However, I did find myself in the hospital (emergency room no less) today, after what was suppose to be leisurely ride with some other bikers. We had cruised back and forth along Devil's Backbone a couple of times, no problems. But when we started heading back for lunch at the Salt Lick, I managed to crash on a curve. I went summersaulting over the bike, and rolled and flopped a couple of times on the ground, and came to a stop in a pile of dead brush. I had my helmet, gloves, and boots on for protective gear, and was wearing a long sleeve shirt and jeans.

Got up as soon as I came to a stop, and took stock of things. Physically I was worse for wear, but pretty soon I noticed my right arm was not functioning correctly. A more thorough examination revealed that I had broken my collar bone (the clavical in medical terms). Otherwise I had no injuries.

The bike on the other hand looked like a mess. At first look it was obvuously not street legal anymore: missing rear view mirrors and turn signals. The front wheel spoiler was cracked and off at an angle, and the rest of the bike suffered cosmetic damage everywhere. Not exactly a pleasant sight. But the other riders soon converged on my position, and assisted in the recovery operation. State troopers and sheriffs stopped by to take down information, and it was off on an ambulance ride for me.

So, after a torn shirt, a moderately damaged motorcycle, and a short trip to the hospital later, I am now confined at OC3 on medical leave while my bones mend themselves (6-8 weeks, they say). A rather eventful day. . .

Spent a few hours at Mixer trying to find out why the network teaming isn't working correctly. Turns out an acquaintence of An's stumbled upon the fact that the network cards was the cause of email outages yesterday, so now I'm following up on that lead to see what could be the cause of it. Apparently there's also a motorcycling day-trip being planned for tomorrow, so I may or may not update tomorrow, depending on how that trip goes.

Also found out that a few ex-coworkers are leaving Design Edge, so I trotted out to Opal Divine's to say my farewells. Carrie is becoming a firewoman (unfortunately she missed the cutoff for the AFD by 4 places), and Eric's heading out to LA for new (mis)adventures. Also saw Allison (boss's daughter) there. Last time I saw her was almost a year ago, and we traded glances and smiles. She looks damn good. Doing well I mean. Okay, I'm shutting up before I say something to incriminate myself.

Last but not least, spent a good deal of time talking to a web developement whiz while at OD's. Seems that a certain little project he's working on has tremendous potential value. Since I'm not really doing anything at the moment, I offered to help out with what I can. I can't really talk about what the project is about, but I can say that if it does take off, it will be a REALLY good thing. Really. I mean, he offered me a partnership, how can I go wrong with that?

To make matters worse, not only did I NOT recieve a response from the Parking Gestapo regarding my appeals, but they've already forwarded me to a collections agency. How's that for screwing over students? Not only will they ignore your "innoncent-until-proven-guilty" right, they let loose the dogs of war when they feel like it. At this point I am seriously considering calling the local news station up and see if they're willing to do some investigative reporting on this sorry excuse of a revenue generator for the university.

Meanwhile, Calima is obviously dreaming about something tasty, because while she's lying on the floor taking a nap, her tongue is licking her lips like she just finished a meal. What I'd give for the carefree lifestyle she has right now. . .

Due to the nature of such a move, Calima the Spymaster has been sent to Lady Lew's care (as well as extensive training in inter-feline protocols). Hopefully she will become a better spymaster upon my return. I am grateful for Patricia's cooperation in this last minute endeavour, and I shall have to think of some way to repay her in the future.

This being the case, I have decided to move up my scheduled trip of going back to Camelot Command in order to requisition resources to repair Quincy VII (I'm bringing her with me). I had originally planned for leaving early next week, but because I cannot get any sleep while Quincy VII remains inoperable, I need a rapid resolution to this mess.

I have already tried switching hardware devices, updating the motherboard BIOS, reseating all the connections, and even tried throwing the thing along with my laundry, and nothing has worked so far. Quite irritating, this. . .

That was when I saw the greatest thing ever. . . the Gundam GP-03 Denodrum Space Battle Armor model kit, with a box the size of a small file cabinet, and priced at $300.00. *drool*. . . :)

Anyways, after bubble tea, since neither of us had anything to do for the afternoon and the weather was awesome, we migrated to Town Lake and went canoeing for a couple of hours. I was adventurous enough to take a dip (the water was NICE), but she wasn't and cited fear of water. *chuckle* Doesn't mean I can't splash her with water though. . . *evil grin*

So she tried to insist in buying me lunch, in celebration of me finishing school, but I wouldn't have any of that. And thus I ended up paying for most of everything (except for the bubble tea), but it was all good.

Anyways. . . I'll be rebuilding Quincy VII tonight, so I might be out of the loop and late in the site updates, so please bear with me.

The battle itself was worthy of a saga comparable to the Illiad. The first skirmish involved dealing with page allocation strategies, and it was dealt with promptly. The next order of battle involved virtual memory structures and varies support units, and in and of itself was the most difficult portion of the battle. We took heavy casualties in fighting this thing off, but we eventually did. Fortunately for us, the exam seemed to only have that as their main punch, as the reserve units of threading locks, distributed systems, and network topologies did not put up much of a fight. The entire battle took only 45 minutes out of the allotted time of 3 hours. I decided to be nice and stay an extra 45 minutes just so the professor would not be pissed at me finishing so early.

And thus concludes the final final exam I would have to take for a while. . . this is the time where one asks themselves, "now that you have completed (insert enormous feat), what are you going to do?". . .

I went and had myself a medium smoothie at Wendy's.

Rather anti-climatic, I know. And in fact, I felt jipped.

So to make up for that, I'm going to have lunch with Jennifer.

And so ends yet another chapter in my tapestry of life. I'll get around to adding this to my autobiography one of these days.

I came. . . I saw. . . I loved. . . I fell. . . I slaved. . . I fought. . . I conquered. . .

The end result is I moved the Velocity128/Voodoo2 combo off of Quincy V (since it is stuck on a monitor that has a max res of 800x600), and installed the GF3 into it. The Voodoo2 I moved to the (relatively) new Dell Optiplex box (I haven't created a name for it yet, and it will be using that same 800x600 monitor as well) that I am going to install Linux on shortly, just to see what it can do. The Velocity 128 I moved onto Quincy VII so that I can take advantage of dual monitors (the second monitor has a max res of 1024x768).

And let me tell you. . . once you start using dual monitors, you open up a whole new world of possibilities for your productivity. And after that, you ain't going back to a dinky little one-monitor setup. Its almost addictive as high-speed internet access. Almost. :)

Future Site of Camelot Command II

Reflections of Passion

Went to help out at Mixer Group after class yesterday. Turns out SBC "forgot" to resolve some DNS issues on their side, which is why MG haven't been able to send mail properly. Should've known. . . damn SBC. . .

Since my brain is not fully functional today I'll be wrapping up remaining assignments for my OS class, before heading to MG to help them set up their new workstation-class laptop (a Dell M50).

Does anyone know who Tom Cordar is? I keep on getting calls from him, but I do not know who he is. . .

My original appeal text

The email response I got the morning after (editted to protect the innocent)

This was a bad day that turned into a rather tenacious nightmare. First off, late in the afternoon my cable connection starts fritzing out. A quick call to Road Runner confirmed that they were working on something in the area. I assumed that as soon as they were done, everything would be peachy again. That was my mistake. . . I assumed. Never assume.

Shortly thereafter, my cable connection completely dies. No internet. No cable TV. I step outside to the cable junction box, and lo and behold, bits and pieces of cables and cable connectors lying on the ground. Apparently a technician had been out installing service for a new resident, and managed to bump my service out of bounds. Repeated calls to customer service proved to be useless, as they deny responsibility, and cannot schedule a tech out until Thursday afternoon. Keep in mind my OS project is due Wedensday at 11:59PM. So I resigned myself to suit up and head for campus to try and work on the project some more.

Went for a swim, came back, cleaned up, suited up, and stopped for a quick dinner. Got to campus, worked on code, worked on code some more, and finally got yet another part completed (I'm at about 90% completion now). Decided to call it early and head home. What do I find on waiting on my bike? Two parking tickets. Count them. Two tickets for the same violation.

There are times when a person has to draw the line and defend their well being. This is one of those times. The first time (and only other time) I got a ticket was when I parked on the sidewalk in the back of the CS building. I got cited for parking on sidewalk, so I figured fair enough, they got me. This time I parked in a little walled off area, where there is no posted signs, but there is a rusting hulk of a rack that takes up about half of the space. My bike fits in perfectly in the remaining half.

I had arrived on campus at about 7:45-8:00PMish. Apparently the Parking & Transportation Secret Police walked up 15 minutes later and slapped on the first ticket. Less than two hours later, he/she slaps on another ticket (sequential citation numbers, so I know its the same person, plus they tried to use a lame different violation to justify the second, and much larger, fine), and manages to damage my rear-view mirror at the same time.

Where is the justice in this? Is the P&T Gestapo so short on funds they have to resort to such extortion? Not only extortion, they've damage my bike in the process. Where in their code of conduct justifies damaging personal property when issuing citations? Is there no justice in this world? And yes I am appealing the citations. BOTH of them.

Where I parked

And because I started listening to Yanni, my writer's block went away for a little bit, so I took up my keyboard and started writing out some more in the biography section. I will probably add more throughout the day, as my brain deciphers some locked away memories and analyze them for presentation.

Meanwhile, Calima is literally bouncing off of the walls today. I don't know what's going on inside that little feline mind of hers, but she's been caroaming throughout OC3, and wrapping herself up in the white carpet for no apparent reason (I highly doubt she was playing hide n' seek). I think she's getting stir crazy being cooped up indoors all day. At least, I'm getting stir crazy staring at this stupid program all day. . .

Ryan didn't show up for SEAL training today, nor did he call in advance to announce his absence. Rather peculiar. Especially after his announcement (see his webpage) that he bumped into his evil-ex and her current consort. Fortunately I don't have this problem, as my ex is out of state for the forseeable future (I will abstain from debating whether or not she is evil, and no I do not know whether she is currently entertaining a consort).

Doubt I'll be able to do much updating today. . . final OS project's deadline is fast approaching. . . grrr. . .

As for the movie, City of Lost Souls by reknowned Japanese director Takashi Miike, it was an interesting trip down post-modern interpretative art. Whereas most movies nowadays boast of explosive fighting scenes and very little plot, this one had a very slippery plot and artistically well done confrontations.

If you don't want to know the plot, skip to the next paragraph. The premise of the whole story is that a Brazilian hired gun somehow fell in love with a Chinese hair dresser. But when she is deported from Japan, he literally flies in, saves her, and lands explosively in a Japanese metropolis. Their arrival does not go unnoticed, as the girl's sadistic male friend (I wouldn't go so far as calling him the ex-boyfriend) manages to catch up with them and generally make everyone's life miserable. Mario, the protagonist, spends the rest of the movie trying to find a way to get the two of them out of Japan, calling on Brazilians and Japanese who think they're Brazilians for assistance. Pretty soon their endeavour runs amuck of the Yakuza, and the rest of the film becomes a fierce confrontation between all three sides. The sadistic male friend (with a homosexual bodyguard, no less) is killed in a ping pong match with an upstart Yakuza psychopath (who killed his own boss earlier in the movie), and the final showdown between Mario and the Yakuza ended with the word "Love" written in blood in the alley they dueled in. Does the hero get the girl, Kei, in the end? Sort of, except for the existence of the jealous ex-girlfriend, Lucia, which reminds everyone that "hell hath no wrath like a woman scorned".

Acting wise, it was pointed out to me that some of the characters could barely speak Japanese (the movie was subtitled). Other than that, the dynamic facial expressions shown throughout the movie was a treat and a source of comic relief. Fortunately, every action scene was done perfectly, smoothly, and with just the right amount of artistic sense. There were no overt amounts of gratuitous violence, but enough of it to remind you that this film warrants at least a "R" rating. However, I do believe the gratuitous male nudity at the beginning of the movie warrants an "NC-17". But that's just me.

On a side note, one character introduced in the film proved to be a psychological/mental/emotional disturbance. Her mere presence in the film was a stark contrast to the harsh and unforgiving world the film was portraying, and the irony is definitely not lost. Furthermore I got the sense that whomever she touches intimately (not in a sexual way, mind you) will die before the end of the movie. A Black Widow indeed, and she's only a child.

Overall, definitely something different, and definitely not something I was expecting from a Japanese film. But for the $4.50 admission we paid at the Alamo Drafthouse (Downtown), I think it was worth the money.

Things to do: food. . . drink. . . Advil. . . homework. . . in that order. . .

Well, there is a story of me getting the name Nipples. Basically, we were playing water volleyball one day, and because I was doing too good of a job serving, the opposite team decided to try and distract me. One of them started commenting on how enticing my nipples looked. I returned the favor with a "come hither" remark. And the name stuck ever since then. Anyways, it turns out Patricia was also having lunch there, so we spent a few seconds socializing.

Spent a few hours at work I stablized the network, and celebrated the company's first official release. And then went home just in time for SEAL training (it was brutal, thanks for asking). After training, it was off to Souper Spud (full of healthy foods), Dave & Busters (full of pretty women), and then back home for website updates!

(And no, the maintenance crew has yet to repair the hole in the ceiling).

In case anyone's wondering, yes, I paid for the lady's dinner. What self-respecting knight in shiny (okay, not quite so shiny) armor wouldn't for a fair damsel like her?

Before and after the game, we spent almost a good hour pounding on the DDR machine. I must say. . . a few months ago I'd bash it without a second thought, but now I have a new found respect for this device. It tests your feet-eye coordination, which is complementary to my current SEAL training. Besides, its developing my endurance in leg muscles, as well as improving me being able to adapt the change in balance after shifting my feet around so much.

*evil grin*. . . new ship. . . *drool*. . .

Spent the past 6-7 months in a punitive last push to finish my CS degree at UT. So far its working: I have less than 3 weeks left before I finish summer session, and the last class I'll ever have to take. In short, if I pass this class (flying colors or not), I'm ending my scholastic career. . . until another rainy day.

That said, I'm currently scrounging around for a new beginning for my career. I had originally planned to go back to Four Hands, but after learning that half the company had left (including the one person who has any chance of bringing the company any form of stability), there really was no reason for me to go back. My thinking is as soon as I have an alternate venue secured, I'll hand in my two-weeks' notice, clean up, and close up that chapter of my life.

On the other hand, my four-year relationship with Lady Mitsou ended a few months back. It was painful, and anyone who's ever been in a long-term relationship like that and thought everything was working out correctly said they didn't feel a thing, don't trust them with your money. I spent about a month after that wondering around aimlessly, and I'm still sort of doing that right now. Ironically, back in April and May, I had the next 5-10 years of my life all planned out. Obviously, futile plans of mice and men fares far worse in the hands of reality than they can possibly concieve. I violated the prime rule of "Never Assume", and I paid that price. So be it. Lesson learned.

As part of the recuperation process, I took up SEAL training for the summer. Yes, SEAL. As in Navy SEALs (SEa Air Land special forces). Its one of the toughest regimen of physical training I've encountered, and that's only the precursor to the actual training they put you through at the SEAL training camp. I'm currently at Week 5 of the 9 week program, but handicapped with a shin splint (although I think its a stress fracture, won't know until I see an X-Ray). No rest for the wicked.

Oh, and my household has a new member, Calima (some of you may notice the reference to the new Planet of the Apes movie). She appeared on my front door step one day, so I decided to be a good samaritan and give her some food and water. Couple of days of this later, she decided she had enough, bolted through my door, and made herself at home. I have some pictures taken, and will post them after I've organized them.

One of the main design considerations I undertook was to keep things simple. Efficient. No significant catchy eye-candies that would distract the user from the actual content. Some might deem this to be too utilitarian, but I say to each his/her own.

All the hosted sites that were originally here (NTXF, bleem!, Planet Duncan21) are still here, under their own directories, and more or less unaffected by this change.

It is my hopes that I will be able to update this site on a more-or-less regular basis, since I'm almost done with college anyways. For that matter, anybody out there willing to give a down-on-the-luck systems administrator a job? :)