Tuesday, November 23, 16:46 CST
Added a bit to ascii.txt.
No updates for a few days - heading to Kansas to spend Thanksgiving with relatives.
Happy Thanksgiving all (well, if you're in a country that has the holiday, anyway).
Sunday, November 21, 20:10 (or so) CST
I saw Dogma Friday night.
Overall, I enjoyed it quite a bit, though the ending was a little weak.
Definitely worth seeing (if you don't think you'll find it too offensive) - I
mean, how often do you really find a movie which deals positively with issues
of faith and religion, shows faith in a positive light, poses thoughtful
criticism of the Catholic church, and has a lot of dick and fart jokes?
Finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone last night. Enjoyed it as much as the others, though I think it's actually the weakest of the series.
Looking through Amazon's customer reviews of the Harry Potter books, the sheer number of "This is the best book in the world!!!" reviews is frightening. Still, I think it's a good sign - how many of those people might otherwise be reading nothing at all? And once they're hooked and run out of Harry Potter books, they'll be forced to turn elsewhere for their fix...
Thursday, November 18, 21:58 CST
Meant to add a bit more last night, but by the time I gave up and went inside
around 2:00 I didn't really have the energy to write anything.
I camped out on the lawn from about 12:30 to 2:00... Saw a grand total of maybe 15 meteors, 5 or 6 of them pretty impressive.
Got my ACT results back today. Up 1 point over last time. Joy.
Guess I should reallly start trying to figure out where I'm going to go to college... That, or just make something up to use when people ask. "Yeah, I'm planning on majoring in Zordosnifter Systems Maintenance at the University of Southern Greebledonk..."
Wednesday, November 17, 19:30 CST
Finished Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban yesterday. Better than and the
Chamber of Secrets, I think. On to and the Sorcerer's Stone
(actually the first book, but I didn't have it earlier). I only hope Rowling
can continue writing this well over the next 4 (I assume there'll be 4, one for
each year at Hogwart's) books. It'd be remarkably easy to write bad Harry
Potter books according to their now established formula for a few decades and
have nothing but another soulless cash cow franchise...
(*mutter* Clancy *mutter*)
I'm hoping to see a few meteors tonight (well, a lot would be nice, but I'm not expecting too much). The peak time around here (Northeastern corner of Nebraska) is supposed to be somewhere between midnight and sunrise, if that's vague enough...
Watch us get the most incredible meteor storm in a century - right after the heavy cloud cover moves in.
Anyway, guess I'll update more later.
Monday, November 15, 23:40 CST
It's still warm out there. And dry. Really dry. I get the feeling that when
winter finally hits, it's going to hit *hard*. Then again, maybe this region is
just slowly turning into a desert.
Saw a link to TRONtium over on Stephen's page. It's a cool little lightcycles/snakes clone for Linux/SVGALib, with sound (which I still don't have working on my machine) and multiplayer support. I've always sucked at this kind of game, but they can still be fun, and this is one of the better versions I've seen.
Sunday afternoon:
I read
Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets last night. Not bad at all. Fun,
easy reading, an enjoyable plot, and some great characters.
I think I might go on a Young Adult / Children's Fantasy binge. The other 2 Harry Potter books look good, as does The Golden Compass, and it's been years since I re-read C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia or the Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper...
Saturday afternoon:
It's the 13th of November, and it's 85 degrees out there. Something's wrong
with this picture.
I'm sitting in my living room, with various relatives, watching Nebraska beat K-State. I really have no understanding of football. The basic concept seems simple enough, but everything beyond "move the ball to the other guy's end of the field" pretty much escapes me.
And now it's halftime, and everyone's falling asleep.
Thursday, November 11 (uploaded Sat, Nov 13, 1:03 CST)
I meant to update this last night, but I started playing around with Perl and
regular expressions. Regexps are amazing things, but difficult to wrap one's
brain around at first. I have to wonder if there exists some kind of graphical
tool to put together a custom regular expression. I'd think it'd make a great
teaching tool.
I downloaded w3m yesterday. According to the author, it's a pager (i.e., a file viewer like less or more - there's sort of an interesting little history of the program) that can act as a text mode web browser. It's got some very nifty features - it renders tables and frames, you can pipe standard input to it, it's small and fast, and when it's acting as a pager it can turn anything that looks like a URL into a link. It's not a replacement for Lynx, nor is it trying to be, but it fills its niche well. It's at least worth a look.
Tuesday, November 9, 23:29 CST
It's been a 4 day weekend here, despite which I've pretty much accomplished
nothing. Oh well. ;)
Moving the computer out of my room gave me space for another set of bookshelves, so I spent quite a bit of time this weekend sorting and shelving books... I can actually sort of walk across the floor now. Found stuff I didn't even know I had, and I think I spent more time reading than anything else.
I think I need to convince my dad to build a library.
Updated my software page a little. I'm thinking of switching that page to an update format, or ditching it altogether...
I see AltaVista, once my search engine of choice, has succumbed to Generic Portalitis, complete with a pretentious and irrelevant marketing campaign.
*sigh*
Thursday, November 4
Typing in this font is definitely weird. It's also pretty ugly.
I've discovered a couple of things. Weird little decorative character sets with few distinctions between upper and lower case don't map very well to electronic text (especially fixed-width text mode). And designing a font that even comes close to not sucking must be both remarkably difficult and incredibly time consuming.
Tuesday, November 2, 23:59 CST
I've been playing a bit with a Linux console font editing program called
FontEd. It uses
a fairly simple ncurses interface for editing, and immediately makes use of the
changes. It doesn't serve any purpose, but I've been working on a font of an
alphabet I made up a while back... I feel a need to be able to display
screens of text unreadable by any other human.
Monday, November 1, 23:18 CST
Ahh, standard time. Gotta love that extra hour. (Unless you work the night
shift, in which case you have my sympathies.)
Hmm. It's been a while.
Just read Othello at school. My least favorite of the Shakespeare I've read so far, but I thought the recent film version with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh was pretty good.
Think I'll go to bed.