Heya Tom, it’s Bob from the office down the hall
Good to see you buddy, how’ve you been?
Thing have been OK for me except that I’m a zombie now
I really wish you’d let us in
I think I speak for all of us when I say I understand
Why you folks might hesitate to submit to our demand
But here’s an FYI: you’re all gonna die screaming

All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable, I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re at an impasse here, maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
We’ll all come inside and eat your brains

I don’t want to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?
To spend your whole life locked inside a mall?
Maybe that’s OK for now but someday you’ll be out of food and guns
And then you’ll have to make the call
I’m not surprised to see you haven’t thought it through enough
You never had the head for all that bigger picture stuff
But Tom, that’s what I do, and I plan on eating you slowly

All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable, I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re at an impasse here, maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
We’ll all come inside and eat your brains

I’d like to help you Tom, in any way I can
I sure appreciate the way you’re working with me
I’m not a monster Tom, well, technically I am
I guess I am

I’ve got another meeting Tom, maybe we could wrap it up
I know we’ll get to common ground somehow
Meanwhile I’ll report back to my colleagues who were chewing on the doors
I guess we’ll table this for now
I’m glad to see you take constructive criticism well
Thank you for your time I know we’re all busy as hell
And we’ll put this thing to bed
When I bash your head open

All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable, I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re at an impasse here, maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
We’ll all come inside and eat your brains



Jonathan Coulton is a genius.

Good things have been happening lately.  Let me get you caught up.

First things first, you should know that I was working as a sub-contractor for a company to work for a government agency.  I wasn't working directly for the company, I was working for this other company, which contracted me to the primary company.  Well, the contract that the primary company had was coming to term about two weeks ago.  A new company picked up that contract.  Their partner, which handles hiring and payment of employees (eg. me) decided to hire me on.  The company that I was with, got pissed.  See, I'd been waiting a year to get into this place because they took an awful long time to process my clearance.  And to clear that up, I have Secret clearance.  So this other company tells me that they're going to pay me on a salary.  At a higher salary than the other company I was working with.  I'm talking about a significant raise, and much better benefits.  This causes a problem between the two companies, because I hadn't worked for the first company for long enough to get out of my contract.  But they let me go anyway, and now the two companies are in a legal battle about all this, because of the way my clearance was handled.  But that's out of my hands now.  I'm fully employed for the next seven years.  My first paycheck from this new company came in yesterday.  It's for over one thousand dollars.  That's right!  I'm making some good money now! 

And it feels so good.  I feel so vindicated.  When I was at the law firm, I got myself A+ certified, I was doing the same kind of work I'm doing now, but I was also doing other duties, and they were paying me pennies.  Well now I'm doing less work, there's no stress, I'm getting paid more, AND I've got better benefits!  I'm not leaving the public sector.  This is too good to lose.

Sometimes I wonder if this is just some fantastic dream.  Of course, I know it isn't, because beautiful women aren't throwing themselves at my feet.  THAT would be a dream.

So with my new fat paycheck, I figure that by the end of the month, I should be able to cover all of next month's bills and pay off my credit cards completely, and have a little left over as a safety net.  So, what am I gonna do with almost two grand in credit?  Well, first thing's first, I'm going clothes and shoe shopping.  My shoes are starting to fall apart, and I need new shirts and pants.  Oh, it's gonna be nice to have money to spend again.  What I'd really like to do is get a new car.  A used car, and just finance the thing.  My current car is falling apart.  Maybe I can get a thousand dollars for a trade in or something.

Okay, on to other things.

My roommate has been working at GameStop.  Apparantly one of the perks of working at GameStop is that he can "check out" a game for three days.  Well, he brought home Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy.  I have only this to say about it:

I have never in my entire gaming career had so much fun with a Star Wars video game.

If you like Star Wars and/or Legos (and who doesn't, come on) then you must get this game.  It's both fun and humorous.  I don't want to say anything about it, for fear of spoiling it for you.  All I can say is that this game is a must buy.  There's so much to do, and so much to unlock.  It's a genuinely fun game.  My roommate and I were playing it (it's also a two player game) and we were just laughing our butts off and having the time of our lives.

More nerd stuff now.

I've been fiddling with Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition.  It seems to be very similar to VB6, so I shouldn't have any issues with writing programs.  The main differences are the look and feel of the IDE and some code changes.  My main gripe is that some things just aren't well documented.  For example, they changed how you add things in listboxes.  In VB6 the syntax was object.additem(stringobject) but in VB2005 they changed that to object.items.add(stringobject) and what gets me is that I had a hell of a time looking it up.  They also changed the Null function so that it's a system only function, but they left alone the Nothing function to clear out your variables.  Double-you tee eff?  Anyway, aside from the documentation issues, once I learned the changes I was able to get right back into programming.  Since I have lots of time on my hands, it's not a hard thing to do. 

So, I built the foundation for a text based game, like Zork.  And I did it using only arrays.  That's right, arrays.  Why?  Because I didn't feel like going through all the maddening processes to figure out how linked lists work again.  So what I would like to do is to actually build a text based single player game, similar to the olden days of Zork, but with a few modifications.  My form has a status window, a key counter (to show how many keys the player has for unlocking locked doors), and four buttons labeled N, S, E, and W.  So far, I can support a maze-like "map" including locked doors.  I'm eventually going to put in an event system and an inventory list.  Later down the line, I should figure out how to put in a save game feature.  And then I'll just need a story of some kind.

I'm dealing with a text based game right now because it's simple.  I don't have the artistic talent to do any kind of graphical games.  That and programming with DirectX makes my brain hurt.  One of these days I should actually sit down and play with some kind of DirectX demo and see what I can do with this thing.

I was talking to a friend of mine about what it would take to download the internet into an accessible storage medium.  We figure that would take several hundred Yottabytes.  So I figured, what if we took it a step further...

2015 - Project "Mercury Mine" is approved by NASA to begin mining the precious metals from Mercury's core.

2018 - Project "Mercury Mine" is underway at full steam.  New caches of metal is shipped from Mercury to Earth at a regular pace.

2020 - DataHive, Inc. is founded and is open for business.

2021 - DataHive, Inc. presents to Congress a proposal for a massive data collection project.  The project is dubbed "Heaven's Doorstep".  The goal of Heaven's Doorstep is to compile, and make available to all the people of the world, all recorded knowledge of mankind throughout history, up through the completion of the project.  The means of storing all this data would be a massive Beowulf Cluster which would sit on a space platform, cooled by the vacuum of space, on the dark side of the moon, and connected to the Earth via a network of sattelites.  Completion date is approximated to be around 2060.

2022 - Funding is granted by US Congress to begin project Heaven's Doorstep.

2023 - Technology vendors began making bids to include their products in the nodes.
-IBM won the bid to develop a blade workstation case design to reduce the amount of space used by each node, and would provide a 450 watt power supply for each node.
-Intel won the bid to use their newest line of 256 core processors named "Penultimate", and as such the motherboards were also produced by Intel, using shorter busses and integrated RAM, co-developed by Kingston.  AMD's CEO was furious, and attempted to sue Intel and DataHive, but the lawsuit was thrown out as frivolous.
-Maxtor won the bid to use a new development in HDD technology, a self enclosed solid state hard disk drive (SESSHDD), which would ensure that the vacuum of space would not interfere with the inner workings of the disk drive.  Seagate came in a close second, wanting to use the newest innovations in SATA disk drive technology.
-Kingston won the bid to use their latest developments in RAM technology, 4gb SDDR/Flash chips which was integrated in with Intel's motherboards.
-AMD, regardless of the frivolous lawsuit, won the bid to use their newest ATI Radeon video cards, the Radeon 16650 with 2TB of integrated video RAM.
-3Com won the bid to develop a networking technique to connect all the nodes together, using a new technique specific to "outer space networking" called CatSW.  CatSW uses ions captured from the solar winds as a transmission medium between the nodes and the routers.
-Cisco won the bid to produce routers that would work in conjunction with 3Com's CatSW technology.
-IBM won the bid to develop the server cluster that would act as the head node, using Intel's new Penultimate processors and Maxtor's SESSHDD's.  They developed a cluster server in which each node would act as a failover in the even that a server would fail.
-Veritas won the bid to provide a backup system which was a disk backup, using another cluster of machines using Intel's Penultimate processors and the largest SESSHDD's that Maxtor could provide.
-Microsoft, to everyone's surprise, won the bid to provide the operating system AND the database software.  In a rare move that won them the bid, Microsoft volunteered the software licenses, at no cost.  The servers would be running MS's new OS Windows Eon Server Farm Edition and the nodes would run Windows Eon Cluster Edition.  Each server and node would be running MS's latest SQL software, SQL Server 2020 Enterprise Edition.  The Open Source Community was shocked.
-Network Associates, Inc. won the bid to provide a firewall, antihacker, and antivirus technology for the nodes and servers.  Symantec, in response, made a scathing press release denouncing the entire project.
-Google, Inc. won the bid to provide searching technologies.  No one was surprised, really.
-Northrop Grumman, as contracted by NASA, developed the sattelite network which would connect the Earth to Heaven's Doorstep.  The sattelites would use a combination of 3Com's CatSW and the latest developments in "line of sight" laser transmission medium.  Two large sattelite dishes would be erected in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans which would provide the connection from the Earth's internet to Heaven's Doorstep.  Microsoft is given a private sattelite that would directly connect their Microsoft Update servers to the cluster.

2024 - Technical details are developed for each node and server.
-Each node consists of a blade workstation running an Intel Penultimate processor, 4gb of RAM, a RAID 6 array of 4 100tb SESSHDD's, with two 3Com CatSW network cards with a failover configuration, and running Windows Eon Cluster Edition.
-The nodes are connected together using the CatSW transmission medium to the rows of racks of Cisco routers, which connect to the head node, the cluster of IBM Blade Servers.
-The head node is comprised of a cluster of servers running a matrix of 4 Intel Penultimate processors, 8gb of RAM, two RAID 6 arrays of 4 200tb SESSHDD's, connected to the backbone with two of 3Com's CatSW network cards, running Windows Eon Server Farm Edition and MS SQL Server 2020 Enterprise Edition, and Google's Search Server software.
-The head node is backed up by another cluster of servers similar to the head node, which is running Veritas 2020 as the backup software.
-The whole thing is connected to the sattelite network via a sattelite dish using the networks own line of sight laser transmission medium.

2025 - A massive donation campaign is launched, as the amount of money that was granted by the US Government was simply not enough.  Technology vendors, corporations, philanthropists, charities, and individuals alike send in a massive amount of money and support.

2026 - Construction of the space platform, sattelites and computers begins.

2035 - Construction is completed and the space platform is moved into position behind the moon.  Temperatures on the platform drop to near absolute zero.

2036 - The computers are launched to the platform on an undisclosed number of separate space shuttle missions.

2037 - The network of sattelites is put into orbit.

2038 - The beowulf cluster is assembled, the head node is assembled, and the head node's backup is assembled.

2039 - The beowulf cluster's nodes are upgraded to the latest version of Windows - Windows Infinity.

2041 - A massive data collection movement begins.  Everything that has ever been written, video'd, podcasted, or otherwise recorded is uploaded into the massive database on Heaven's Doorstep.

2042 - Heaven's Doorstep is made accessible to the public for the people to not only search the current database, but to upload anything that they can.

2055 - Heaven's Doorstep project is complete, five years early from it's approximated completion date.  All recorded information from the first human writings to the last news article of 2055 is uploaded into the massive database.  The size of the database is approximately 900yb.  It is the largest technological undertaking in the history of mankind.

It's fun to dream.

So I'm poking around my Xanga account today.  I notice this "Pulse" thing.  Seems it's a little way to post quickie messages.  That's neat, I suppose.  But then I get on GMail and I see in my RSS feeds a story about Twitter clones, of which Pulse is one (though they didn't name Pulse).  Wierd.  Just thought I'd share that.

What I've also noticed is that someone out of Michigan is checking my site at least four separate times a day.  Who do I know in Michigan?  Hey you!  Yeah you in Michigan!  Send me a message and tell me who you are!

I feel like writing again.  I've got something floating around in my head, but it all depends on if I can get my thoughts to make it onto paper in the form of groups of legible letter-like symbols.  I need more inspiration though.  I need a muse.  I need someone or something to inspire me.  I haven't quite figured out who or what that would be just yet.  Someday I'll figure it out.  Some people have a picture.  Some people have a person.  Sometimes it's an animal or a song or whatnot.  I haven't found mine yet.

I'm in a rather good mood today.  I think I know why though.  Most of the webcomics I've been reading have been leaving off in spots that are rather "feel-good" areas.  But even so, it feels a bit strange.  It's like something's missing, something that's been there for a long time has suddenly vanished.  Do you know what that is?  Stress.  Going back through all of my Xanga entries, I see that I wrote a lot of things about being upset at various things and people at work.  Now I look back on all of that and I can plainly see the stark differences between now and then.  It's almost amazing, what with the kind of transition I've made over the past several months.

I've been in this government job for going on eight weeks now.  They've moved me into the server room, which some people around here feel pretty bad about.  Not because of the fact that no one can look over my shoulder, but because of the fact that I'm not out in the cubicles with everyone anymore.  Everyone seems so concerned that I'm in here all by myself.  Really, it's not a bad thing for me.  I prefer privacy.  It would only get better if I could use IM programs on anything other than my SideKick, but on the other hand I actually have a use for my SideKick again.  This job is turning out to be the very best thing that's ever happened to me.  I've got zero stress, more pay, and friendlier people to deal with.  I don't think I'll ever go back into the private sector.  Well, at least not for a very long time.  I really like it here.

The contract that I'm in is being transitioned to a new company which will be upping the period of performance to seven years.  Seven years.  That's stability right there.  And the way it looks, I will be going through the transition with little to no issues.  I might have to get a new set of clearance though.  I currently have Confidential clearance, and they want people to have Secret clearance.  And there's talk of upping the clearance again to Top Secret clearance.  Man, that'd be simply awesome.  Me, with Top Secret government clearance.  Which is understandable, I suppose.  I mean, I do have physical access to the servers here, and remote access to almost every other server in the network, and that's nationwide.  They need to be able to trust people with that kind of access.  Of course, I can't say what's on these servers.  All I can say is that they are some pretty sweet machines.  All brand new Dell stuff too.  Well, it was brand new a year ago when they bought it all.  But still, it's all very nice equipment.  I'm in heaven here.  I could only dream of this stuff when I was back at the law firm.  I could only dream of the support I'm getting now when I was back at the law firm.  I always had to do my own research, make my own white papers, etc etc.  Now I have a whole team of people dedicated to just supporting me to support my end users.  All I have to do is send out a question, and I usually get more than one response within the hour.

And even when I have to get help from Dell, it's simply top notch service.  Dell's support team has drastically changed over the past couple of years, and is a complete 180 from what I used to deal with when I was working at the law firm.  They used HP.  HP's support team is located somewhere in India where english is not taught as a primary language.  Whenever I call Dell, I get an american person, someone who's first language is english.  They fall over themselves to help me.  An example of this is my most recent problem.  We had to order new motherboards for some machines that had gone bad.  We got the motherboards (one was bad so we had to get another one) and once I had installed them, I didn't know what to do with the old boards, and I was told to dispose of them.  Now, it's fairly common knowledge that most computer manufacturers, including Dell, have some kind of recycling program for their old equipment, since most of this stuff isn't biodegradable, and can probably become toxic if certain parts do get broken down.  So I checked out their site, and while they have a slew of information up there about what they do with the old parts, I couldn't figure out if they took loose parts.  So I called them.  I got this nice girl named Rebecca.  I asked her how I would go about getting these old motherboards recycled.  She had never heard of anyone wanting to recycle motherboards, but she did point me to a section of the Dell website where I could print up DHL airbills so I could ship this stuff.  The site lets you make airbills for whole computers, monitors, printers, ink cartridges, and "other".  As it turns out, loose parts like motherboards are catagorized under "other".  She gave me a case number and told me she would call me back the next day to check up on me.  Not paying that any mind, I went ahead and packed up the motherboards, printed up airbills, and prepared the boxes to be shipped.  Unfortunately, we missed the DHL pickup that day, but our mailroom lady told me that they would make it out on the pickup on the next day.  With my work done there, I moved onto my next task, which I had to leave for the next day.  The next day, I'm in the middle of finishing up my work when my phone rings. 

It couldn't be. 

It was.

Rebecca had called me back to check up on my case.  I was a little surprised.  HP never called me back to check up on the cases I had opened with them.  They just assume that the case is closed when they send out the part or give an answer.  This nice lady called me to confirm that I didn't have any trouble with the website and that my packages had gone out.  They hadn't gone out at that time since DHL hadn't arrived yet, and I told her that, and she seemed satisfied with my response, and then told me she was going to close the case.  I have never had a better experience with a customer support person.

Alright, enough of how awesome my job is.

I recently got myself caught up on Megatokyo.  That is to say, I've gotten caught up on the last five years of comics that's been drawn.  I haven't looked at MT since sometime in 2000.  Instead of trying to locate where I left off, I just started over.  It took me all of yesterday and half of today to get through the almost 1000 pages they have.  That's not a comic anymore.  It's a freakin' graphic novel.  But I can't get enough of it.  I remember now why I got hooked on MT back in college.  I guess for me, and a lot of other people I would assume, it's the equivalent of a soap opera.  You, personally, have nothing to do with the lives of these people, and yet you can't help but feel some strong attachment to the characters, even to the point where you get all emotional when things get sad or angsty or whatever.  If you're caught up on the story, the part where Piro says "I didn't deserve that", I had to take some deep breaths and sit back.  It was so moving.  If I hadn't stopped myself, I would have actually cried.

Understand something.  Comics don't normally move me like that.  Very few things actually do move me like that.  For MT to nearly move me to tears really says something.  What says even more for MT is that when that portion concluded, I actually heaved a sigh of relief.  I won't spoil the story for you though.  You need to sit down and read MT from beginning to end.  The story is so good, you may actually find yourself crying or laughing out loud or feeling the hurt that some of these characters are portrayed as feeling.  I can't describe it any better than that.

...

My job is really awesome.

So... Talladega.  Saw both races, the Busch race was a lot more interesting than the Nextel.  There were a lot more wrecks.  Jeff Gordon won the Nextel race, and it was his first pole at Talladega ever.  So that was awesome.  Unfortunately the rest of the fans that were sitting around me didn't care too much about it and so started throwing beer cans onto the track when Jeff was going to do his burnout.  14 people got banned.  Awesome.  I ended up buying one of those race track recievers.  Cost me about $100.  I'm hoping to make plans to start going to the races in Texas and maybe go to the second Talladega event in October, so I'll actually get some use out of this thing.  We'll see.

Alright, get this.  My roommate works in a porn store called Mr. Binky's.  Working with him is our new friend Kat.  She's hawt, by the way.  She's also 18.  Woo!  Anyway, over the weekend she called my roommate at about 5 in the morning on sunday.  Her replacement hadn't showed up and she'd just worked a double shift (that's 16 hours), and to top it all off she had to call the police about people who tried to rob the store.  So she waited until about 7am, while making several calls to the manager of the store, and making several calls to her replacement, but no one thought to pick up their phones.  She's still in high school so she can't work on sundays.  So what does she do?  She does the smart thing.  She gets everyone out of the store, locks the store up and goes home.

They fired her.

They also fired her replacement because she was in the hospital with food poisoning and had told the manager where she was.

The lesson here boys and girls, don't ever work in a porn store.

Over the weekend I made a run by GameStop and picked up Pokemon Diamond and a copy of Bully.  I wanted to get God of War 2, but I didn't have enough money.  Both are really excellent games and you should pick them up.  That's all that really needs to be said about them.

This weekend I'm heading to Talladega, AL with my dad to watch the NASCAR races.  We're going to be watching both races, on saturday and sunday.  Unfortunately, we'll be in the cheap seats so I'm going to need some sunblock SPFOMFGIBURNSOBAD.  We'll be heading out tomorrow night after we get home from work, and we're not going to be back until sometime monday.  We'll be in a hotel somewhere in Montgomery, which is pretty much directly south of the race track.  It's been a long while since we've gone to Talladega.  It's been a long while since me and my dad have done anything together.  Especially since because of Katrina, the monster truck show didn't come to the Super Dome, and that's something I usually like to see, since it normally comes around my birthday.  Instead, they replaced it with a motocross rally, and I don't particularly like motocross.  I guess it's the child in me that likes to see the oversized trucks crushing cars like they're made of cardboard.  And who doesn't want to see Grave Digger flip over?  I mean, seriously.  That's the only reasony anybody goes to those shows, for the freestyle competition.

I haven't been active lately.  I mean, at all.  In fact, I've been getting very sluggish these past couple of months.  Maybe it's a side affect of not having any stress anymore?  Or maybe it's because half the time, I'm sitting in the server room doing absolutely nothing physical, aside from moving the odd computer or two.  Most of my dad is spent sitting around, waiting for someone to enter a support ticket.  And when someone does enter a ticket, it's usually a fairly easy fix.  So in between fixes, I'm surfing the internet or reading a book or playing something on my PDA or chatting with someone on my SideKick (not gonna risk installing AIM or MSN at work).  Being a government employee can be pretty dull, but at least I don't have stress anymore.  I need to start DDR'ing again.  I popped DDR Mario Mix in my Wii last night and played it for a good 45 minute session.  My legs are pretty stiff right now.  I need to do that every night.  Maybe I'll lose some weight.

Speaking of my Wii, I grabbed Super Paper Mario over the weekend.  They've taken most of the roleplay elements out of it.  There's no random battle scenes, there's no independant leveling of your characters, etc.  Now it's more like a sidescroller plus.  I'm not complaining though.  It's a nice twist.  And I prefer not to have to go through those random battle scenes.  FFXII has spoiled me.  Anyway, one of the nifty things about this game is that you have the ability to switch from a 2D view to a 3D view.  Apparantly the 3D view is touted as a "parallel dimension".  Yeah.  It certainly adds to the innovativeness of the game.  There are puzzles all over the place that can only be solved by going into the 3D view, and often I forget that I have the ability, and have gotten myself stuck more than once.  But there's a wide cast of characters both playable and NPC.  You even get Peach and Bowser on your team again.  It doesn't put too much use into the Wii Remote though.  In fact, you don't even use the Nunchuk.  You hold the Wii Remote sideways, like a classic controller.  Though there is one use for the Remote, and that's to use the ability of one of your team to get information about enemies and find hidden things.  And as usual, the story is long and involving with some good plot twists thrown in for good measure.  It's a good mix of the original style of Super Mario Bros. and the newer style of Paper Mario.  Get this game.  And make sure you invest in rechargable batteries for your Wii Remote.  This game will have you wearing your batteries down.  I had force myself to stop playing it to recharge my batteries after going through five chapters in a row.  It's that good.  It's not too hard, and it's not too easy.  That's the way I like 'em.

That's all for today.

It's been a while since I pimped a site.  It's also been awhile since I've posted anything Pokémon related.

http://veekun.com/ - This has to be the most comprehensive game-related Pokédex on the internet, evar.  Best viewed in Firefox.  This is the site that I check first whenever I need to do any kind of Pokémon related research.  He recently updated the site to include information from Diamond/Pearl.  The site is ever evolving (pun intended) so it's definitely one to watch.  It contains a massive amount of information that you can use in the various games.  He's included all the GameBoy games from Red/Blue to Diamond/Pearl.  He also links to other resources so that IF there's something he hasn't covered, there's probably another site that has covered it.

That's all for today folks.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/sexdrive/2007/04/sexdrive_0406/

I'm still available.

That is all.

 If someone were to create jewelry out of spare Cat5e cables, RJ-45 connectors and plugs, and make it so that if you took the jewelry apart, the cables used to make it would actually work on a computer, would you buy it?