Spring break turn on.
You know what that meaning.
I get to be exceptionally lazy for the next two weeks; moreso than usual. And I added my new story. Ass.
Illness goes away. Knowledge of telecommunications grows. Inspiration returns. Then I go online and watch people frown and shrug at me every forty minutes over the course of several hours. Whatever. My next masterpiece will called "The Stink of Defeat." It's the touching pokemon fanfiction story type thing of a smelly man who walks into a bar and has to defend his smelly ways. Then he rides away on his bike. That Hawthorne jerk can kiss my ass.
As had been expected this time of the year, I'm sick like a fraggin' animal, and I will most likely continue to be so until the latter half of March. My throat's all itchy and raw and sore and whatnot, and even the combined efforts of five full glasses of water consumed in the course of an hour didn't help to extinguish the flames that are slowly making their way towards my lungs. I have become exceptionally lazy. More than usual, I mean. I hardly have the motivation to sit up in the chair in front of the computer here; I find myself much more willing to stay in bed and watch TV, reluctant even to reach towards the glass of water a mere few inches away.
That's pretty damn lazy.
My sense of creativity is gone (meaning my stories and essays are all on hold), and no doubt my senses of taste and smell will soon follow. Luckily, though, I am still capable of rational thought and of absorbing information, so my studytude and learnification continue uninhibited. This has led to my basic, non-physics oriented understanding of bipolar junction transistors, and their applications in switching and amplification. One of these days, when I'm not living in fear of waking up the next morning and having to cough up nauseating quantities of mucus, I will write an essay about it. Until then, I'm going back to bed.
Happy Freakin' Valentine's Day. Ass.
I don't care. There are rules to be followed. When random passersby ask how you're doing, you respond with "fine." You don't say that you woke up feeling terribly nauseous, and there was a puddle of some indiscernable substance next to the bed, and you know this because you stepped in it when you got up to put your pants on. Therefore, I'm fine. I did not have a long, frustrating, unproductive day of electronics labs that didn't work. Nor have I had a splitting headache for the past four hours as a result of staring at the flickering waveform line of an oscilloscope for an hour and a half. I will say that my story is progressing quite rapidly, that it is practically writing itself in fact, and that it should be done by the day's end, for I have complete confidence in my abilities as a writer, a student, and a technician; moreover, my mind is clear, and can easily be focused on any given task.
I'm no Isaac Asimov, but I decided to write an article about number systems, as in decimal, binary, octal, and hexadecimal. Yes, binary-coded-decimal is conspicuously absent. Ass. v0.5b.
What? A Rocket Power movie? Nonono. NO. You see, "Maximum Rocket Power" can only be achieved when the internal resistance of the Rocket Power Supply equals the resistance of the load, which is, apparently, some kind of race. Consider two resistors in series. The internal resistor has a set value. The load resistor does not. Now, a greater load resistor causes a greater voltage drop across it with respect to the internal resistance, but this also raises the total resistance of the circuit, thus lowering the total current, which is the same through both resistors. If the load resistor is lowered to a value less than that of the internal resistance, then the load has a smaller voltage drop, but the lower total resistance draws more current. Power is equal to voltage times current, and those two factors vary inversely with each other with regard to our changing load; on a graph you would see two lines sloping away from a certain point. That is the point of greatest power dissipation, or the Maximum Rocket Power transfer, if you will.
The resistance of this "race" is obviously the physical difficulty it presents. The "internal resistance," as it were, may be assumed to be just that: one's internal, personal doubts, fears, and/or self-imposed limitations. The theme presented is that one should overcome this resistance, presumably to reduce it to zero, or at least make it proportionally dwarfed compared to the load resistance. This is morally interesting, but unfortunately is also mathematically and electrically wrong; in fact, this is the exact opposite, in that the internal resistance, rather than the load, is lowered. It is in direct conflict with the maximum power transfer theorum, as well as with basic circuit analysis; thus, the power metaphor is laughable, flawed, and almost entirely inappropriate.
The sky was angry that day. It spit crystalline pain down upon me as I traversed the snowy wasteland. Yet as I neared my destination, it instead wept in shame at its failure to impede my progress.
And that is the type of paragraph I just don't put into my stories. It's not that the style is beyond me. It's that it just has no place, unless I were to contrast it with a sentence of the "Misty woke up to find Togepi peeing on her face" variety. I wish I could find that story again. I'm pretty sure I have a hard copy somewhere. Maybe.
I'm so arrogant I like to show off my technical lexicon in story form. Hence "Hack the Planet." Sorry, no tips for buffer overflows or exploits of features here. Just more nudity and soiled underwear. Well, what did you expect I would write about? Excuse any technical inaccuracies. I'm no CCIE. At least, not yet.
I'm so arrogant I think I have something to teach about basic Boolean logic. Version 0.5b.
I don't even know why I bothered waking up this morning. I turn on the television, and what's the first thing I hear? "Time for Tubby sponges! Wash wash wash, wash wash wash, Tubby Tubby Tubby Tubby, wash wash wash." A communal scrubdown of Po ensued. I'm sure I could have learned a thing or two about hygiene, but that's not the point. The idea left reverberating in my mind after I turned the set off is. I knew all that literary analysis in high school would catch up to me one day. I knew.
I've added a new story. No, it didn't take me two days to write. It took an hour this evening. I was proud, because I didn't agonize over it for days or weeks. Ass.
I've still been using 2001 for all the dates of my entries, at least until I noticed just now. Thanks for telling me. Ass.
I've added a new story. No, I wish it had only taken me four days to write, but I'm not very good at this writing thing. It is twelve pages of mind-numbing garbage, but it's more than you did. Ass.
Why, yes, I did write quick little story this evening. Thank you for asking.
Ask Tiny Sepuku. Yes, ask Tiny Sepuku. Go on. Ask Tiny Sepuku. Don't be shy. Enlightenment is imminent. Your unity with the Cosmos would be but one step away if you were to
Oh. I might add that I managed to keep last year's resolution. I don't know if I have one for this year, except maybe that my humility never be exceeded by my greatness. And maybe that I take at least one of the CCNP exams before the year is out.
New Year.
...
I guess that's it.
Happy New Year. To celebrate, I have performed a symbolic and ceremonial changing of clothes. It doesn't happen very often; that's what makes it special.
Wait. Wait. I remember now. In fanfiction.net's respectably large archive of gay anime porn stories (and a few other works), two stories stand out above all others. One of them is a 220-chapter, 400,000-word long Pokemon story. I scrolled through a few pages of it. It was alright. Just lukewarm writing, nothing spectacular.
Except for the fact that there's 400,000 words of it. It's nearly two megabytes of pure text. That's longer than most novels. That's more than I've written in my entire life: my collected stories, my history and social studies essays, every English assignment, all of my notes for every class I've ever taken, research projects, term papers, homework in general, my website collectively, letters, e-mails, personal reminders, memorandums, and stuff on sticky pads. Even if mathematics were included, this story's page count would still exceed that of my life story by far.
The other is a 239-word Pokemon drama. It has three sentences and an author's note at the end. I think it was written by a little girl, the younger sister of some other fanfiction.net author. I...forgot the point I was trying to make, but I do like the juxtapositioning thing, and a 47 microFarad capacitor in series with a 100 Ohm resistor will charge to the applied voltage after about 23.5 milliseconds.
...Forgot what I was going to say. But I've gorged myself with various confections for the past eight hours, and that has to count for something.
"The final LANE-related device is the LAN Emulation Configuration Server (LECS.) When a LEC first joins an emulated LAN, it consults the LECS for certain information, such as the address of the LES for that ELAN. The LECS also contains ATM naming information. One LECS is required per ATM cloud, which is to say all of your interconnected ATM devices."
...
...
...
Remember not to confuse LECs with LECS' or LES', and for goodness' sake don't try to use ISL for VLANs with your ATM stuff.
LMFAO. G2G. BRB. TTYL. BS.
It is Christmas Eve, or Christmas Pre-Dawn. I am naked and alone. Actually, I am neither, but I wanted to say that I am both. The point is, I have added a new story.
So, holy wars rage on, Armageddon approaches, and holiday spending is rather low. I have but one holiday wish. But I can't remember what it is, so here's a glossary instead.
Anode - the 'p' region of a diode.
Cathode - the 'n' region of a diode.
PN Junction - the boundary between two different types of semiconductive materials.
Ripple Voltage - the small variation in the DC output voltage of a filtered rectifier caused by the charging and discharging of the filter capacitor.
Rico Story - a series of basic, common ironies used to form a half-hearted social criticism of modern America.
And here is an anecdote, stolen verbatim from PlanetNamek.com's Odd E-mails section.
"I have another story about a dumb kid who thinks he's in DBZ or someting. Two kids got in a fight in my school, it was a geeky kid and a jock. Well anyway, after geting his ass kicked pritty bad, the geek got up and screemed "KAIO-KEN!" at the top of his lung, after that the geek landed about 3 good punches, and he ended up winning the fight. I've never seen anything so stupid in my life."
Neat. Happy holidays you blood-sucking bastards.
Through the grapevine the end comes.
That's how I know we've come into the adult world.
That's how I know we don't belong there.
I have another story to share. A Rico story. However, I felt I had to set the plot aside to make room for what I'm certain is a very, very, extremely important message. Maybe. At any rate, these Rico things are proving to be a very successful children's book series. A character to which everyone can relate faces extremely common, real-world problems, yet comes to an agreement and/or understanding by the end of each story. I should get a metal for this, man. Preferably copper, or perhaps iron.
I have another story to share.
I am a freak. As such, most of my friends are online, where I can carefully and precisely control the kinds of impressions I make, and where, thankfully, such things as basic hygiene are of no concern. It follows, then, that I would spend a lot of time online talking to them. And I do.
There are eight people online to whom I give even a thought. Four are very close friends. Four are acquaintances. Of the total eight, three have the interesting habit of playing tic tac toe. On their arms. Using razors. They will be referred to as friends A, B, and C. There is also an X, who is unknown to me, but has a central role in things. It might have been A who influenced B and C to start cutting; I don't remember. A has nearly sliced her veins open twice, and just recently lacerated her arm down to the muscle; all accidents, but this has done nothing to deter her from the habit. B hasn't done nearly so much damage, but is gathering a respectable collection of scars. But this story is about C.
C is outside my circle of close friends, and so these events came to me only through the grape vine. C and I never spoke much in the first place, but she hasn't been on in some time. I now know why. I do remember being in many chat rooms in which A, who is somewhat of a self-mutilation connoisseur, gave C all kinds of advice regarding the subject, such as how to remove the blade from various types of shaving razors when one's own seasoned and blood-stained one has been misplaced or seized.
I have heard that C's mother is a lunatic. Logically, then, C would want to slice herself up like a Christmas ham as therapy. And so she did. The mother, in an act of absolute and unforgiveable hatred, took the razor away, and hid other razors that were lying around the house. That's when X came into play. X is a friend (presumably online) of C who, perhaps on a request, perhaps not, began sending C razors through the United States postal service. Better than anthrax, I suppose.
Some while later, and this is when things take a turn for the...whatever, C and X decided to run away together. So they ran away from home, two girls on the lamb; rebels without a cause, man. And they had razors. And they had made a suicide pact. The whole miserable plan failed. I don't know what happened to X, but C was grounded from the Internet for a month. How harsh.
So that's why C hasn't been around lately. I can only assume she hasn't violated the pact and offed herself without the presence of X; however, I will not assume that this will not be attempted again. If it weren't real, perhaps it would be funny. Some would say she should get therapy. She says this is her therapy. As you wish. Who am I to judge?
Yet suddenly my own idiosyncrasies seem just a little muted.
Having recently been inspired to dust off the old port scanner/proxy querier/e-mail verifier/otherwise network analyzer-type thing, I came across an odd little...whatever in the WHOIS information of yahoo.com:
I live! And I have a story to share.
A local high school got a bomb threat the other day. Actually, it was over the weekend. A message was left on the voicemail or answering machine or whatever, and the staff didn't get it until Monday morning. A high pitched voice explained that there was a bomb in the high school and in the middle school, and that a whopping $100 was to be left at a local fast food dining establishment, presumably for him to retrieve later. Now, the middle school encompasses grades eight down to six, so I'm betting that he was still adjusting to the idea of not having recess anymore, or perhaps wanted to avoid his multiplication test that day.
Then there's the fact that if the bomb had a timer, it would have to have been set for two days or more (assuming the message was left on Saturday) for it to have done anything. Any less and the bomb, assuming it had enough strength, would have blown up the school and the voice mail, so nobody would have heard it in the first place and he would never have gotten his fortune. Or, more likely, if the bomb were pitifully weak, it would hardly warrant even a $100 fee.
Assuming the bomb was of the stronger variety, it would still have to be detonated somehow. The mini-terrorist (MT?) wasn't clever enough to disguise his voice, but maybe he would have been smart enough to be away from the building when the bomb went off. Yet even if it were to be remotely detonated, people would be tripping over the wires in the hallways, eventually breaking them entirely, or possibly just following them back to MT? (Of course, this assumes that MT?'s carelessness carries over into more than just threat-making). That leaves wireless detonation, I suppose, but that just seems too sophisticated and/or expensive for some careless schmuck who has to ask for $100. Furthermore, the scare following this hoax lasted all of thirty minutes, which takes roughly four minutes out of each class during the day. The scale of it all is too tiny not to be funny.
None of this would have concerned me in the least, were it not for the fact that all of this is such a Rico thing to do. This just proves that what I write aren't stories so much as pieces of my own horrible, horrible reality. It also exemplifies my incredible wisdom in graduating early.
And anyway, personally I would have held out for $200, but I suppose I'm no match for that youngster's superior criminal genius.
For the intricacies of circumstance which have led to this point.
Shush. Story.
Yeah, so I received a strange letter the other day. Unfortunately, my scanner isn't working, so I have typed up this reproduction of the text contained therein:
YOU CAN NOT STOP US. ALL THE ANTHRAX ARE BELONG TO US. YOU WILL BE HAVING THE DEATH. ARE YOU AFRAID? DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT JUSTICE.
Yeah, so I was reading CNN.com earlier today. Osama bin Laden says this is a terrorist expansionist colonialist war against Islam. If this is a holy war then Armageddon will be a joke. Any serious strike against Islam would involve crashing commercial jetliners full of human excrement into the holy city of Mecca, but that ain't happening, nor would it accomplish anything in regard to terrorism. Instead there's just some politics and exploding Afghan airbases. Lame. But then, I know all about puffing things up to make them seem important. I do it all the time. I just don't have any cruise missiles or box cutters or commercial jetliners in my arsenal. So...you lucked out this time.
In the meantime, the World Trade Center should definitely be rebuilt, plated with pure gold, and then purposefully destroyed by plane again, just to put on a show of incredible opulence and wastefulness. Yeah. Take that, terrorism.
AH! Oh, right. Well anyway, I've just been keeping busy with my schoolwork. I worked harder in high school than I am right now. I'd have plenty of time for writing stories, except that I haven't had much motivation or inspiration or whatnot recently. Maybe I'll write about my classes for a while instead.
