Well, I finally got a shower mirror.  And it’s great.  The only one Walmart had was the water-runs-through-it kind, which was fine with me.  I can even shave most of my face without shaving cream now, which is pretty awesome.

And in case you were worried about the efficacy of this solution, rest assured:

Can you really trademark a phrase like that?  And... would you really want to??

Ever get the feeling that some advertising has just gone way too far?

I’ve already bought (and am attempting to use) your freakin’ toilet paper; I don’t need a commercial STUCK DIRECTLY ON the roll itself.

In other funny randomness, I came across this hilarious photo (note the fine print):

(show full-size image viewer)

"Changing the opinion of a Mac fan is impossible, and not really necessary.  Just leave them alone and let them believe what they want.  Worldwide there are probably more people who play the banjo than use Apple computers.  It’s really not a big enough group of people to warrant an argument, much less the constant flame wars we seem to have around here."
- a comment on an article about Apple’s false advertising

My cable internet and cable TV were offline from 2pm Monday until 9am today -- 19 hours.  They were also offline for a half hour on Friday, and according to my logs, the net connection frequently goes out for a couple hours in the wee periods of the morning.  And let’s not forget the 6 hours it was offline 3 weeks ago -- 3 weeks to the hour, no less.

This reminds me of when we got our first computer in 1995.  It was really cool at first, especially since we’d been begging our parents for one for years.  (We were also in our early-to-mid teens, so what seemed like years of begging might have actually only been a few days.)

But the coolness faded fast, because we didn’t "have the internet" as they say.  We didn’t get online till sometime in 1997; I know because our first username/email account was eggman97.  And without the internet, a computer is cold and impersonal.  It’s a completely isolated system.  When you sit down and use it, it’s the same as it was yesterday, and the day before.  It’s entirely static, boring -- no, worse than that, it’s depressing.  If it doesn’t let you talk to your friends, email people, read up-to-the-second news, and compulsively read the boring details of people’s lives in their online journals aka "blogs," then what good is it?  No good, that’s what.

...is a band you should love.  Take a listen.

Also, I had a dream that I attached a piece of paper to my monitor by putting a thumbtack into the LCD screen.  It didn’t even occur to me (in the dream) that it was a bad idea.

Sometimes I feel like I need to make new friends.  I’m such a loner here, and I don’t really "go out" much.

OK, there are lots of reasons for that which are unrelated to friends; c.f. having lots of work to do, wanting to work on personal projects (musicbox, programming, etc) when I’m not doing schoolwork, and the fact that most of the activities I really like (drumming, biking, caving, driving aimlessly) aren’t really group activities.

But the thing is, I don’t really want to make new friends.  I’m not totally against it, but it’s not a priority for me, as it seems to be for many people.  Maybe what I mean is, I don’t want to make friends for the sake of making friends, if that makes any sense.  When people have common interests or go to the same places frequently, friendships might tend to form.  But it seems like many/most people are driven to constantly socialize and try to make friends as much as possible.  I’m not.

In high school, my small group of friends was pretty "tight" as they say.  I don’t think we were outcasts in any real sense, and it’s not like we didn’t interact with other kids, but it always felt like (for me at least) it was us against the world.  I never really thought much about that before now, but I think I still hold to that mentality.  I interact with people here when I need to, but these people aren’t my friends; I already have friends, they’re just not here.

Of course, I’ve made some new friends since high school, but very few -- maybe 1 or 2 or 3 -- that I would consider close friends in any sense comparable to my high school friends.

I’m not a "group person."  I pretty much like to hang out with people one on one, unless it’s my close friends because that’s different as I said.  In social situations where you have maybe a friend or two, or just some acquaintances, in the group, there’s this pressure to "mingle" or "make friends" or at least just shoot the breeze with the other people.  And I hate that.

So the only time any of this really comes up is times like tonight.  My friend Jeremy was playing an acoustic set on campus (and Rob played a few songs with him).  There were probably 8 people there who I knew, but most of them were faint acquaintances if that, and none besides Jeremy were close friends.  I got there a couple minutes late, but the show was about 25 minutes late, so there was basically a half hour to wait.  I sat at a table with the people I knew, and everyone was doing the whole social interaction thing.  I have no problem doing that, but I also have no desire to do that.  (See previous paragraph.)  I guess people in general enjoy social interaction, but I just find it to be awkward.

(As an aside, that all makes it fiendishly hard to meet girls.  I guess I need to qualify the above paragraphs by saying that I do want to interact with girls.  ...  Then again, no, I don’t.  I want to interact with one girl in a long-term kind of way; I want to make girl friends only as much as I want to make guy friends.)

Anyway, it was a fun night, because I love music and I love to hear Jeremy play.  But it was awkward too.

My musicbox now detects when the key is removed from the ignition, and when that happens, it fades the music out and shuts itself down automatically, saving the current playlist and the current song’s elapsed time.  With this feature, my system is now just like a normal car stereo in terms of on/off: it turns on and off automatically with the car, so the only time you have to touch it is to select the music.  (Previously, I had to press a key to make it shut down, before turning the car off.)

This was actually really simple to accomplish.  When a car is shut off, its accessory signal goes low (goes to zero volts).  So I just send the car’s accessory signal from the ignition into pin 6 on the computer’s serial port (the DSR pin).  It just takes a few lines of C code to detect the state of that pin:

int i = TIOCM_DTR;
ioctl(fd, TIOCMSET, &i);
int dsr_state=0, dsr_prev_state=0;

while(1)
{
ioctl(fd, TIOCMGET, &i);
dsr_state = i & TIOCM_DSR;

if((dsr_state==0) && (dsr_prev_state==256))
{
printf("The DSR pin went from high (256) to low (0).\n");
exit(1);
}

dsr_prev_state = dsr_state;
sleep(1);
}

My musicbox script forks that C program at startup, and when it exits, the script shuts the computer down nicely.  I have an RC timer circuit that keeps the computer powered for about 11 seconds after the car is shut off, and the computer’s shutdown process takes about 5 seconds.

Here’s the diagram:

You can read more about it here.

Gosh, I just love webpages that have bugs crawling across them.

Can watching where you fall in ’the count’ become an additive thing?  Don’t know but signing in this a.m. and being #54545 just made my day, so far.  It can only get better from here ^_^ !

lvu,