Thomas H. P—–” <t—-@enteract.com>
To: Dannyman <dannyman@enteract.com>
Subject: Re: *please* dannyland.org FRIED!

[…]

Your machine is making extremely weird loud grinding noises.

I checked all the patch cables and reset the box. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

—————-
Thomas P—— at EnterAct, L.L.C., Chicago, IL [t—@enteract.com]
—————-
“If you’re so special, why aren’t you dead?”

Yeah, that’s like not good. I’ll be coming home for Spring Break on Friday though. The next morning I checked my Amiga’s shell prompt …

PING sasquatch.dannyland.org (206.54.252.251): 56 data bytes
 
--- sasquatch.dannyland.org ping statistics ---
34749 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

Guess I’m in the market for a new hard drive?

But hard drives fail all the time. Hell, this would be my third dead hard disk. Anyways so me and Asao were making out a bit after dinner, and I’d left my glasses on her bed, and we took turns sitting on them. People kissing aren’t so attentive about what they might be sitting on. The arms were bent upwards, and I bent them back just fine. But, well … fine tuning the left arm it broke off. Ouch! Now I have a one-armed eyeglass.

Now Asao’s pretty conscientious about where my glasses keep themselves. She seemed to feel bad about being involved in their untimely destruction. That’s okay though, I’d been wanting to replace the lenses any way, they’re scratched. The frames are obviously quite aged too. This pair has lasted me many years, a good strong piece of workmanship. I’m truly impressed and hope to find an identical frame.

Rachel was wearing stretch pants today with a floral pattern. I thought that rather attractive. But anyway the bigger thing is turns out Rachel’s a budding optician, and offered to mend the “temple” temporarily. If this half-cocked set-up doesn’t work out, I may take her up on that.

I’m thinking, I’ve got some month’s-old backups of my home directory, but this “crash” has taken a lot out of me spiritually .. maybe it’s time to start things over … namely, my web page? We’ll see. I’m glad I’ll have Spring Break to give me free-time for restoring things! About all that’s new so far is I’ve added a recently-written story on line. When it was reviewed in class it was well-received for the convincing tone and excellent detail. The readers were then let down all the more, it would seem, by the somewhat farcical ending. You can judge yourself though.

I’ve got work to do, so that’s all for now.

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Yesterday we went to visit Grandpa. He’ll be a few more days in the hospital after his lung collapsed earlier last week. I brought him his mail on Friday When I got in to Evanston, on Ridge, I noticed these goddamned “no bike” signs. No biking?!? What a rip-off. I went along anyway. If anyone confronted me they might think twice when I said I was visiting my grandfather in the hospital.

Well, Grandpa seems to be doing okay. All things considered. After visiting Grandpa we dropped off Jessy at Howard El so she could go visit Christian. Saw a man flip out of his wheelchair. To make matters worse, he wasn’t wearing pants. I went over to offer him help. He was laying pitifully on his side and told me to call an ambulance. Mom covered him with a blanket from his chair while I dialed 911 on a payphone. I was transferred to Fire Department who said that unless it was a life and death matter, they’d be sending a squad car.

He appeared homeless, stank to high heaven, and as far as I can tell, “Call me an ambulance,” may have been his only real intelligible words. After leaving him with another guy who would watch him while the squad car came, mom and I talked about it. He could at least use a shower, we figured. Maybe the cops can drop him off at a homeless shelter or some other service if he’s otherwise okay.

The lady at 911 seemed a little irritated that I was calling her for some drunkard falling out of his wheelchair. “If it’s not a life and death Emergency, we’ll send a squad car.” I understand that it’s necessary to conserve resources, but it just came off sounding callous.

Well, anyway, shit happens. The guy is hopefully taken care of some. That’s about all I’ve got to say for now. More later, I hope.

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Yesterday was June 4. Anniversary of Tienanmen Square. Also Lionel’s birthday. I saw a very good documentary/movie on Channel 11…very long, but it was all about the student protests and all. I appreciated that they explored all sides of the story … and some of the messages that people had to say. There was this one kinda crazy girl who was a big wig in the protest, it was impressive to see her talking about how she knew there would have to be bloodshed for anything to happen, and how she found it hard to tell students to come and gather when she knew that it was neccessary for them to be attacked. The messages that progress cannot come very well in too large steps … the analogy of the ripe melon, that if eaten in one gulp by the hungry person will cause an upset stomach, but can a hungry person wait to bite at the melon? Which is the right way?

While it put things in perspective, there was still the strong emotional appeal of the whole theme present. China, last great bastion of totalitarian Communist government, a “People’s State” not run by the people, but whose people are eager to stand up for themselves, although they are not suitably educated as to how. I guess the thing that impresses me the most about China is that it has great potential, and has over one fifth of the world’s population. Nearly a billion and a half people who are kind of in darkness.

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[An assignment from high school, recently re-discovered. It received an A grade with the notes “Bravo!” and “nice conclusion” -danny, 2009-03-28]

DAN HOWARD     ENGLISH

MOODY PARAGRAPH:
Morbid, gloomy, etc. I write it, you call it.

I was stumbling down the street on a gloomy afternoon, in the very rainy month of June. I was taken by surprise – by a monster twice my size, as he started ripping organs from my body. I fell over into the wet and grimy, filthy street, my arteries spewing out blood in sudden bursts, mixing with the puddles of water that had collected over the sewer, which had been clogged by an unknown radioactive substance that had fallen from the sky the day before.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning fell from the sky, which had turned a dark black during the day, and killed the monster which was busily picking his teeth with a knife I had accidentally ingested the day before. The giant monster fell to the ground as nothing more than a piece of charcoal that smelt of burnt hair.

Just then, the dark storm clouds parted and a bolt of bright light fell from the sky upon my organs. I realized, to my horror, that I was still alive, even though half my brain had been eaten, one of my eyeballs gouged out and stepped on, and the only body part I could feel was my right-hand pinky finger.

Just then, a herd of elephants with giant tusks came running down the street, and a herd of donkeys with razor-sharp teeth came running from the other direction. The beasts began to fight each other over the spot where my highly disorganized body lay . . . and it really hurt when one of the elephants stepped on my finger!

– so it was written
– DAN 11:91:36.1833

I may not have fully understood the assignment concept, that is why I was late in handing it in.

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