Divine Lunacy

I bet you’re wondering where I indend to go with a title like that, right? I would be too… I was chatting with Mike yesterday ( hi mike! ). He happend to tell me about some spread firefox pictures he found. I’m all for spreading the fox, but what I saw was a kind of spread I never would have associated with Firefox. If you’re brave enough, you might try a Google Image Search for "spread the fox", or perhaps you’d like a Direct Link or two. Hey, why not? No really… I’m sorry if I just horrified anyone, but I really can’t be held responsible for your compulsive left clicking. ( and if you read the title… ) If you clicked the links, you’re probably wondering why. The why is perhaps more alarming. Lets just put it this way: Have you ever wanted to undress your favorite female cartoon character? ( me neither… ), well now you can

I worked on this theme more today, incase you didn’t notice. I finally brought the capabilities of the theme up to what is expected of a wordpress theme. ( yay, what fun! ) As part of that I started working on a separate page for search results. ( Unless you’re familiar wordpress, you probably never knew about the search function, which I never bothered adding a form for… ). Although the CSS for this new theme is changed, most of the XHTML has remained the same. For that reason, I am having trouble understanding how this theme makes 24 queries whilst the old one only makes 12. ( it was doing so before I fancied it up, mind you… ). I’ll soon get to the bottom of this, just as soon as I do a million other things. Well, I’m off to finish drawing all graphs of order four and five now…

Ever since I started using my Google Personal Homepage, I have been tracking google’s stock. I believe they were at $266 or so when I started monitoring them ( a little over a month ago ). GOOG hit $306 today… Makes me wish I had some Stock in them. /me sighs…

This might come as a bit of a shock, so please make sure you are sitting… Ok, here goes: I’m booted to ‘Windoze’ right now… I haven’t booted to windows since last time I had to make a diagram for a pow. ( I don’t think I used diagrams on the last 3-4. ). My main reason for booting to windows is for photoshop. I could use the gimp, but I am not nearly as familiar with it as I am photoshop. Given my lack of artistic talent, I really need to be using an interface I am familiar with.

So now you’re wondering why I need photoshop, right? I need to make some images for this new theme. Notice how the link bar is on the right now? That is pretty much an accident, but I’m not going to bother changing that now. ( I had a little help from kubrick. ). Also, because I was doing all my work with the black theme, it is the only theme that will work with this new layout. I’ll probably fix starbucks and make a white color scheme as well. I also plan to use images for post titles, and probably for the bullets. ( I’ll probably use either sigma, omega or delta as bullets… ) If I’m not too lazy, there will be many changes to this theme over the next however long it takes me to finish. Hmm… it smells like soup in here…

Speaking of soup… I just had soup the lazy way for lunch. There was a can, a bowl, a spoon, some water and a microwave. After placing the soup in the microwave I paced around the kitchen for two minutes waiting for my soup to finish ‘cooking’, before I realized that i hadn’t yet set the microwave. ( ahh… Ooops? ).

Greg is having arguments with himself again. He hates it when he does that. Anyway… Greg doesn’t know what he will wear for his senior picture, which is to be taken in august. He figures he’ll probably wear a thinkgeek T-shirt for the potrait, but what shall he do for the creative shoot? I have thought of wearing my frame pack, or my Boy Scout uniform, but no one at school knows the Boy Scout Greg; they all know the computer geek, math-loving, insane Greg. How does one depict that? Meditate on this, Greg will…

Greg figures he’ll tell you that he’s reading A Beatiful Mind for summer reading. Greg liked the movie and highly reccomends the book which he has only read ten pages of.

When we’re hiking for Philmont, the slowest person leads a what is called the all day pace—a pace that the whole crew can comfortably maintain for the duration of the day. If you have a fast crew, the all day pace may be a truly comfortable pace, but for me it is hell… My normal pace is around twice the ‘all day pace’. Consequently, when I am forcedto walk the all day pace, I feel like a cyclist who is going just fast enough to avoid falling. ( Yes, I wobble like that too! ). The pace we walked on flat ground was depressingly slow. There were two times my legs didn’t hurt yesterday during our third Philmont shakedown; one of them was when I was leading and the other was when comrade Brian was leading ( Neither of us lasted long as leader. { we were fired. } ).

I started working on a new template today… Anyone who happend to visit this morning should have seen the beginnings. ( I’m actually altering this template drammatically. ) Well… umm.. This is actually the new theme now… It is very far from done, but I’m sure I’ll finish it before summer’s end. Edit: I just changed my mind and put the old one back.

About thirty minutes ago, I was just happily surfing the internet, when suddenly there came a knock on the door… Well, actually, Firefox ( 1.0.5 Beta ) crashed on me, and sent my whole world to hell. When I tried to restart Firefox, its memory usage hit the roof and forced me to reboot. ( Firefox is not good for high uptimes ). Upon rebooting, I su’ed to root and vi’ed my system log. ( /var/log/messages ). Hoping to find something interesting, I quickly skipped down to June. I was expecting to find something interesting on June 24^th, but I found something very interesting before I even got there. June 16^thwas a Thursday. I clearly remember coming home and trying to use my computer, which seemed sluggish and dead. I never bothered to look into the matter. My SSH server was still up from the previous day at that point. When I was looking through the log today, I found hundreds of failed login attempts spread accross three ip addresses, each of which seems to have led one ‘attack’—clearly a brute force hacking attempt. I am, of course, too good to have my root password brute force hacked. I am also smart enought to password protect my other accounts. All of the attempts failed, but I am still quite annoyed. I am led to wonder if it was someone I know, or if it was just some n00b who scanned an ip address range for open ports and found port 22 open on my ip. A log of all relevant messages ( I wrote a script to extract them ) can be found here.

First off, I’d like to address the current mood issue. I’d rather put caffeinated, but when I made my LiveJournal plugin, I figured I’d never want to use my own custom moods so I left that text box out of the form. Now, I am quite mad at me. I’ll probably spend all of five minutes fixing that later today. This is why we do beta testing… well.. Not really…

Secondly, unlike the dude in the Dominos commercial, I love change. I fear lack of change. I have been using the same template here for a long time. Quite frankly, I am sick of it. I plan on spending parts of the rest of forever thinking up a new template. Although I plan on scouring the internet for ideas later today, any input is appreciated.

The blogroll to the left is far from being my complete blog roll. There is something about this theme that makes me weary to put my whole blog roll on the front page, which is one of my reasons for change. I browse my whole LiveJournal friends list, and several other blogs on a semi-daily basis. Until I make a new template, I’ll add links to the blogroll by request only, providing the person requesting: runs a blog/journal I read reguarly and links back to me. ( I have googleish motives )

At 1048 this morning, I looked at my clock… It was…. 1048 ( surprising, eh? ). I looked at my clock again at 1148… then 1248… Three hours in a row, I have glanced at the clock at the fourty-eighth minute of the hour. This is beginning to freak me out.

Perahps I should refrain from drinking coffee in my room. My hands were wet. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. The mug tilted ever so slightly and poured coffee on to one of my summer reading packets. It had to be the summer reading packet, didn’t it? It was just yesterday that I ranted about all the spares I have. I guess they’ll actually be useful.

Look at me… I’m actually blogging again later. Over the last two days, I have recieved Exactly four envelopes from school. I recieved three envelopes yesterday, and one today. Of the envelopes I recieved yesterday, one was addressed to me and two were addressed to my parents. The one addressed to me contained a notice about senior pictures. One of the envelopes addressed to my parents contained the same exact notice. The other one was an informational packet about summer reading—the same exact packed I was given in class. ( or close enough to it… ). The envelope with the summer reading had two $.37 stamps on it. With about 800 students, that comes up to $592, not including the cost of printing duplicate pakcets for everyone. This is the same packet that is available in the guidence office all summer long. I recieved the B12 memorandum today, but wait… isn’t that the same packed that I had to go pick up in Mrs. Druin’s room? ( yeah, it is… ). oh.. and… I recieved another summer reading packet today… Now if I lose one of them, I’ll have two spares. Now would be a great time to rant about the duplicate award ceremony invitations, but I have already done so. Simply put, the school spends somewhere well over $1000 sending out duplicates of certain publications…

As I glanced over my report card today, I first ran my eyes down the credits column to make sure there wasn’t some freak accident that caused me to fail something for the year. After seeing a 0.000 in the US history row, I looked again… and again… and again… and… Wait… There aren’t any failing grades in that row. I then looked at the career credits printed at the bottom of the report card. It says I have 18.5 career credits, which I know is impossible without even doing any real math. Career exploration is a quarter credit and is the only quarter credit class I have taken; thus, my total credits can not be divisible by 1/2… It looks like the error is in the credits, not the grades, which is good… Looks like I’ll ( I mean my mom will ) be on the phone with guidence tomorrow…

There has been so much to blog about since my last post. I have planned to blog several times everyday, but I haven’t been on my computer much in the last week. In fact, I’m not on my computer right now. I’m at my Grandma’s house, on her laptop, suffering from the slowness of dial up. I could instant message you right now, and If I am lucky, you might recieve the message by 1800. My Grandma got HBO back sometime, so I’m watching “Along Came Polly” right now. THe movie kind of sucks, but it is good entertainment for someone who is trying and failing, to blog.

I’m really into this whole light gear thing for Philmont. After my latest shakedown at Mt. Monadnock, I am willing to do anything to lighten the load. One of the things I have decied to get rid of is my cuttlery. Those Scout forks and spoons must weigh ten pounds each. To hell with them now. I have something better… a Titanium Spork. This spork is the best thing since… coffee… and that means a lot coming from me. It is deep enought to eat soup, yet forky enought to… use as a fork.

A local dance group has a recital in our school auditorium every year around this time. Previously, Craig has run lights and sound alone, but he was unable to attend one of the performances and got me to cover it. Thursday and Friday were rehearsals they went about five hours each. The actual performance was on saturday and sunday and lasted three hours. On friday, we finally put ALL the rows of house lights on their own faders. Blinking each row sequentially gives a pretty cool effect… Now we just need to get the odd numbered lights in the 25-44 grorup working. ( the square ones… ) At the end, my cut of the pay was $160. Unfortunaltely, I have spent most of it on textbooks for math. ( I like reading textbooks more than I like reading… fictional stuff. )

Last Wednesday at the troop meeting, all of the little people were kept busy making another troop sign ( we have a corner site at Yawgoog. ) In the short time they worked on it, they made a ton of mistakes. My whole week thusfar has been spent finishing it, and fixing the mistakes. Its actually coming out quite well. ( I should be working on that now. )

Josh had threatend to sick Andre on me if I didn’t write this post… He lives about 200 paces east/south east of my Grandma. The idea if stabbing finally got me into a sort of blogging mood… OH, how I love stabbing. In other news, I haven’t bothered with that whole poweroff/reboot thing since school ended. I have about six days of uptime now. Not bad. I only wish Firefox didn’t consume so much memory. ( if you’ve ever seen it’s memory usage, you understand. ) As I mentioned, I haven’t been on my comptuer lately and am thus quite far behind on wordrpess updates. Ugh. Speaking of wordpress, I am about done version two of my LiveJournal Plugin. I completely rewrote everything, made it object oriented, and gave it error handling/logging abilities. Reporting erorrs is annoying during the posting process. The action hooks I am using run after wordpress sends the redirect header. Standard output thus never reaches the browser. I’m kind of annoyed with livejournal. If you don’t explicity specify that a backdated post is… backdated, it will throw an error. If the time stamp is before one’s latest post, it is obviously backdated. I think it should have the brains to figure that out. From what I have observed, it doesn’t matter if I just set the backdated option to true everytime I post… I’ll proofread this insanity later. I might even blog again later… Just for those of you who were nearly dead from lack of me blogging. Edit: If this shows up on my LiveJournal, it is all thanks to version 2. Version one stopped working with wordpress 1.6 after the last upgrade I did…

As they say, the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple… As part of the Middle School’s ‘murder’ of the Literature classes, my brother had to take Spanish class this year. ( poor child ). Almost everyday when he came home, my brother complained about his Spanish teacher, Ms. AnnaMaria Morales, who is from Ecuador… I always told him that it couldn’t be as bad as Adv. Spanish one with Mrs. Simmons, who is also from Ecuador. ( See where I am going with this? ). He tried to convince me otherwise by telling me tales of this Morales lady, and on several occasions, I had come to believe that Ms. Morales and Mrs. Simmons were one in the same, but my suppositions were quickly falsified upon learning that she had been working at the Middle School for two years. Mrs. Simmons was working at the High School last year… She couldn’t possibly be working at two school’s, could she? My brother was looking through his yearbook tonight and upon looking at one picture, he began to scream and called me over. Upon seeing the picture, I too began to scream. What I saw was cleary Mrs. Simmons, but the caption labeled her as Ms. Morales. After talking to a few people, I decided to look at my sister’s year book ( from my freshmen year. ). When looking through the staff pages, I noticed that half the people were either pink slipped, or retired. Anyway, I eventually came to a picture that I recognized to be Mrs. Simmons. The caption read “Mrs. AnaMaria Simmons.” Mr. Berthellete did it, Mrs. Charabacz ( spelling? ), and yes, Mrs. Simmons did it too! After I finished with that, I continued to look through the yearbook. I found the it to be slightly depressing, as 3/4 of the classes depicted therein have graduated ( mine obviously being the only one that hasn’t ).

I just happend to be listening to some Wizard of Oz songs and talking to Lea a month or two ago. I think I was hyped up on coffee or something, because I told her I felt like frolicking and singing the Yellow Brick road song. Through some more discussion, we finally decied that I would frolic past her house no later than the sixteenth of June, two-thousand five ( anno domini ). I procrastinated, but I finally got around to it today. I imagine it was a pretty funny sight. The pictures she took don’t near capture the essence of the frolicking, but I do look like a total idiot. ( it is kind of hard to capture frolicking in a still picture… )

Yeah… So I’m doing a thing for the dance dudes the next couple of days… I suppose I’ll write about that later. ( about $20/hr for pressing play… )

As I stated earlier, I finally have a respectable version of my livejournal synchronization plugin. I decided it would be a good idea to copy ALL of the posts from this blog to my LiveJournal, so I made a nice five line function to do just that. I accidentally ran the function three times. ( and I didn’t put any stupid-proof measures in it… I figured I wasn’t stupid enough to do that… ooops.. ) After I realized that I ran it three times, I also realized that I forgot the linkback feature (oops…), so I wrote a program to delete my whole live journal… Alas, I got it posted, but there was an error in the comment settings piece, so now comments are disabled on all of those entries… ANyway… in the course of ten minutes, I posted over 300 entries, deleted over three hundred, then posted somewhere over one hundred. I kind of feel bad for the livejournal server :-\…

I finally have a truly working version of this live journal plugin. It is still very alpha, but progressing. ( I’ve yet to add an edit post feature. ) I’m doing all my testing on my test blog, which is running wordpress 1.6 alpha. I finally decided to save all the live journal meta data/props to my wordpress database. I figure I’ll add a current mood and current music feature while I’m at it. I know there are plugins that do that, but this will be able to sync live journals, etc. I have made this interface very similar to the live journal interface, so its pretty cool. I figure I’ll add some friends features, etc while I’m at it.

I’ve had a lot of stuff worth posting about for the last few days, but I figured I’d hold it off until I had the LiveJournal plugin working well enough to synch the journal. I went to Bert’s for lunch with Joe, Jill, Lea and Dick on Tuesday, but I ate breakfast instead… The waitress messed up my order which clearly stated that the omlet should have sausage and bacon in addition to the swiss cheese. So, I ended up eating a cheese-filled lump of egg, but it was a good lump. After lunch, Dick ordered a muffin for Dessert. Bert toasted and cut the muffin for him, and when it was layed out on the plate, it looked rather heart-shaped. Dick interpreted this as a sign that Bert loved him more than he loves me, so I ordered a chocolate cream pie, heart-shaped. My pie totally pwn’ed his muffin, and I totally outfatted him too! ( but he still denys that I am fatter… ).

I’ll post again later… after I frolic past Lea’s house…

I had a hotdog for lunch today! I finally came to th realization that boiling is the only way to go. If I had decided to fry it, I would have had to stand at the stove for like five minutes—five minutes which could have been spent on my computer

I think I finally have a working live journal synchronization plugin. It is thusfar very simple, but if it is working, this post will be the first post to be posted to my blog and my live journal. /me crosses fingers and clicks publish!