wolfwings

As some of you may know, I'm into programming.

As more of you should know, I'm a huge fan of emulation.

( I'm also a hobby-level programmer with a thorough enjoyment of optimization. )

I'd say I'm thriving, albeit busy every day whenever I'm awake.

Was busy dodging the heat of the day while clearing a bunch of outside rubbish to make room for an RV arriving, that's here now though so I'm able to focus more on inside stuff. I've started scrubbing the floor in the bird room about 50 square feet a day. Seems a good boundary between making myself sore, giving the birds something to stare at and watch, and actually over-exciting them. Also removed numerous innoperative pieces of equipment from the room, I hope to clean and repair them over the next week.

Also finished tearing down and scrubbing the main cooking-area fridge entirely. We've moved everything from the guest-trailer fridge over to that fridge now, my next target fridge is the drinks storage one. Once that's cleared of 'debris' I can start re-organizing both fridges to properly put all the 'needed while at the stove' stuff in one, and everything else in the other one to help organize foot-traffic to and from and through the kitchen.

The 'temporary' network cable is still in place, need to contact Sy about having him ship out a box of gel-filled outdoor-rated direct-burial Cat5E cable, and finish digging the trench to install the conduit into just to over-engineer the primary network line to the house completely. The interior layout reconfiguration I've begun seems to be meeting with everyone's approval, though I may swap the game-room AP and the front-room mini-HUB as it would be easier to run permenant cabling in the game-room directly to the 16-port house switch possibly.

Once the tertiary chest-style deep-freezer shows up, I'll transfer and defrost the primary deep-freezer, cycle everything back, then move the tertiary one by the secondary one to repeat the process before the tertiary one is permenantly installed in it's final location. I fully expect to find things in both current deep-freezers dating back to the 90's, if the 2 pounds of (thankfully sealed) packages of bacon I found in the fridge so far is anything to go by.

Laptop got sent of today finally to get the hinges repaired. Should be back next Wednesday, free replacement screen that doesn't count towards my warrenty since it was a manufacturer's defect that the hinges failed in the first place, woo! Now here's hoping they don't 'upgrade' my screen to the hi-gloss version that you can't see in direct sunlight. :-P

Need to finally unpack the chainsaw-trimmer and finish chopping up the tree branches thick enough for doing wood-carvings with, and start measuring the length of stout wood I got to start trimming it to length for a walking stave. And find some place to get a small block of copper to machine an end-cap out of I think.

Secondary task is to finish installing Linux on the old K6-350 and configure it to act as a fax server, presenting all incoming faxes over a web-interface via Samba. Kinda goofy and wasteful, I know, but there's PEBKAU reasons for this design decision. That should save a couple hundred dollars a year by itself, and allow the fax/copier to possibly be set up as a network printer for use from the gaming room for things like character sheets.

I think that about covers it for the next two weeks... obviously I'm not at AnthroCon this week. =^.^=

Current Mood: productive

I've been working security for about 18+ months now, living primarilly at my mom's house on Catalina in theory, but spending much of my time on the mainland crashed out on my grandparent's house to help them out and to avoid paying the boat fee all the time.

My grandfather, who already has Alzheimers bad enough he doesn't always know who I am at this point, has been diagnosed with lung cancer that's already spread to much of the rest of his body before it was detected. This means, in effect, he will be dead long before my next birthday in September. He also has gotten into a habit of grinding his teeth so loudly I can hear them over my music even when he's in another room and I have headphones on. He's nearly completely deaf, so even with his hearing aid he can't hear the grinding noise. And he usually has the hearing aid turned up so loud he has high-pitched feedback hum on top of it all. *I* have to shout at nearly maximum volume (and for those of you that know me, you know that's a LOT) for him to hear me, even when he has his hearing aids in.

Due to financial planning in the form of a long-term gamble my grandmother took, since barring a vehicular accident this will guarantee my grandfather dies before my grandmother, my grandmother will suddenly have a noticable infusion of cash, and plans to move to Catalina island.

Couple this timing with going to visit some friends (who because they're relatively well-known and this is a public journal I'd rather not name-drop) in Oklahoma, and sniffing around at the job market getting my nose singed because the market is so hot out here, then sniffing at property and leaving my jaw on the floor due to the cheap prices of that out here, and combine all that with the cheap airfare from here to... just about everywhere in the country... it's an opportunity I don't want to pass up. Especially since my friends have offered to let me stay at their place in one of the guest rooms for several months as long as I help with things like yard work and home repairs while I'm here.

So... I'm here. And staying for a'while. =^.^=

...Lose Yourself is a powerfully-accurate song for me right now.

You better lose yourself in the music, the moment.
You own it, you better never let it go.
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow.
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo!

You can do anything you set your mind to, man.

Farewell for now, California.

Let's go see if I can get this Opel GT running in time for Further Confusion...

Solid Snake for the win!

...whoever decided this was 'piss in the cheerio's day' would you please go stand in the corner and test if your head or the wall will dent first?

It really hurts to see people this <insert negative emotion here> like today. Hurts more when several are those I consider my friends.

( And now for something gross, but interesting for Asthma sufferers... )

It's likely to lead to amazingly powerful and nearly side-effect-free control systems for Asthma, once people figure out how it actually works. In the meantime... *shivver*

And an especially biting one, considering Bush was less than eight feet away.

Stephen Colbert, at the 2006 White House Correspondants' Dinner
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

I'll respond with something random I like about you.
I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
I'll name something we should do together.
I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me (or just me).
I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
I'll leave you a quote that is somehow appropriate to you.
I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.
If I do this for you, you must (please) post this on your journal so you can do the same for other people.

Giving a single parent struggling with two jobs to make ends meet welfare.
Handing the keys to an apartment to a homeless man for free indefinately.

Pick one.

Welcome to logic versus emotion when you start dealing with power-law statistical problems. Enjoy the headache.

...come help save Palladium from going under.

Forum post detailing the situation. What it boils down to is buy a $50 print, keep Palladium alive.

And kindly punt this note as wide as you feel comfortable doing. The more eyeballs we can flood them with, the better. :-)

I'll be happy till the day I die, I smile each day and I don't ever cry...
Feeling sad is such a waste of time, so just be happy... just try...

Every time I hear it... I just get infectiously bouncy and happy-twitchy. :-) But it's always something like 'DJ SoAndSo, Set 437' for the streaming radio ID of the song. =-.-=

...but I just found probably what I will consider the coolest powder-coat 'color' I'll come across for a while.

Glow in the Dark!

Now I'm going to imagine an Ariel Atom with the open-frame chassis powder-coated with that color, with a semi-contrasting color of body panel like a purple glow-in-the-dark.

Yes, I know it's silly, but I think it'd be fun to see a softly-glowing car zipping around at night. Though I'd imagine it'd give any law-enforcement officials conniption fits. =^.^=

Or just a ruthless one?

Car parked across two parking places. Literally the Oldsmobile emblem is centered on the line between two parking places, front and back. In front of a sign warning the Guest Parking Lot is only for 48 hours maximum. Affixed to the lightpost so it's HEAVILLY lit. With a baseball cap thrown on the front dash directly in the area of the light from the lightpost that reads Border Patrol, in approximately the correct colours and font per a quick web-search.

Been there since Saturday Morning.

Tow truck en route.

...and it's about something vaguely mechanical-based, and vaguely sabotage-based.

Most folks think sugar in a gas tank will nuke the engine. Well, it won't. It's been tested repeatedly, raw sugar in gasoline is no different than pouring silica sand in. It just clogs the fuel filters at worst. Even on ancient cars.

Well, most folks also know that water in your gas tank is VeryBad because it will settle 'below' the gasoline and refuse to burn. The infamous 'crank forever and go nowhere' problem.

The solution to water in the gas tank, amusingly, is to pour a bottle of denatured alchohol into the tank, as it's soluable in water and once the concentration is high enough will let the water get 'smoked out' of the engine. It'll play merry hob with the ECU's timing self-adjustment for fuel grades, but it's the generally-accepted answer to a 'watered down' gas tank.

Well... sugar disolves in water. And alchohol dissolves in water and can let it ignite. The entire way that sugar is supposedly able to ruin an engine is by getting into the guts of it, and caramelizing under the intense heat and pressure. And the whole solution is technically combustable.

So what would happen if you mixed some proportion of Simple Syrup (boil water, add sugar to saturation, cool), and Denatured Alchohol, and dumped that into the gas tank? I think that's the 'actual' way to 'sugar' an engine in mythology, as it keeps the sugar liquid so it can get past the fuel filters, and the fluid combustable so the engine will actually turn over and keep drawing the stuff into it. And since it's heavier than fuel to begin with and still not soluable in most gasolines, it'll settle to the bottom if given time and hit the engine just after the fuel in the fuel lines has gotten the engine running smoothly.

This is what my brain ponders at 1AM on the job site, 'obvious' barriers to recurring myths, and how to possibly make them real. Gods, I'll need to track down the Mystbusters episode about sugaring a gas tank and see if they covered this angle or not now...

...I repackaged the (in)famous shooter GunRoar in a much smaller download package that plays identically, and sounds pretty much identically unless you're playing on a really high-end sound system.

Base Install (390kb)
Music Pack (478kb)

Remembering a fallen soldier.

Link from

meowse initially, passing along. May we all keep going.

Road Conditions

Example URL for Interstate 5.
Example URL for State Road 101.

And for those of you stuck on data-enabled mobile devices with tiny screens, try here for a flat 'directory of files' interface for the same information.

...go check out this auction of a sculpture Doc Nickel has named Rage.

It's a wolf-head scuplture in sheet-metal, roughly 2' tall, long, and about 1'4" wide. And something you really have to see, even if you can't afford to bid on it. =^.^=

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

Memory versus Code optimizations...

I'm alive!

Okay... I'll explain a little better.

Love or hate him...

(no subject)

Okay...

(no subject)

Welcome, a true Satirist.

And since I forgot to post this earlier...

So what's better for the world?

Palladium gamers, artists, anyone else with $50 to spare...

Any of you HHCers out there know which song this is?

Boy it's expensive...

Does this make me a Jaded Security Officer?

I've started thinking...

For any Shooter fans stuck on dial-up...

Smooth roads ahead, kind thoughts behind Brother.

One of those utterly useful web-toys the California highway system has on-line...

For anyone out there with some money...

Something very few will understand...

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