Well, it seems time to whip it out, though I haven't much to say.
I've been perusing the Open Pages of late. You noticed that I've joined their web ring eh?
Have stumbled across a few good documents;
deny from 141.210 deny from oakland.edu deny from 198.110 deny from dialip.mich.net ErrorDocument 403 "Access denied in interests of my personal security. Please email djhoward@uiuc.edu for access.
Well, all that being said, I suppose I should then endeavor to bring you up to date on what's happened of late, and to do that I should again revisit an old discipline from when I started this fucker and review the last journal entry ... well, there we are. I tweaked it a bit. I've noticed OZ and some others tend to separate chunks of an entry with breaks ... well that's something I should subscribe to more here, don't you think?
Alrighty, where to start? Well, momma picked me up on Sunday, that was nice. Turns out she's a bit pickier about speed than Uncle is. Okay, so I had to keep to no more than 75MPH, ah well ... it was still a nice drive.
The week before that was pretty frenetic ... Beckman upgrade! Ripping out BNC thinnet cabling and installing twisted-pair 10baseT ethernet. I'll spare the gruesome details, but I let ya know I let me hair grow out in part because I kept hitting my head on the undersides of desks, digging around.
See, also upgrades work better if things aren't defective ... bad jacks, bad splitters, bad cables, all somehow unavoidable and so we gotta keep dealing with them. Not to mention a few old Macintoshes that just wouldn't listen to an AUI transceiver and were very interested in just sticking with their thinnet.
By week's end, my mantra had become, once again, "Computers suck!"
Ah, it wasn't all that bad though, really, just a little more stress-ridden than anyone likes I think.
Paul's party was very nice. I followed Mike's example and made myself a little keychain out of a BNC connector. Mike was making one for Paul, but I thought it cute too. Right now I've got a tee, a barrel connector, and three terminators on my keychain as well as a wrench I bought to fix the front wheel on my bike. I think the whole ensemble could double for a weapon in a pinch.
Brats, those were good ... good food, good desserts, extremely humid and occasionally rainy weather, and soggy chips that went stale absorbing moisture out of the air as a result. We watched "Beavis and Butt-Head do America" on Mike's DSS setup. It was an excellent movie indeed. I don't think we ever got around to margaritas, after the movie. Plenty of beer though. Mike boils the brats in cheap beer I guess, and we drink the good stuff.
Paul couldn't stay long, they have a cat on a feeding tube ... if that's not good devotion to a pet I don't know what is. Anyhow, this cat gotsa be "fed" kitty goo every few times a day, and Paul comin' down from Chicago.
We hung up Beckman thinnet around Mike's yard, told Paul he had to "debug it" ... ookey yeah we're geeks, but there was also ... I think his name is John ... juggling lit batons! Just wait 'til I get this one picture scanned! Yeah ...
On the domestic front ... Jessy has/had eyes on my room. Something about wanting to swap spaces so she and Matt "could live in sin down there" ... I don't care if they wanna live in Sin or Champaign-Urbana, they're not going to live in my room. First I worry all my stuff would just be tossed back into the other place willy-nilly, breaking God-knows-what and having things scattered where I'll never find them again and in some arrangement that seems to me disconcerting. That's not the big deal, the big deal is that I like my room ... it's quiet and dark down there, nice and cozy. That I should be asked to move from it, without a really good reason, seems disingenuous.
See, I don't see why it should matter if Jessy lives on the same floor as mom or not ... but then I don't know so much goings-on around here anyways. If they really wanna be separate though, why not just get a cheap apartment? Matt is working at EnterAct now, and while it's not a very great salary for someone living on one's own, it is certainly sufficient, full-time at $6/hour, to afford a very modest place. I get to live with three other guys the rest of the year, and when I do make it home, I like to have the place I like to sleep in!
Anyways, I went down to Grandma's yesterday to see about getting her Mac on the Internet ... Mac Classic II with the little black and white screen, and four Meg of RAM ... ookey at least it has a harddrive and what is apparently a Mac-only DD disk drive ... so she needs a modem with a Macintosh cable and a disk with some terminal software and an account somewheres ... I think we can manage that.
She fed me dinner, and it was good. We ate with Bert and Jane too. They're in town to meet up with Susie and go out on a trip to Alaska, but they'll be around as well for the August birthday parties this weekend.
I made the mistake of taking the highways home in mom's van - I drove down via Western as I'm a bit fuzzy on the approach to Grandma's via 55 ... oi veyismer that thing vibrates most wickedly between 45-60MPH .... it made it difficult to pass often because the cars in the driver's side mirror would become streaks of light, like I was doing some funky warp speed or such ... and there's no muffler, so it sounds like a tank or something.
Mom has requested that I take the thing in to Fair Muffler, and now I understand all too well why. First though, I wanna know which problems again she wants them to work on ... the vibrations? The slow brakes? The sluggish steering? The muffler, of course? And the driver's side window doesn't roll down, and the A/C is kinda SOL too ...
Well, I'll try to write more again soon. Meatloaf on the horizon, and mom's home. Bye kids!
H O M E
08 August
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