So I'm post a lot today. It's been a sort of busy day like that.

So I got home today to find an AIM from Regina saying "Check the Phoenix forums." I could pretty much guess what I was going to find, but checked anyway, and, yes, sure enough, Ken Wood, aka tonto_real, had passed away. Not unexpected at all, really, considering that he was very, very sick, and not altogether sad, even. I've seen the whole prolonged illness thing before, and it's just not good, yknow?

Some of you knew _real, being Tontos as you were, but I imagine most of you don't, because I really didn't and don't talk about Tonto that much. How to describe him? He was many things in his life from Vietnam vet to co-founder of an internet gaming clan. Most of all, he was one of the warmest people I've known. Tonto, for most of its existance, was a big, sprawling, friendly, open sort of place, and I think that's the kind of guy _real was, too. We were many of us, or at least I was, sort of like his surrogate children, or grandchildren, or what have you. Always a word of advice (indeed, a whole forum full of it), always ready to pass on a new book title or AoK strat or talk on any sort of subject, in his often quirky, usually witty, and always intelligent manner.

I'm sad I never got to meet him. Regina and I had planned to go down there, but sometimes life has other plans. *shrug* Doesn't matter. He was still my friend, and a good and utterly respected one.

Rest in peace, Ken, and don't forget the alien.

So we're all hanging out on the MUD...

You say 'So, for today's humor moment.'
You say 'We're all standing around doing work, and over the PA comes "Ron Jeremy, please dial 8130, Ron Jeremy." about 5 times.'

Whir says 'ROFL'

Samson says 'I fail to see the humor'

Whir says 'For some reason, I'm surprised you know who Ron Jeremey is.'
Whir says 'Samson, OTOH, obviously doesn't.'

Samson says 'because I'm a heathen scum, of course'

Whir says 'Or you don't watch porn.'

Samson says 'As if I care what their names are'

Whir says 'It's not that you don't care what their names are, Mein Furher, it's that everyone ever has heard of Ron Jeremy.'

Samson says 'obviously not everyone. I dare you to ask on ichat if any of them know who it is.'

Whir says 'They're all Samson clones.'

Samson says 'So are you. What's your point?'

You say 'You so walked right into that one.'

Whir says 'I did, didn't I?'

You say 'In fact, it was more like running.'

So funny, on so many levels.

On that note, there's some bizzare stuff going on at work. I mean, random people I went to HS with, sure. We're only 20 miles from Monroe. But there's this guy who looks JUST LIKE Whir. And another guy who looks just like some other people I know. AND there's another Erik Wolfe in the plant somewhere, which was vaguely confusing when I heard "Erik Wuff, please dial 8130, Erik Wuff." Because, as we know, no female older than 30 has ever pronounced my last name correctly, ever. Except my mother. But she's had some practice.

Quoted for great justice.

[05:37] Samson: Tell me you aren't actually up at this hour.
[05:39] Dwip: Work really, really fucking blows like that.
[05:39] Samson: yeah, I know what you mean

I'm also sick, which is somewhat less fun than fun, as it were.

I also meant to get around to that whole "the more stuff happens, the more history there is" tagboard comment thing, but got variously distracted by Alsherok, the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga, and the last 7 or so episodes of Cowboy Bebop. So you'll all just need to be patient for a while.

Give in, give up, turn off, tune out.

Go to work.

(Actually, I'm off sanding table, and the job appears to be getting better. We'll see. Will also be getting to the tagboard comments, because I find them interesting, but not yet.)

I'd love to tell you all about my interesting week, but it pretty much wasn't, so I won't, other than to note that doing maintenance on your car at intervals more often than a year or so will save you a lot when you do do it. Just saying.

To reprise last week's gaming entry, I totally forgot the part where we were traipsing through the snow-covered forest towards the Main Evil Base, and I was like "This is the part where we get attacked by guys on snowmobiles, right?"

Rather shortly thereafter, we got leaped by guys in winter camo parkas wielding poisoned shortbows and shortswords. So, you know, no snowmobiles, but still.

In other news, I sure have been randomly reading Wikipedia a lot lately, because it's incredibly handy when you're thinking "I want to know about *thing*" to be able to pop it up and search for *thing* and then read about it a lot. I love the Internet.

But sometimes it can lead you to some strange, strange places. Like yesterday, when I randomly looked up Oregon and things therein (Monroe, FWIW, has a Wikipedia entry. Also, we ARE one of two states along with NJ to prohibit self serve at gas stations. For the WIN.), which led to reading about the various successors to Standard Oil, which somehow led to the Dow Jones, which somehow led to reading about Enron and Google, which somehow led to reading about the founding of Apple, Cray supercomputers, various oldschool workstation computers, and such, which somehow led to reading about Pong, Atari, and Nolan Bushnell, which somehow led, through the Commodore 64, to reading about EA and Activision, which got me off onto the Ultima series and Richard Garriot, at which point I said "I'm totally sleeping now." and stopped.

Because, well, self serve gas in Oregon and Richard Garriot. The relationship between them is so CLEAR.

Would it help to know that I used to read our Britannica downstairs all the time, at random?

Some gaming humor.

First, Chad said something tonight that sounded like "I see armored squirrels" or so. Which is cool, because, well, armored squirrels.

Some of you may remember a previous episode wherein the party was attacked from across a river by some bandits. Cleric casts a bridge spell, and my ranger ki frenzies and starts charging across the bridge. Only to come to the realization that it's 30' too short. But, well, frenzied. So he leaps anyway, rolls a natural 20 on the jump check, but still comes up 10' short...and then gets shot by arrows, goes unconcious, and drowns.

Keep that in mind.

So, trekking to recon this keep with undead, etc. Standard. Except there was a bridge.

Chad: "I wonder where the bridge troll is."

Rema: "Funny you should mention that..."

Combat ensues, where almost everyone but me is almost killed by the troll, but in the end we triumph, thus spawning legions of adjective trolls. Forest trolls, horse trolls that leap out of horses to attack people, stuff like that.

So we get where we're going, and we're checking out this keep full of undead. And, well, we got attacked by assassins. So we fight them, and we win. And decide to leave, because us, undead army, fortification, well, no. And of course our route goes, yes, across that bridge.

Rema: "So set yourselves up about halfway across the bridge."

Me, jokingly: "Oh, I bet we get hit by landmines now."

FWOOM!

Me: I hate bridges.

So I ended up falling with the bridge rubble, going unconcious when hitting the water, then getting hit and pinned under some rubble, drowning.

"We've been here before, right?" everyone says.

In the end I get rescued, and not dead, but still. But still. Bridges. Ph34r them. With great ph34r.

So I forgot that in Bywater on Alsherok, there's, yes, Largo's Fine Weaponry. Predating MT by 4 odd years. Boy is that appropriately funny.

Platinum Sindhae is kicking Thag's ass.

I was talking, some small while ago, about how when I get Oblivion in a couple weeks, I would like it not to cause blue flames to shoot out my fan ports when my mostly four year old computer attempts to run it. Fortunately, as that saying goes, we can rebuild it. We have the technology, to the tune of a 3.2 Ghz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 256 MB video card.

I direct you, firstly, to a post from the days of yore, wherein this computer was originally built.

With that firmly in mind, it's amazing how much easier the whole thing is when you know what you're doing. Though there were moments...Open up your computer some time. Locate the power supply. Note how many cables come out of it, connecting to obscure locations in your computer. Imagine taking all of them out.

Now you will understand why, upon removing my old power supply, I grabbed it by the cables, lofted it above my head, and screamed a wordless, primal scream of triumph, as our distant forebearers must once have done, only they wielded spears, and I wield a screwdriver.

In contrast to last time, the motherboard almost put itself together. Took the awesome motherboard tray out, which is one of the reasons I love this case (the other being that it weighs less than I do rather than more), unscrewed the old motherboard, moved a couple clips, put the new one in, connected a bunch of wires and things, and stuck the CPU and fan in, which almost took less effort than it's taking to type this.

I did notice a few things, though, such as how I didn't bother to screw in one of my hard drives to the case, but raiding some screws from an old school Zip drive (remember those?) fixed that. Of course about 5 minutes later I found out that I had about 600 screws sitting around in my box for such things, but oh well.

With a nod to all that USB gloating from times past, let me now note that I have ten, count them ten, USB ports. 4 with the motherboard, 4 attached from the case front, and 2 more because I had a thing with 2 of them that goes in a card slot, and since this thing can only have like 4 cards in it, well. I have no idea what I'll DO with 10 USB ports, but there they are.

Dad: Well, you could always get a USB mouse and keyboard.

Me: Well, I have a USB mouse, but I've gone through how many keyboards? The way oldschool 1996 one from my first computer works just fine.

Dad: *laughs* Yeah, you do seem to kill a lot of keyboards.

keyboard_death_sucks as it were.

So my video card, right? It's a freaking BRICK. It weighs more than the motherboard/CPU/CPU fan combo, even. This leads me to postulate, given the amount of onboard stuff on this motherboard, than given the rate of miniturization and the rate of graphics card advances, it won't be long until our computers are a giant graphics card with a few plug in slots for the CPU and such, and a heat sink/fan the size of your microwave.

Before this thing started, Whir's like "Yeah, you'll have to reinstall Windows." And I'm like "That really sucks. I just did." Come to find out you can just run the recovery wizard thing, and it mostly works. However, there's this really fun part where you get to the login screen, and try to login, and Windows is like "Please activate Windows!" and you say "Ok! Let's do it over the internet! My onboard NIC is plugged in!" Well, no it isn't really, which means Windows won't let you login until you activate, but you can't activate until you install the onboard NIC, leading me to go snag the old plugin NIC from the box of static bags and such, throw it in, activate Windows, and take it out.

But really, when you think about how it used to be back in the bad old days of Win95, that's really not so bad, is it now?

Let me just note to you that CoD2 looks...way better now. Way way better. And RTW? Wow. Just wow.

MOH:PA looks good too, but still crashes right after I saved, so whatever.

But no more blue flame action for me.

Since Simmy keeps asking me to dig up my old Tonto college posts, which pretty much no longer exist, and since he went and ranted about college in the last entry, well, we're just going to create ourselves a college post right now.

Let us, shall we, talk about the whole 18 credits deal, since I think it lies at the root of our problems, here. So, flashing back to the fall of 1999, we have my final grades for my first term:

ALS 111 OSU ODYSSEY 1 credit, Pass
BA 131 BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE 2 credits, A
HHP 231 *LIFETIME FITNESS FOR HEALTH 3 credits, B+
MB 230 *INTRODUCTORY MICROBIOLOGY 4 credits, B
MTH 111 *COLLEGE ALGEBRA 4 credits, B+

Total of 14 credits, 3.31 GPA.

Looks good. But on closer examination, we note that the Odyssey class is an orientation, with stuff like "Where's the library?" and whatnot. BA 131 had such monumental concepts as how to use email. HHP 231 was fundamentally no different from HS health, and had fill in the blank notes. MTH 111 was essentially a repeat of the college algebra I had JUST had in HS. Only MB 230 was at all new, but it was highly interesting and fun, so it worked out.

So you could say after that first term, I got a little cocky. So let's examine winter term's final grades:

COMM 111 *PUBLIC SPEAKING 3 credits, C+
GEO 102 *THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH 4 credits, C+
HST 101 *HISTORY WESTERN CIVIL 3 credits, D-
HST 203 *HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 3 credits, B
MTH 241 *CALC FOR MGT & SOCIAL SCI 4 credits, D

Total 17 credits, 2.51 GPA

Now, these aren't exactly hard classes, except perhaps MTH 241 for us non-math types. Speech, well, I've always sucked at that, though I did reasonably well considering. GEO 102 was almost impossible to fail, yet boring. HST 203 was taught by an awesome prof, so I did ok. But I flat out failed HST 101 of all things.

So what's up with that?

Well, first is, I tried to do too much. Now, later on in my college career, with a few upper division classes under my belt, this sort of schedule was easy enough. But for 2nd term? No way. So I was struggling to keep up, especially in MTH 241, which was not only taught horribly, but beyond my ability to comprehend. And, thing is, when you start floundering in one class, you generally get demoralized and start floundering in others, too, which is what happened here. So we see two things:

1. Don't get in above your head.
1a. If you do, drop a class.
2. Don't let one class demoralize you and drag you down.

Now, it didn't get a whole lot better from there for a couple years, which had a lot to do with utterly hating every single part of my major at the time, which was business. I initially tried to stick with it, since my parents wanted me to, but, well, there comes a time in every person's life when they need to tell their parents to just fuck off already, and that was mine. Switched to history, and almost immediately got both a dramatic increase in GPA, and a dramatic increase in happiness as I ceased beating my head against things I didn't care about and hated doing.

There's a third lesson involved here, which I definitely didn't learn until long after this, multiple crises and boring as hell core classes later, which was:

3. You know that old saying "This too shall pass"? Yeah. It will.
3a. And you know my old sig, "When it rains and shines, it's just a state of mind"? I keep that around as a way of saying "Whatever it is that's wrong, it will go away. It will go away. If you keep yourself optimistic, you'll feel a lot better."

Try it. It works.

I have said this before, and I will say it again. Do not be afraid to get out of your major if you hate it that much. Do something you enjoy, no matter what that may be. However, make sure you end up on a course that leads to some sort of paying job after graduation. Internships, whatever. I didn't, and I'm sanding doors at $10/hour until I can get into grad school. Talk to your advisor about it. They can help you out.

OTOH, if you do love it, and it's just the one class, stick with it. It'll get better.

Now, let's talk about this whole dropping out thing, shall we?

In my mind, coming out of HS you have 3 ways to get yourself grown up, responsible, and ready to face the world. They are:

1. Go straight into the workforce.
2. Enlist in the military.
3. Go to college.

There's also a 4th option, involving dropping completely out and doing the drugs/gangs route, but that's so obviously bad we'll ignore it.

Now, for option the first, with an HS diploma and no work experience, you'll be damn lucky to get a $20k/year job like I have, and I only got it because I took 3 years of shop classes and so technically have experience. You cannot live on $20k/year at all easily or well. For you lot making minimum wage, it's even worse. On the other hand, you'll get responsible for yourself real fast, or else you won't make it very far.

As for the military, well, I have a lot of respect for it, and a lot of respect for people who've been there. Drill sergeants will instill a certain amount of responsibility in you, which seems to have worked for my father and Laurent, among others. OTOH, at least for the three members of my family who went that route, it was a pretty shitty experience.

Thus leaving college, which is astonishingly forgiving as long as you can pay for it. If you live away from home for long enough, and at least make an attempt to go to classes every once in a while, you'll eventually pick up a measure of responsibility. Maybe not to, say, Regina-esque levels, but enough. Even if you're that guy who slacked all of HS like me.

I'd like to say more on the topic, and on others such as studying and time management, but being responsible as I am forced to be these days, I'm going to bed, because I have to get up at 5:30, and that freaking sucks.

You lot in the audience, many of whom are in or are college graduates, feel free to chime in, and Simmy, if you have questions, or want me to talk about anything, leave a note.

Click me!

Me after a week at work, shown full size for great justice and clarity. Though not enough clarity, because you can't quite tell that my hair was actually more white than not, being covered in so much sawdust. Also note the faded-looking flannel, which isn't so much faded as covered in sawdust. Nor can you see my glasses, which are, yes, covered in sawdust. But my hair standing up is accurate. The sanding table has more static electricity than you can possibly imagine.

I sure do look like a fool, closing my eyes like that.

And yes, the part I hate the most about my job is how I breathe dust all day. There's lots of other parts that sort of suck, but the dust is just terrible.

Anybody who reads here and actually cares already knows that DS has, in Godlike fashion, caused the old Tonto forums from days of yore to rise from the dead.

Thus providing us with endless Marechal quotes, of course. One of which I will relate to you momentarily, as I am too preoccupied with fixing my laptop and trying to make my desktop not shoot blue flames from the fan port upon the release of Oblivion, which I guess has specs so high only about five people are going to be able to run it. I garuntee to you that Whir, Samson, and I will be among them. Save your spot now.

If presented with a choice wherein the HD on your laptop dies or does not die, I urge you to pick the "does not die" option, because the "dies" one is just all kinds of bad. Let's just leave it at that.

Anyway. Quotage:

[18:37] TontoMarius: Quoth Marechal: "Simfish, I order you to desist using big words. Now."
[18:37] PxcTNK: Hehehe
[18:37] TontoMarius: So true. So true.
[18:38] PxcTNK: One of us needs to make a book of Marechal quotes
[18:39] TontoMarius: I did show you that great big .doc I made of Marechal ICQ quotes, right?
[18:39] PxcTNK: I think so
[18:39] PxcTNK: See? You don't need to go back to school!
[18:39] PxcTNK: You can just sell those!
[18:40] TontoMarius: Ha.
[18:40] TontoMarius: And probably do better than my crappy paycheck now.
[18:40] PxcTNK: You can split the money with Marechal, which, after he gets through seminary, will spend it all on a mega-church where he can give sermons to the masses. Then he'll get his own television station.
[18:41] TontoMarius: And then it'll start getting really funny.
[18:42] PxcTNK: Yes. And then you get to publish the sequal, involving his sermons.
[18:42] TontoMarius: He needs to get elected, too. Since I'm taking over power from him in a coup.
[18:42] PxcTNK: What if he just ends up getting elected Governor of Wisconsin? Do you really want to start your empire in Wisconsin?
[18:43] TontoMarius: Well, I could conquer Michigan easily enough. But I've been to Michigan. I don't really want it.
[18:44] PxcTNK: You better stick with Oregon. I mean, who doesn't want to start an empire in a state whose main colleges' rivalry is called the "Civil War" and involves Ducks and Beavers?
[18:47] TontoMarius: Buahahahahaha.
[18:49] PxcTNK: As opposed to New Jersey, which apparently has no colleges of note
[18:50] TontoMarius: Doesn't everyone flee from New Jersey given the chance, anyway? Since it's that state that all the other, more popular states make fun of?
[18:51] PxcTNK: Pretty much