a ba'b'ian journal

• August 31, 1999

and i was really bummed when my internet connection to my laptop was busted. it turns out that rebooting linux reset it, and i forgot to run the script i needed to activate ip masquerading. i haven't made it automatic yet

so i slept most of the evening. i still haven't written aimee.

i played on the rock103 web chat. it is connected to an irc web server. maybe i should do something like that.

and i wrote wes, the late night dj. he is kind of hiding from the web cam, and it was that web cam that inspired me to try to get mine. i respect that he shouldn't let them force him to give up his privacy. your personal image is one of your possessions and you shouldn't be forced to give that away just because of your job. and it's radio, there is no expectation that youre going to have people looking at you all the time. that seems like it would be pretty annoying. i told him about how cliff used the jetsons episode as a classic example of why videophones wont work. the two ladies get calls in the morning, before their faces are made up, so they have artificial faces made, and then they eventually have the two artificial talking to each other, and they try to negotiate an armistice. i didn't see the episode myself.

jserv, the httpd module to handle servlets, didn't load automatically like it should. make didn't even make the library module. it was totally not installed like i thought. but when i did try to compile and install, the whole httpd server didn't work at all. grr. and i should be studying java, but i'm not.

• August 29, 1999

ftp seems to work now

i was playing around on the net, looking at how to do webcams. i downloaded the logitech drivers for my quickcam camera, and it turns out that it does simple automatic capture and ftp, so i put low grade web cam stuff on my local server page. but netscape caches the picture, and it won't update right. still, it's something.

• August 28, 1999

i also installed nt server 4.0 on the desktop, and was trying to get the evaluation version of msoft proxy server going, but that hasn't worked yet. the web server was running under nt for a while, though, and now the nt bootloader selects linux (that turned out to be hard to get to work, and i downloaded a program bootpart to get it to work, but it was a little tricky) i was going to load windows 2000 server, and had trouble with the cdrom. (i had trouble with nt 4.0 too and had to copy everything to the hd to get it to work) but then i found that 2000 server needs 64 meg ram and i only have 32. i went to the computer store today and got the card and i was going to get memory, but i didn't know what kind to get, fast page or edo. they said it was hard to buy. it's been so long since i put it in, i've forgotten what kind it is. i think it's edo. it was always so easy to buy ram. they suggested taking one out to check. i'll just wait on doing that for a while, i guess.

paladin press is no longer going to sell books about explosives. i just bought several from them a few months ago. i guess i was lucky. plenty of stuff out on the internet, anyway. it's a creepy evil sign, though.

only two other guys at temperance. no davedavedave, no david, no lingoes. i wonder what gives

in videophoning, the camera is typically on the top of the monitor, and it looks to the other person like you are looking down. (cf the call in 2001). isn't that something women are used to? does that make it more natural?

the laptop is back next to the desktop. and i'm writing this on the desktop. and linux decided to mess up the automatic login to roadrunner yet again. grr. but conversely, nt ran out of virtual memory after i woke up. i don't know which server os is going to win out.

the mouse froze up in nt also, but it looks like it's just some bad connection thing in the mouse that confuses the software. it responded to a few good knocks.

• August 26, 1999

andrea left. i miss her. she called when she was on the road, but i haven't heard from her after that (though i've been going to movies in the evenings).

i rediscovered that method for doing two digit multiplications in your head. you only do three multiplications instead of 4, though there is an extra addition. the tricky bit is what you do for the cross product to get the middle digit. i used a little algebra to find out what the formula was, since i couldn't remember. you've got two numbers a.b (ie a*10+b, a and b are digits) and c.d ("). the "." operator could be seen as multiplying the left side by 10 and adding.
a.b * c.d= (a*c).(a*d + b*c).(b*d), this is the traditional way to do it by hand, if you know your multiplication tables to 9x9. maybe i should actualy do it that way, butit ends up that there are lot's of numbers floating around and it's easy to get confused. the middle cross product can be written another way:
ad+bc= ac+bd+ad+bc-ac-bd =ac+bd+a(d-c)+b(c-d) =ac+bd-(a-b)(c-d)
if we use this formula, we get to reuse the multiplications ac and bd, which turns out to help a little bit. This sort of method would really help for multiplying two 4 numbers together, but i was thinking about it, and in engineering, two digits, or 1% accuracy, is usually all you need, and would be plenty good anyway for multiple choice tests. squares are pretty easy to take, it turns out. use x^2=(x-y)(x+y)+y^2 for example: 22^2 (y=2) = 20 * 24 +4=484. 78^2 (y=2)= 80*76 + 4=6084. something i've to practice is just go through all squares 1 to 100. in order to do a general multiplication, square the average and subtract the square of half the difference( which is also the difference between the average and either number) this might help, maybe, if it's easy to see the average or the numbers are close together, and the average is a whole number. too much free time, maybe?

i went back and reviewed physics. momentum is really the basic concept, though for some reason my textbook covered energy and force before. all we have is a bunch of moving objects with momentums (mass times velocity which has direction), and they swap momentums for various reasons. momentum is always conserved, while energy a lot of times gets converted to stuff that's harder to see. whenever you have a change in motion (momentum) or some kind of action, you have one thing giving some motion to another. to help handle and describe this event, physicists imagine a concept of force, which is isolated from the whole thing, and then they add the "law" that forces occur only in pairs, that while the first pushes on the second, the second pulls back. to me it seems like the whole idea of force is imaginary and strangely wrong, since a force can't actually exist by itself, but we act like they can. they are more of a matter of point of view, of a way of looking at things and breaking down stuff into isolated bits, when in fact, the bits are not isolated, and can't be. another aspect of it, that bruce brought up, is that we think of our actions as forces, that come from nowhere. we have a notion of a force that sits by itself, as a cause or origin of movement, when before, everything was still. anyway, something seems amiss in the whole worldview of physics (depending on an unreal idea of isolated force). energy, as the square of momentum divided by the normally constant mass, is conserved as a consequence of the conservation of momentum. i'm a little bummed that i didn't really how basic the momentum thing was. the book shows that momentum is conserved based on how forces have to be exchanged in a collision, but i think conservation of momentum should really be a basic law and not a derived principle. a real theory of physics would explain how momentum gets transferred at all. it seems logically possible to have a (boring) universe where nothing interracts.

in a dream i was in a classroom where the kids were discouraged from interrupting with questions, and were supposed to make little notes (maybe via computer) for the teacher to quiet notice if he wants

still working on the linux server. trying to get the jserv java servlet module for apache running so i can get back to java stuff. downloaded the blackdown java stuff instead of kaffe and guavac. and yet my netscape browser crashes with a "bus error" on any java program. grr.

saw american pie. it was ok. i don't go much for them thar high school thangs. and everybody looked 20 something. a 25 yo in pig-tails is still a 25 yo. i supposed i will look at baked goods in a new way.

and i saw run lola run or lola rennt. that was a great movie, suggested by cliff. in german with a sort of music video style. lola has that cool tank girl quality to her, and yet she has a feminine side. lots of running. interesting photography. i didn't so much like the weird time stuff, but it had a german philosophical mood. the boyfriend loses some drug money and needs it in 20 minutes or they'll off him. she has told him that with love anything is possible, and this is kind of a test and they make her do it right. again and again, each time, with little differences that end up in big changes, which is what chaos theory is about, but it was really an old idea, the whole "for want of a nail the kingdom is lost"

• August 21, 1999

had a big barbecue yesterday. for the kids, i tried to go back to windows and get multiplayer quake going, and had a lot of trouble. i had to undo the changes from the roadrunner install, which meant setting the ip address to be fixed again. i think i could do it again fairly easily, but it was annoying in the way it just wouldn't come up. i'm trying to get quake working under linux, but not having too much luck. the sound doesn't work, for one. the hi color seems to mess up the x11 version. the opengl is having trouble finding files.

finally brad wrote something to the mensa list, so i can show his link. i hope it doesn't have any evil scripting and such.

• August 18, 1999

andrea came over for dinner yesterday. bunches of flies were coming in from the kitchen window, and it wasn't her fault.

i went to blockbuster and i wanted to get das boot (since we have german folk over) but they had it dubbed. ew ick.

i finally resorted to using lilo (a bootloader commonly used with linux) but i didn't have it replace the dos bootloader on the main partition. instead i put it on the third partition which is used by linux and used fdisk to set the third partition active. i hear horror stories about people messing with their boot records and losing everything, and this seemed like the safest choice. i can just go back and run fdisk to activate the first partition to restore everything, and lilo lets me boot to dos/windows if i want, so it works ok.

and the best thing of all, i'm running microsoft free now. unfortunately, there are some applications missing. one noticeable one is shockwave, which is a browser plugin for looking at video. i hope there is some other way of doing that, because it would be bad to suddenly have a high speed internet link but not be able to look at video.

as the centurion (?) said as he flew into the sun "I'm free!"

my mom actually said that andrea would make a nice daughter-in-law. and she said again that she was bubbly

• August 15, 1999

had steak for dinner. didn't make up for the day.

• August 14, 1999

i need to study german, java, physics, greek, philosophy, networking, e-commerce, secure sockets, linux, guitar, keyboards, tai chi, yoga, aikido, engrungineering, dance, organic chemistry, origami, japanese, frontpage. i need to install the road runner stuff on the laptop, to recompile the linux kernel to get it small enough so i can use loadlin, to install the roadrunner stuff for linux, to do all the linux stuff on the laptop, to rearrange my mail so the desktop keeps it all instead of the laptop, to set up all the mail filters, to set up a servelet, to set up a script to transmit an updated page to link my server when i get that up. tomorrow i'll work on this stuff.

andrea is really sweet, but i think i'm getting more depressed because i'm just not so interested. or it's just a bad few days.

• August 13, 1999

the waittress at the sports pub at the weekly mensa meeting called temperance said "an ass-kicking every week". trippy.

happy friday the thirteenth. seems like everyone was having a bad day. girl at the bank said she was.

sitting herre watching letterman. cab driver had a rabbit's foot tied to his turban. the rabbit was struggling to get away.

so i'm troubled. i don't know whom i like better, paul or suzanne (theyre married). suzanne works at a technical, engineering company (though she's in marketing) and she took my resume to try to help me get a job, but paul is into guns and has studied premed and we seem to have more knowledge and education in common. I guess it's reasonable if i'm more like him that i should like his wife. and her age is closer to mine than his. anyway, she just had surgery for a big old pea-sized kidney stone (with hooks), and our sympathy goes out to her. i saw her at temperance, and it was good to see her with a healthy appetite, eating.

i'm very bummed. i failed the java 2 programmer certification test. i got 69% and passing was 71%. so close. i'm out the money. but what hurts most is the loss of some bit of identity. i thought i really knew how to program java. i considered that i was a java programmer. but i guess i was wrong again. something to cling to. for the longest time recently about the only thing good about myself that i could say about myself is that at least i know how to program java, but now i can't say that.

anotherbad thing about it is that i kind of resent my friend. she came over the day before when i needed to study and was a distraction. probably the most important thing i needed was to get enough sleep and she messed with that, too.

there's a fly buzzing around here. she let flies in. the dog was in the back yard, and his food spilled just around the back door and attracted flies. when you have flies near a door, some are bound to get in.

getting people to want what you have is quite doable. very important for "success"

i'm still not fully up with the road runner. it's on my desktop computer in the other room, and i'm typing this on my laptop, which is more convenient here by my bed. that means i'm going to have to use a slow phone modem to load this up. i need to get a cable strung around so i can put connect this laptop. the desktop is at a really uncomfortable chair.

but i finally got the telnet account for our computer client up. java does run from there, so i should be able to run servelets, i guess.

• August 9, 1999

i lost 4 pounds to get down to 176 lbs. and i have a light dinner of one piece of chicken and a bowl of rice. and the parents come home, and my dad goes out and gets kentucky fried chicken, not knowing i had eaten, and gets some for me. i guess nobody was forcing me to eat it, but i did. and a snickers bar.

i registered to take the java 2 programmers test on thursday at 11. it was really a hassle trying to arrange it. the web site www.2test.com was too hard to use. and i went though about 5 phone numbers before i got to the right one.

i haven't been studying my german

• August 7, 1999

the article about the single molecule transistor from rotaxane was a little underwhelming. it's more of a fusable link, which can be burned out so current can't flow any more. and the demo was actually quite large, but they assumed it could shrink down. its advantage was its simplicity, largely, since it consists of a grid of wires instead of a complex pattern.

the wedding was very nice. Grace is something of a quiet engineering type. tall. her sister's husband is an aeronautical engineering professor at stanford, and the reception was at his mansion on a hill on campus from which you could see over the bay into fremont.

i have been described as a kind person because i have been helpful. but i see being helpful as only a reasonable action and not a consequence of some emotion. to see what needs to be done and to do it, that the world may be ordered, not in order to feel better. for i'm sure that people realize that the payment for service is more requests for service. i'm not surprised that people don't volunteer.

i called the roadrunner people, and they said they will come by wednesday. and i got a voucher from sun for the java programmer certification test, but i haven't arranged to take it with the sylan prometric people.

• August 2, 1999

we just had some indian food.