Older blog entries for kvance (starting at number 5)

I promised I'd make a release of libzzt, and I did! There were some really stupid bugs in there, mostly related to counting (I'm horrible at counting, and my code shows it :) The glZZT page on sourceforge has it as a downloadable module. Once the latest version of The GIMP finishes compiling, I'm going to design a page for glZZT and libzzt to put glzzt.sourceforge.net (instead of the ugly grey thing that's there now)

Well, I made the choice to visit the doctor instead of the school today. It turned out to be the right one, because nearly everything was infected -- ears, bronchial passages, tonsils... what a mess.

With the impending standardized test on Saturday, I loaded up on drugs. Cold medicine for the congestion and pain, Amoxil for the infections, vitamin suppliments for the immune system, and Gingko Biloba for the SAT.

Enough about me, more about my projects. After this blasted SAT, I'm going to finish libzzt once and for all. Then I'll probably end up rewriting glZZT, because I think I did a lot of things wrong with it. Not to mention Lunlab, which I'm going to dump a lot of time into (but which I'm not going to hype lest it turn into vapourware like some things...)

Ugh, sick. Actually, I've been sick since sunday. The problem is that I felt great yesterday and now all the symptoms are back plus some new ones. More complications include a giant test in American Studies and a slightly less giant test in Advanced Math tomorrow and the SAT on saturday... and instead of studying, all I feel like doing is lying down with a hotpad on my head.

Maybe I'll just cut my losses and not go in tomorrow. The problem there is that I think I've already exceeded the maximum number of days you're allowed to be out of school and they just haven't called me on it yet. Oh, how I can loathe meatspace...

The only redeeming factor here is that while investigating possible causes for sickness, I found that the preemptory filter on my HEPA air cleaner (the one that collects big dust particles before the actual HEPA filter gets to them) was in backwards. Romantically, when it was in backwards it was making the air worse causing me to become sick. Realistically, it was just blocking the HEPA filter from doing its job. Pessimistically, it had no affect at all and I've contracted a rare tropical disease for which Medical Science has no cure.

I've been running a few programs on my windows box to bone up on my test-taking skills for the ACT and SAT, Inside the SAT and Inside the ACT, 1999 edition. I took the ACT last week, but the program I used to take some trial runs never scored the test right. This left me crestfallen the first time, but I got used to it. Since the SAT is this Saturday, I've been running Inside the SAT and it also breaks as it tries to score the test.

"That's funny," I think to myself, "because it worked last year." Eventually, a thought occurs to me. I execute MS-DOS edit and start browsing through the test result data files and make a couple of changes. When executing the program again, a full report of my SAT is generated! What happened? A giant, gaping y2k bug! I kid you not! :) It stored the date as 4/4/00, and for some reason tried to divide by the year, causing a divide by zero error. And here I was thinking that since nothing had gone wrong for 4 months, my machine was y2k compliant :)

So yeah, I was just reviewing my emails as root on pc486. I have a nice little script set up to update tekktonik.ods.org (and thus www.tekktonik.net) if the IP changes. Ever since Frontline (who bought out uscom, *sigh*) enstated their "disconnect all you freeloading bastards every 10 hours" policy, I get an output from this script about 3 times a day. Today, I had ungodly numbers of them. Apparently, the connection nazis are at it again! It seems like after a couple minutes of inactivity, they also disconnect you. At least they had the decency to email me about the 10 hour thing, so I knew in advance to give up on manually updating tekktonik.net's IP... *sigh*

I wish, I wish my ISP didn't blow. And that I had DSL.

I've been looking for something to do a net.diary on, and this looks great (except for the impending lawsuit.. heh). I tried running scoop on pc486, but it obviously wasn't meant to run on a machine so slow... after all that time getting mysql compiled on OpenBSD, too :P