I'm glad my little jingoist episode wore off. Mm...that's all I have today.
NO WAIT. The nice military man called me this morning to see if I had reconsidered joining, perhaps in a fit of patriotism. Nope. Alright, that's all.
NO WAIT. The main Yahoo server seems to have lost its video drivers, unless monochrome is meant to imply remembrance/sorrow/respect. Okay, that's really all.
In retrospect, I really should have butchered all of my classmates when I had the chance. Alright, just some of them. I just had limited resources and motivation to do, you know, anything at all. Plus it probably doesn't look very good on a resume. Anyway, it's too late now, and I have bigger concerns, such as how to flee the country before the lunatic government dooms us all, and how to keep track of the sixteen different ways (or maybe it's two or three, whichever) to pronounce each of the two thousand kanji before I go live as a clumsy gaijin in Japan. Whee!
They said it couldn't be done. They said, "DV, you are an asshole. There is no possible way you could ramble on for four typed pages in some pointless anecdote about your own gas." And then I said, "You dick. Shove it, or I will shove it for you. I swear, I will tie you down naked in front of your friends and family and pee into your mouth, and then send the video to Stile." And then I wrote "A Midsummer Night's Flatulence."
Nothing blew up like it was supposed to. What a rip. And today's top story is the death of some jerk I've never heard of whose contribution to humanity as a whole was his godlike skill at playing baseball. Well, whatever works. Yet other top stories included an article about a U.S. plan that calls for a massive assault on Iraq. Yes, that list of priorities seems about right. Reminds me of this one poem thing I read once. I forget who wrote it. Some jerk. It was some diary entry type thing about current events, in which such topics as breakfast were given more attention and detail than, say, the death of some political leader, and...yeah. It was all very clever. Irony and contrast were the major techniques employed in that work. I remember because I don't like writing about how good other people and other things are. Except this one guy on fanfiction.net who writes awful crossover stories with titles like "Battlefighters 2XX1 Unit Six." Precious.
I now have a little sticker that says, "I survived summer calculus." Go me. After approximately two months of doing absolutely nothing but mope around and think about derivatives and integrals, I don't know what to do with myself for the remainder of the summer except maybe mope around and think about nothing. Oh, wait, yes I do. I will mope around and write stuff with titles like "A Midsummer Night's Flatulence." Life is good. You, however, are not. So go 'way.
It was at approximately six o'clock in the evening yesterday that I stupidly unleashed unholy hell upon my hapless computer. The file looked innocuous enough: TYPE.BAT. It didn't occur to me that a batch file could contain executable code, I suppose. As if the fact that it was coming from some guy named fox@foxysexman or sexyfoxman or some damn thing.com wasn't enough of a red flag, eh? Regardless, I was analyzing the e-mail which had been accompanied by some other strange ones, and which had been causing some problems for a friend of mine. So, I presumed to analyze the message, and was promptly infected with the virus WORM_KLEZ.H. Such a thing used to be a joke back in the day on the old local message boards. "AHAHAHA. You opened my e-mail, and now you have a VIRUS." E-mail virii were not even technically feasible, and even if suspicious files were sent, they wouldn't magically wreak digital havoc in someone's system unless they were intentionally executed. But no, no, you see, things actually made sense back then. The powers that be, in their infinite genius, automated and streamlined and fluffed things up a bit, and now in 2002 the message board gags of ten years ago are a horrible and obnoxious reality. You see, apparently it isn't necessary for the attachment to be run for the worm to take effect.
Not that it excuses me from my own exceedingly poor judgment. I ran the damn thing myself. Thus, in my own infinite genius I reasoned that there was something a bit shady about a batch file that didn't seem to do anything at all when executed. It didn't even pop up a DOS window. It just did some processing, followed by some hard drive activity. It was hiding something. In my subsequent computering I noticed that the system was a bit sluggish, and for no real reason. This computer is a couple of years old now, and runs from a 650 megaHertz processor. There are some who would now scoff at such a number, but it's well more than enough for the humble tasks to which I assign myself. I also have a trifling 128 megabytes of RAM, which is also well more than enough for my purposes. I am not a hardware fanatic kind of geek. I don't need a dual-processor motherboard with two 2.4GHz processors, with a tubes of liquid nitrogen running all through the fan-spattered case to keep up with the tremendous heat being generated. It would be an interesting experiment, to be sure, but that's not my style, and anyway it's neither here nor there.
The point is that some rogue program was sucking the life out of my meager yet sufficient resources. I brought up the system monitor to find that there was an ungodly amount of processor usage. No program I run needs 650MHz. In fact, I run the United Devices THINK program in order to salvage the many many cycles of processing I never use. Also, there were only spikes of processing. They lasted about five seconds each, and were approximately eight seconds apart. Processor-intensive or not, the stuff I run is either all-out and constant or entirely irregular. At that moment I began kicking myself for having run that file. I had no idea what it was or what it was trying to do. I was prompted to back up 700MB of my data on a recordable CD I had lying around. I should have been keeping backups all along, so I suppose it was good to get such a nudge. I didn't know if the rogue software would fill up the hard drive, wipe it completely, corrupt random files, or just make Windows unusable.
I spent the next three or four hours frantically searching for an antivirus scanner. Quite to my dismay I found that at worst I would have to shell out fifty bucks for Norton's antivirus program, and at best I would have to fill out some paperwork to download a likely shoddy trial version. And as I searched on I fumed about how fellow geeks could hold out for cash when disruptive and potentially destructive software was running about acting like a prick and doing heaven knows what, and I mused that perhaps communism could work out pretty well after all. At least, on the Internet. Then I found it. A free, recent, online virus scanner, courtesy of the fine people at antivirus.com. House Call, they called it. They asked that I sign up on their mailing list, but gave me the option of skipping straight to the scanner. This was good, because my poor system needed immediate relief. It took some time for the online scanner to download all of the information it needed, but it got right to work on scanning the sixty-seven thousand files on the hard drive. And there it was, the WORM_KLEZ.H identifier. Not that I was paying any attention to the name at the time. I had been through several reboots and an emergency backup session, and I just wanted whatever that damn thing was the hell out of my system.
But fourteen gigabytes of information is a real pain in the ass to sort through bit by bit, looking for matches with a database of virus definitions. Eventually I just got tired, and gave up for the night. I did not resume until this afternoon. This time the scan completed. And this time I had the name. I went to the website's top ten virus list, and--wouldn't you know it. WORM_KLEZ.H was right there, staring back at me, as if to say, "And where the hell have you been, hotshot?" I was too relieved to feel like any more of an ass. The evil had been named, and the bastard was going to pay for tinkering with my system. Through the online scanner I had already identified and deleted approximately twenty infected executable files for various programs, including Acrobat Reader, Flash, CD burner software, a diagnostic program, several games, including one of my favorites, and Netscape for crying out loud. Well, screw it, they could all be replaced easily enough. Nullified. And then there was the file that spooked me, a WINKVMI.EXE in the c:\windows\system directory. The previous night I had asked around to see if anyone had a replacement. I came up empty-handed. The virus description explained it all. Of course no one had the file. They didn't have the virus. The virus made the damn file. I had renamed the file and successfully booted without it. When I learned of its corruption, I moved it to disk. I will send it to someone who likes to collect viruses. Or to an enemy. It really doesn't matter.
Lo, was my vengeance unleashed. I butchered the worm to the last file, system integrity be damned. I could replace anything and everything, and at least I knew which files and programs I was affecting. The convenient KLEZ fix program cleaned up that which I missed, and removed all traces from the Windows registry. I rebooted and checked the system monitor: levels were extremely low, as they should be. Then, just for good measure, I ran the virus scan one more time. Nothing. I had crushed the worm beneath my heel, and with good cause, because it was a pissing little prick bitch-ass whore. So there. No more strange e-mail analysis for me.
But our story does not end there, for today I had an exam in my telecommunications class. Never before have I seen such a test. Let me begin by explaining a bit about this class. It's a voice communications technology class. It has covered basic telephone service, problems and solutions of the early telephone network, problems this caused for future networks, analog and digital applications, multiplexing techniques, and so on. The structure of the class is a bit unconventional. It's a rather informal environment, with not quite rigid discussions more than lectures. It's difficult to take notes a lot of the time, but that's alright, because the material really isn't all the difficult. Grades are based on attendance, homework, and labs. There is but one test grade: the final exam. The exam was open-book, open-note, and the first part of it was to be done as a group. As in all of us: the class as a whole. Thirty-three multiple choice questions. Seventy minutes. Go. And yet it still wasn't enough.
As I have said, the material isn't all the difficult, and anything one might happen to forget can be looked up in one's notes or textbook, or even online if need be. The rationale for this is that few people are going to have every intricacy of every technology perfectly memorized, and therefore it is permissible both in the field and in the classroom to have references. It almost seems like a sham. Yet therein lies the brilliance of the system. My friend, that test was hard.
I've taken three advanced placements exams: English literature, English language, and American history. English and history are on one side of the humanities/sciences gap. Mathematics and the assorted sciences of, say, chemistry and physics and biology and whatnot are on the other. There is a conceptual split between the two in that mathematics are set in stone; it is pure calculation. The numbers will add up or you are incorrect. There is no interpretation. English and history, on the hand, are largely open to interpretation, and have the notorious gray areas that make for horrible experiences in the multiple choice question area. I did pretty well on those advanced placement exams. The gray areas didn't phase me. I do even better on the other side of the gap. Therefore, it should follow that a telecommunications technology exam, which leans towards the cut and dry world of mathematics and engineering, would be a breeze. Sure.
That exam would have split your skull open like a ripe melon, and devoured your brain through a straw. It would have gouged your eyes out and spit in the bloody sockets, then mashed your face into a fine paste and shat down your throat. Every question was five problems in one; every question read, "Which of these is false?"; and every question had a choice 'e' for "none of the above." E was a constant factor. It forced one to evaluate all four of the other options and determine if they were true or false. Even that wouldn't be too bad, were it not for the endless games of semantics. Five other people and I had discounted all but options 'c' or 'd,' only to find out later that 'a' was the best choice, because, you see, the sentence was discussing the consolidation phase of manufacturing, and the optical fiber isn't drawn into an actual fiber until a later phase; yet the word 'phase' is not present in the sentence, and the significance of phases is but shakily implied at best. I can interpret the metaphysical implications of a piece of literature from its diction, sentence structure, and characterization. I cannot, however, interpret the vernacular whims of technical test questions.
That exam made the advanced placement tests look like friggin' tech prep, special ed, preschool BS. And I hear from my academic elders that a few choice classes in future semesters are more of the same; nay, worse. Until then, I have electronics and digital logic exams to ace, and a virii-free computer to enjoy. Now piss off.
Yeah, I know I said I'd be back in a week. Instead I'm here within twenty-four hours. Piss off.
Anyway, I always find these weird pictures on CNN.com. The strangest are invariably the tech-related ones, which attempt to look all sophisticated and spooky. In hacker stories I've seen the same picture. There's always a computer monitor, and superimposed is some supposedly impressive and 31337 h4x0r code. Until you look at it and see that's it's basic HTML use to define the size of an image. Lame. And earlier today I read an article about stiffening the penalities for cybercrimes. I take the bureaucratization of the Internet as a personal insult, but that's another issue. The issue at hand is that the article was accompanied by two pictures. The first was of someone's hands handcuffed behind his back. Superimposed was a string of numbers, irregularly separated into groups of three or one or ten or whatever else. Better than HTML, I suppose, except that I don't know what it could possibly be except a randomly typed string of numbers by some guy working on the CNN site. It sure ain't hex code, and it's no list of IP addresses, so I dunno.
The other image was the obligatory computer monitor, and the superimposed faded white text. This time the plain text in the upper left corner read, "DENIAL OF SERVICE." The lower right corner had a command prompt. And do you know what the command given was? Ping 207.25.71.26. Below was several iterations of the line "REPLY FROM 207.25.71.26" and so on. First of all, as far as I know, the ping command doesn't send out an endless number of packets without the -t parameter, which wasn't given. My ping doesn't do that, anyway. Second of all, a puny little wuss-ass ping, even if repeated indefinitely, ain't gonna bring down the CNN webserver, unless a few thousand other terminals are doing the exact same thing. I suppose it could also work with just one computer, if that baby happened to have an OC-192 connection and could generate pings fast enough (and it probably couldn't). But hey, if you have that kind of bandwidth, just download a fraggin' macro program and set it to stream repeatedly every high and/or low quality video clip on the CNN server simultaneously. Unfortunately, leasing even a single T1 line is about a thousand dollars a month, and T1 is about, oh, .015% of the bit rate of OC-192, so fat chance getting your hands on any optical technology. It's just not worth it, people. It's just not worth it. On a side note, that IP address is one of CNN's own. Not that it matters. Ass.
I went for a walk today. It was cloudy. It was rainy; not raining, just rainy. Cars lined the streets, and some people were walking on the sidewalks. It was pissing me off. Then I got up to the school cluster, 'cause that's about as far as I can walk without going near the busy streets, and I don't like walking on the busy streets for the same reason I didn't like all the people and cars and whatnot on the non-busy streets. I don't want people looking at me, or driving by me, or otherwise occupying my mind. There were also a few utility vans. There was a gas truck I think. They were digging up a chunk of street. I wonder if they hit a telecommunications conduit in the process. There was also an Adelphia van. They were probably wiring a house for cable access or security services. That house has a laser security system. I can see it late at night, if I feel like looking outside. Anyway, I got to the school cluster and saw white-shirted people standing around inside the band room. Then I saw a small group of people standing around near the bleachers on the field thing. I don't know if there was some kind of sporting event or if they got lost on the way to a concert in the auditorium. The point is, they were having an event on my walking day. I'm sleepy now.
I also have a few exams and final projects. They are nothing strenuous or even remotely difficult, but I am a very angry and lazy person, so I will go do the lazing and/or studying thing. I'll see you in a week, probably with a story or two. Ass.
The electronics shindig. It was certainly one of the easier tests I've taken. Then I came home and did the Internet thing. Advertisements came up here and there and everywhere, urging me to track down my former classmates and military buddies, or to buy little trinkets made from World Trade Center debris, or to pay for memberships to some damn thing or another. I don't know. I don't come here to buy things. No amount of customer profiling or tracking is going to get me to start now. I don't keep a refrigerator in the bathroom, a toilet in the kitchen, or a television out on the front lawn. I don't go to the bathroom to eat, to the kitchen to crap, or to the front lawn to laze around. Nor do I come here to shop. The idea is an insult to my...whatever.
Anyway, I installed a newer version of Winamp, and decided I would actually read the license agreement. I suppose all license agreements are cut from the same mold/template, or maybe just copied from existing license agreements. Otherwise I can't think of any explanation for this section:
"8. HIGH RISK ACTIVITIES. The Product is not fault-tolerant and is not designed, manufactured or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of the Product could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage ("High Risk Activities"). Accordingly, Nullsoft and its suppliers specifically disclaim any express or implied warranty of fitness for High Risk Activities. Licensee agrees that Nullsoft and its suppliers will not be liable for any claims or damages arising from the use of the Product in such applications." [Emphasis added]
Imagine. It is the near future. In the snowy mountain wastes somewhere in the American midwest, a lone missile defense base sits in the shadow of one of the larger peaks.
Inside, in the very heart of the institution, our hero sits in a comfortable, padded wheeley swiveley chair thing. He swings back and forth, bobbing his legs and head up and down, and making "badadaDA" noises. A tiny earpiece is blasting funky beats directly into his head; it is noticeable only by the thin strand of wire that plugs into his computer. Deep into the night he sways and gets his groove on.
Suddenly his mad tunes cut out. Annoyed, he looks to the monitor. It seems the five hundred megabytes of RAM were not enough for the system. The battle for resources between Winamp and the ungodly list of other processes has finally ended, and Winamp has lost. Not to be scorned in its defeat, it crashes with a mighty fallout. A popup box appears, warning of the illegal operation that has been performed. Unable to interpret the memory location deep in the bowels of the system, our hero clicks the box away.
It pops up again, only to be clicked away again. And again. Our hero clicks furiously on the close button, in hopes that somehow the error will work itself out. It does, but the clicking countinues for a few milliseconds afterward. It is enough to activate the conveniently located and user-friendly "launch" icon on the desktop. Authorization codes and the like have, of course, been disabled, to allow for immediate action, and because on this level of the base our hero already has authorization.
Warning lights go off, but our hero can't do anything because he has to reboot real quick. "Ah, crap," he shouts as the silo doors open. Certainly this will not end well. He has to find a scapegoat. He looks to the printout of the Winamp license agreement. Yes, that should do it--but wait. What's this? Section 8 of the agreement says the music software's programmers can't be held responsible for inadvertent missile launches. Our hero's aesthetic tastes are about to cost the lives of thousands, and there is no one he can blame but himself. Damn.
And now I go work on my real story. Go 'way.
All the best massacres are game- and/or television/media-inspired. This is good, in a way, because then there's a certain artistic standard to be upheld. Otherwise such events would be dependent on people's individual creativity, which is almost always bad except when I do it. Well, isn't it? A significant portion of school massacres would be accompanied by regular clothes, an utter lack of Counterstrike-esque "Ninja-style masks" (thank you Mr. Heise), and uninspired statements along of the lines of "I hate you I hate you I hate you AHHHHHH" instead of, say, "This does not make sense," and then the seriousness and, yes, dignity of school violence would plunge downward like a commercial airline. And...I guess that's it. Go away.
Whoa whoa whoa, hold the phone there, jackass. This is hot, hot news, and I really mean that: the blood isn't even cold on the walls yet.
And so, the week of April 20 came and went, and what do we have to show for it? Nothin'. No suburban violence, no massacres (ones that I care about, anyway), not even one little sissy-weenie threat. Just some articles about the Yahoo commercial yodeler and one more step toward armageddon. But I don't want to hear pansyass holy war doomsday religious rhetoric shite. I want to hear about bricks of calcium being flushed down public school toilets. Yeesh. My former administrative figures, in preparation for a bloodbath, ran a lockdown drill. Now, while sitting in the dark, locked in a room for twenty minutes is usually the way I like to start my day, and finish it, and fill in most of the rest in between, I'm still glad I wasn't around for that one.
Anyway, since I've been in reading mode, I've been less inclined to write anything of my own. At least, nothing that doesn't relate to what I've been reading. Until now. Because after five books about early computer culture/exploits, I'm...kind of in the mood for a story about peeing in a bucket, and since to my knowledge no such story exists, I'll have to write it myself. Gimme a day or so. Or don't. I don't really care. Ass.
Essentially, I'm a stubborn, idealistic purist about such techie things, which is to say, not realistic. Ah well. That's never stopped me before.
And so today I found in my inbox a message from Yahoo. I refuse to put the exclamation mark because it's a pain in the ass to figure out the proper punctuation. I don't know if the exclamation mark should mark the end of the sentence, or if I need to put a period after it, which just looks silly. "Yahoo!." Regardless, the message was more or less an open confession that yes, if you use Yahoo you will have no anonymity, your actions will be monitored, tracked, catalogued, and then shared with people who want to sell you things based on that data. Moreover, because you are to provide full personal information when you sign up with Yahoo, you are subject not only to mass e-mails, but to mass snail-mails as well. Oh, and phone calls too. ...Right, I'll do that. Yahoo is jerks. I suppose the next logical step would be to require that personal information be filled out thoroughly, and any blanks provide, under some new terms of service, that membership may be denied or, for those who already have accounts, terminated. Of course, if that happens, I will have no choice but to forge a new identity of, a la Ed in Cowboy Bebop, one Marshall Banana. I will live somewhere in the suburbs of Oregon as a 40-something overweight sex ed teacher. I have backed up this entire site in preparation for bureaucratic fallout or voluntary exodus. Whichever. Or neither. We'll see.
Now, the account information pages provide options that will keep you off of any of Yahoo's or Yahoo-affiliates's mailing and calling lists. This is good. Necessary, actually, considering the current privacy debate about unsolicited e-mail, cookies, and customer profiling and such. But regardless, there will still be a record of you. The physical you. When XxSiliconAvengerxX busts your account wide open some dull summer day, not only your Yahoo account/website/universal password will be available, but a detailed description of just who you are, exactly. The possibilities from there are many. Thanks, Yahoo, for helping to make identity theft, digital fraud, and various and sundry hacking exploits one step easier.
Oh, and speaking of which...there is indeed a Yahoo hacking message board. It's...well, it's about as much as one would expect on a subject like that coming from a company like Yahoo with members like it has. "Yahoo! Hacking," it just doesn't sound right.
I don't like the way things are going much, with e-business and all. But then, I was born too late, I had nothing to do with the development of the systems that have brought things this far, and thus I have no right to complain. Still, compared with how I remember things before the mainstreaming of the Internet and such, I feel like I've lost my niche, or at least lost track of it. And--well, nevermind. It's just that awkward springtime feeling talking. I'm honing my skills. I'll carve my own damn niche.
Well, I spent a good hour or so walking around, and then another good hour or so writing about some unorganized angsty kind of things. Then I looked it over and decided it wasn't fit for publishing. Feh, what a waste. At least I got that feeling out of my system. Happens every spring. With any luck it won't be back for another year. I don't have time for stupid crap like that.
It's a slow day today. I'm feeling a bit nostalgic, but I don't know why. I returned Crypto and took out another book today. Published in 1994, and placed in the library in 1995, it has been taken out three times: April 12, May 10, and May 31, all in 2000. I'd like to have read through it by tomorrow night, so I can get another on Wednesday. I want to have torn through the whole shelf by the end of the semester. I go read now.
On an unrelated note, I'm going to start a band called Inappropriate Touching. Get it? An unrelated note, a band, an executive being violated? AHAHAHAH. AHAH. Ha. That's clever. I'm going to bed.HP Exec 'Violated' By Mail Release
The Associated Press
Apr 11 2002 5:17PM
I'm glad the Buzz Blasts commercial gives me a warning that it is not, in fact, a flying cereal. Otherwise I could sit at the breakfast table for HOURS just waiting for my cereal bits to rise up and float around in circles.
But this story is not about breakfast. No, it's about lunch, or, rather, my lunch break today. It was a good lunch, because the class had been good, and the class would soon be even better because the lab that had so horribly been botched up before would be completed successfully. But this story is not about electronics labs. It's about what happened in the building.
The campus I go to has several buildings. There are seven total, I think, but only three of them have what I would call actual academic buildings. There's the math and science building, the english and social science/humanities building, and then there's building 5. Building 5 has the cafeteria, the library, the bursar's office, admission and registration and security offices, two comparably small lecture halls, and, most importantly, the telecommunications wing. It's a puny wing, really; just three classrooms with a few smaller offices. A small wing, but it's plenty for few students in the curriculum. But this story is not about the telecommunications wing. It's about the staircase.
There are two staircases, actually. There's what appears to be the main staircase: you can tell it's supposed to be the main staircase because it curves around 180 degrees and is well lit by the huge glass windows next to it. The entrance goes right out to the central hub of the campus, which makes for convenient travel between buildings. The other option is, of course, to go up the stairs and use the inter-building hallways that straddle the gaps between buildings. It's a convenient way to get from place to place during bad weather. But this story is not about inter-building hallways. It's about the staircase.
The other staircase, I mean. It's in the same building, and can't be more than, say, fifty meters from the main staircase, but it's still a minor staircase. It's at the edge of the building which faces the very boundary of the campus, and there's nothing out there but a big field, and then a parking lot. Nobody wants to see that. They want to see big glass windows that look out upon the central hub, where all the smokers gather under one of the inter-building hallways. Personally I don't prefer either stairway over the other. The minor stairway is closer to the telecommunications wing, so I usually use that one to get to where I need to go. Which is up. Up to the second floor, where the inter-building hallway. I had use of such a hallway last year, when I had a non-telecommunications class, but such is not the case this semester, and so the only reason I go up that staircase is to get to the second floor library. The library itself has a second floor, actually, which gives the building three floors; it's the highest point on campus, perhaps, and it has big glass windows that you can use to look out over the big grass parking lot. There's another big glass window that would look out over the smokers if not for the poor line of sight that is cut off by the roof of the first floor, but that's just a hallway. And this story is not about hallways. It's about staircases. In particular, it's about the minor staircase which goes all the way up to the third floor, which is more than can be said about the major staircase, which only goes up to the second floor with its little 180 degree turn.
I don't know why the minor staircase goes all the way up there, really. You can't actually use the doors that are there. They're emergency alarm doors. You would send the security team into fits if you were to open the doors there. Probably. I suppose in theory it would serve as a valuable fire escape for the library patrons, but there really aren't all that many. The ones who do go to the library mostly stick to the lower floor, and so they would be better off using the main staircase anyway. It's not as if there would be an uncontrollable mob trying to cram through the doors. Many of the books in the library have been taken out less than a dozen times in the past twenty years. Since I spend my spare time during the day in that library, I have had time to look around and see such curious things as useless doors and neglected bookshelves. But this story is not about neglected bookshelves, nor is it about useless doors. It is, however, about what transpired behind those useless doors.
Behind those doors is the mysterious third landing of the minor staircase. To my knowledge nobody ever goes there. If it were a high school, perhaps students would go there to catch a quick and surreptitious smoke or two, but it is not a high school landing, and the smokers have their open, public sub-inter-building hallways in which to smoke. The third floor landing could be kind of a spooky place, I suppose. The lighting is rather poor, and what little it has is that pale yellow light that always gives things an ugly, dingy look. And therefore the third floor landing is an ugly, dingy place. The floors are also filthy as I recall. It makes sense, since as nobody goes there the janitors would have no reason to spend much time or effort keeping it tidy. Not like that main staircase. But this story is not about the dinginess of the landing. It's about what happened that day, in that building, on that landing during my lunch break, just before I went back to class for a successful electronics lab.
And so, after the first half of electronics class ended, I sauntered a quick thirty meters to the vending machines, then another thirty meters to the cafeteria. After some chips and Sara Lee brand pastry treat, I found myself at the bottom of the minor staircase. I had thought to stop by the library to look around a bit, and perhaps get something to read. And I did. A recent book (2001) about cryptology, and I was the first to take it out, but this came later. On the way to the library the first time, I used the minor staircase. I got to the second landing, and then went up some more to the second-and-a-half landing. For whatever reason, the inter-building hallway leading into building 5 needs a half-staircase (or maybe even a quarter-staircase; just a few steps) to bring it up to the right elevation to match the rest of the building. The point is that as I reached the second-and-a-half landing I happened to look to the right. This was because I heard voices; not just the usual voices but actual human voices. It was also because I saw a flash of bright pink that was horribly misplaced in the ever-dwindling light of the staircase. Indeed, it was a girl, and she was looking up the stairs towards someone near the third landing. I couldn't see who, for the minor staircase also had 180 degree turns in it. In that brief moment I picked up that they were a couple that was arguing about something. Since I was busy, I continued on my way.
I sauntered into the library, ready to dig through all of the books that hundreds of other students had forgotten or otherwise abandoned. I took three steps up the library staircase before I stopped and realized that, being the little prick that I am, I really wanted to listen in on that conversation after all. I turned right around and walked out of the library, towards the minor staircase. In retrospect, I suppose I could have gone to the far corner of the library on the third floor, pressed my ear to the emergency door, and listened in that way, but it would be far too obvious, and the library was uncharacteristically crowded. Therefore, I went back down the minor staircase and leaned against the wall there. People passed by, and I pretended to be waiting for something or someone, while looking at my watch or idly counting the change from my pocket. So I stood there and listened to the argument echoing down from above me. Never have I heard such petulant whining. Or, that's what I'd like to say, anyway. There's surely some comparable material somewhere in my archives, but let us never speak of it again.
The male voice kept repeating something about him not wanting her to follow him around anymore. The female voice responded that she would, in fact, continue following him around. And so they snapped at each other, with things not even intelligible enough for me to remember clearly. The conversation moved on the the issue of what sounded to me like Amy, who apparently is the ex-girlfriend of the male, and who has called him several times recently. I don't recall why. Maybe she wanted to go out for coffee. Maybe not. Regardless, the girl did not like this, and their voices grew more hysterical. Then the male said something to the effect of, "If I saw her twice then would it be twice as bad?" For half an hour they went back and forth, their voices changing from calm expressions of concern to increasingly agitated snarls, then growing thick with emotion, until the female was crying and they were both yelling outright. Finally the male snapped like a cheap store brand pretzel and roared that he had to put up with her stabbing him in the back for days, or maybe it was weeks. And then he was crying too. And then she said that they should not bother continuing with things. And then they broke up.
I heard one of the doors up there slam open, and it was left to close quietly on its own. It must have been the second-and-a-half landing door. I don't know who left first. The remaining voice was left to make the silent kind of crying sounds, like forcing short bursts of air through a clenched throat. Then that went away too. I felt nothing. I don't want a girlfriend.
I got the cryptology book from the library and returned to class to find that a few of the students had hooked a laptop up to the classroom's projector, and were playing American Pie 2. Cute.
That's all.
I had a curious dream last night. I was driving along, and then a police car came up behind me and wanted me to pull over, so I floored it and then drove off a bridge into a forest below. I have no idea why. It's all very symbolic, I'm sure.
Before the dream came, I had been watching cartoons. Late night cartoons. Seventies cartoons; thank you Boomerang. 'Twas an episode of Superfriends. It looked interesting, because the title of the episode was "Rest in peace Superfriends," or something similar. And sure enough, the Legion of Doom got their hands on a little green crystal of a convenient, custom-made element called Noxium; chemical symbol BS. Lo, the bad guys starting kicking ass like it was their job, and the Superfriends were killed off. One at a time at first, and then in groups of two and three at the end. I thought that the animators must have gotten tired of doing the show, so they didn't renew their contracts, and decided to leave a nice little parting gift for the show by ending it permanently. It was something different, and I was pleased.
What happened next was the absolute worst case of deus ex machina/plot manipulation I have ever seen in any form of media from any time period. The Superfriends came back, right in the middle of the bad guys' reign of terror. They were posing as world leaders, then poof, they took off the disguises. They promptly stomped Legion of Doom with little to no effort. The Noxium, of course, had been conveniently abandoned immediately after the good guys appeared to be dead. But no, they had to come back.
The explanation? "Oh, we were never dead. Those were our robot duplicates." What?! Oh, shut up. I've never seen anything so stupid--even in the Bible Jesus got to be dead for a few days, but no, no, the Superfriends are much better than Jesus. They're so good they're completely untouchable.
Robots. Robots. That means that when the Superfriends went off one by one to defend their respective homes, knowing full well that they'd get iced by a Noxium-weilding schmuck, and making semi-kinda-dramatic speeches, it had all just been pre-programmed, which completely killed any semblance of dignity or drama the episode might potentially have had. Ech, lame.
So then my DVD player finally got fixed. The tray wouldn't open. Apparently there's some mechanical problem. Either things aren't lined up properly or they're not shaped right or something. This was particularly bad because I had a DVD in there. Worse still, it was a friend's DVD. The solution? Pry the tray open with a screwdriver every time I want to take a disc out. So much for modern technology. Ass.
Anyway, apparently there are three parts to my DVD player. There's the power supply, which I could actually analyze using my rudimentary knowledge of electronics. Some cables connect the yellowy-orangey power supply circuit board to the DVD drive itself. A gray ribbon cable then connects the DVD drive to the D part of DVD, a green circuit board off all by its lonesome. That'd be the digital logic circuitry. You can tell by all the LOGIC CHIPS soldered to it. The power supply board, of course, also provides the VCC for the digital circuitry. So there you go. Three parts. There're also the video and sound outputs, but those don't count. Or fine, count them. They put out nice little analog signals that my television can understand, but not before my VCR combines them into a single composite signal. Because my TV has but one input. A single, lowly, analog input. That makes four parts. So there you go.
Speaking of books, I read Stephen King's On Writing the other day. Of course, it completely turned me off to writing in general, because my sentences are written passively, and my adverbs are used heavily, and some other things which apparently aren't very professional, and the whole thing seems like a big pain in the ass. And not in the good way, either.
I write about people who stink to high heaven or have quivery bowels or who find themselves in situations created by my Random Circumstance noun generator. Nobody reads 'em now (and with good cause), and a few under-the-hood changes in mechanics and/or style sure as hell aren't going to attract any more. So, yeah. Piss off. Ass. If I want to write a short novel called "Lord of the Flies 2: The Starbucks Trilogy" about how awkward and uncomfortable sex is in a post-apocalyptic nuclear world, and do the entire thing in the passive voice, including at least one adverb in every sentence and using all kinds of inappropriate and/or asinine similes and metaphors, such as sitting down with the relief of a man who has the screaming shits and just reached the toilet, then I'll do it and I'll expect not to get no lip from nobody, nohow. Ass.
It'll be just me and Ms. Hamilton, sittin' around and writing all kinds of things that we probably shouldn't be. And that'll be fine. Ass.
My life is all about the sex. Or, rather, the lives of half of the people I know are about the sex, but they tell me these things all the time, so my life might as well be about the sex. They're all out and about, pining for some hunk of flesh or another, getting groped, and occasionally flipping back and forth between loving and hating someone, though always obsessing, more quickly than I change political affiliation. And all the while they work on speeches they can give me during long sessions of petulant whining, in which they tell me that I just don't get it, and that they really, REALLY like so-and-so, and...well, whatever. Kids like the sex these days.
In the spirit of this free love business, which is not unlike the 60's but with less dignity, I will soon have in my hot little hands a copy of paperback wonder called A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton. It is the touching and epic story of a fairy princess who has to flee her fairy homeland because her crazy aunt keeps sending sexy men to kill her. Logically, then, she must seek refuge in LA, where she works as a private investigator of the supernatural, and where all of her problems can be solved, apparently, by having lots and lots of sex. This book was recommended, of course, by none other than my hormone-driven companions.
As I recall the book is just under 500 pages, and from what I hear, even if I skip straight to each explicit scene it'll take a while to get through it all. I suppose if I wanted to read about awkward, inter-species lust sessions I could get it for free at fanfiction.net's extensive pokeporn archive, but for only a few bucks at amazon.com I suppose I can't go too wrong. Besides, I also ordered a copy of The Art of Electronics, as if in an attempt to redeem myself in the eyes of Amazon's secure server and/or customer profiling. So, regardless, my little shopping trip won't be a total loss. Ass.