Descending to the gobberwarts
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Andrew Schultz" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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07:18 pm
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Here comes the spam again
"I changed my identity--kept a low profile--and the crooks STILL found me *GASP*."
I'd been totally spam-free for a year. I still sort of am. I like SBC's spamblocker. I'm not sure where they got my address, but it looks like I'm getting the same pharmaceutical spams, so it's probably only from one place.
But my bulk folder on webmail used to be reserved for internet orders I'd just made. Now real spam is turning up there. I don't miss the days of Earthlink and a much more visible account. But it was amusing to see one message slip through. And heartening it took over a year to do so. I wondered how long it would take. I wondered if I'd feel hunted when it did. I'm just glad that even if it got through it wouldn't be clogging my dialup download any more.
But I did enjoy this clever bot-fooler(warning, sports forum for those who dislike watching sports): http://68.178.249.199/forums/MrHoops/messages/79833.shtml
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12:05 pm
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See you on the other side of the alphabet.
http://ziyx.livejournal.com
I just got sick of this tangled LJ name.
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11:42 am
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Perspectiveful thought for the day
Whatever your petty worries are, remember, developments in the JonBenet Ramsay case are much more important.
Geez. I am just giddy at the thought of Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway retro in a few years. I try to avoid this crap, really I do, but I just can't.
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12:20 pm
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I solved Pitfall yesterday!
Uh, today.
I think my family got the game in '82 shortly after it came out. It always mystified me, and I tried running overground for as many treasures as possible. I think I got to maybe 70k(?) before time ran out. Thanks sincerely to the Stella emulator folks. I was able to finish with 54 seconds left and 114000 points.
A bunch of simple math will show that the minimum time to get through an area is 4 seconds but there's a lot of waiting around that bogs you down...things seemed on a knife edge if I'd get through. I remember drawing up maps and having trouble with the underground scorpion but I can't imagine why now. Anyway, JLV has an awesome walkthrough on GameFAQS(tried to email but his box was dead) and here is a really cool map.
Funny how I once bemoaned the time limits and when I tried to solve it last night I worried I might take too long. It probably took an hour or so with the mistakes I made and the reloading etc. The tough part was getting started. Those **** alligators always ate me up one way or the other.
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12:30 pm
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meta-meta-meta-meta-meta madness
I found this diary terribly funny. It has just about every sort of political blogging and responding no-no known, but it also has a lot of more general blogging booboos.
No, I'm not through it all yet, either. It's just so...rich and full of the human condition. I hope someone saves it.
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10:05 am
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Taking out the trash
Yesterday around midnight a brief storm came. The lights dimmed for a second, but I wasn't too worried, because I was writing to my 7-digit-byte file of notes and saving after every line. It's become the typing equivalent of saying "Like, uh," for me, or maybe poets had rosy-fingered dawn, I have control-s.
Once the storm passed the weather was no longer unbearably hot. So I took the recycling and kitty litter and garbage down. I tried to fill up the garbage bag to a reasonable point. But within a few minutes of climbing back upstairs I'd found ten piddly little articles to dump in my trusty white plastic bucket. My first reaction was that I hadn't searched thoroughly enough for garbage to pitch. A sort of inherited perfectionism of people saying "Well, you pay attention to details don't you?"
But my second was that I wouldn't have noticed all that if I hadn't made my first pass through it, so why bother worrying about it? And I guess it is the same with my writing. I know you just sort of have to get out there and write, but being able to compare not writing with sitting in a house full of garbage gives me a bit more motivation to do so.
Hey, you're lucky this post was about writing. Sometimes late at night I get very introspective about if the garbage I'm throwing out was really used for a good purpose before it officially became garbage, and what I can do better before my next garbage haul.
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09:27 am
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scratchwork
I am on the train and it's late and I decided to take the northbound a stop to make sure I could squeeze in before the others. On the way back I've finished my book but I don't have room to pull another from my backpack. But the person next to me can change CD's from a whiny male to a stilted female. I have to face into the sun as we make room and I notice one lucky sitter finished the crossword and SuDoKu. Groans as the train runs express as I'd been hoping but I am pinned to the center two stops from work. It makes up time but there's enough of an excuse to leave early anyway. Work's first half-hour involves Windows Software Updates, closing the internet browser from staying late last Friday, and writing in my notebook which isn't so hard as the previous week's notes help me with this week's. I thought I'd had more plans than that and done more as the later days are blank as usual. I wish I'd waited to pass the turnstiles once I heard the loudspeaker announce the delay so my one-day pass would expire a little later next morning. But I am sure I will waste 15 minutes today. I haven't even planned two things I could do at once.
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01:17 am
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Limericks, with African flavor
A con artist from Gaborone
Sold cuban cigars that were phoney
Til back in Botswana
He found marijuana
Resale less full of baloney.
A map impaired statesman named Ron
Made plans to arrive in Gabon
To meet Omar Bongo*,
Got lost in the Congo,
And wound up in Azerbaijan.
* - Not some random name, actually. Omar Bongo is Gabon's head of state and has been for 35 years. He gets more of the vote with each election. Some people just get better with age, huh? Oh plus he helped pay off some of the US national debt by paying a cool $9 million to meet with Bush, apparently through Tom Delay. OK, maybe it went to Haliburton, but I like to think the best of people, you know.
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02:19 pm
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The last word is intentionally mispronounced.
A surly trust baby named Mitch is
Well pestered by gold digging -----es
"A sweetheart since birth!"
"The salt of the earth!"
A shocking embarrase de cliches.
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12:02 pm
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On the heels of critical and popular success...
Thanks to all responders in my other topic! Here's a riff on the theme, but with a different downfall.
A diet and penis pill spammer
Sold briskly despite wretched grammar,
Then followed his yearnings
For millionaire earnings
By "helping" a 419 scammer.
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10:43 pm
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cyber-limerick
A pasty-faced chicken-legged spammer
Made money but thought, "Where's the glamor?"
One greedy sad morn
He switched to child porn
And soon he wound up in the slammer.
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10:36 am
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another limerick
A curious diner named Mork
Shunned liver, beef, chicken and pork.
Not due to his health
Nor plain lack of wealth.
The chunks wouldn't stick on his spork.
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05:59 pm
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Finished MM4 maps.
So I finished my collection of Might and Magic IV maps and it is on to V for maps but probably IV for a FAQ this weekend. Apparently any Might&Magic V guide will coincide nicely with the release of HEROES of Might and Magic V. I've written up maps from a text list of locations, and I will be checking rigorously as I did for MM4(after checking the whole Fair Use bit--they're pretty good, but there's a lot a simple list can't explain or illustrate. Oh and they missed a Megacredit in the Golem dungeon.) The biggest-sized one was <11KB(the outside world.) I could maybe make the maps bigger, but I like them laconic. I'm even irritated having to put my name on it.
This weekend I want to try to write up maps for at least Might and Magic V's towns. That'll necessitate playing through them, but my MM4 characters are pretty good now. I'll still have to go back to MM4 for the Dragon Cave, as I have no idea how to get 150+ intelligence to read some of the books there. 100+ might, I can do. But the potential for improvement isn't as ridiculously vast as in MM3. My mapping text file fortunately has incidences of where you can permanently raise statistics, but I'm too lazy to sort it out for my FAQ after a week of work. I guess I just need rest.
Finally paid off the last interest on my second mortgage($24) today. Some closure there although I still have to fax a letter of intent to close the mortgage out. I hope to spend another long weekend just riffling through an RPG although ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sashanan has helpfully warned me that this game'll be a little tougher. But it's apparently got cool stuff like skyroads etc.
I actually thought of a programming project that would help with FAQs. What I want to do is look at some of the old AD&D games and create(you guessed it) maps for them. With a graphical click-interface to pop up walls, etc.
I bet I could do this for gridbased games where I can't locate internal maps, too, although that would be 2 different programs. Still either one would be very fun to try. But I'd need to wait 'til, say, the long Memorial Day weekend.
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02:41 pm
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Solidarity with cell phone users
Friday morning I brought my digital camera along for the morning commute hoping to see the duck that was in the fountain at Grand avenue's L stop. It wasn't there. But when I left work I came back and there were two ducks in the fountain--the one I'd known(green back/neck etc) and another one(grey and spotted) and I took a bunch of pictures of it and half of those had people taking cellphone-cam pictures.
I wound up playing too much Might and Magic IV over the weekend but I haven't been really involved in an RPG for a while...even if it has obvious weaknesses I still enjoyed mapping it out and tinkering with my map creating app to submit it to GameFAQs. It doesn't have a full guide beyond outlines of useful strategies so I may fix that this month. MM4 is rather silly but I have had fun sharpening down where to go and when, to save any future players time. I wonder how much real time I've spent trying to maximize the game-time saved in MM4(solved it in <50 gamedays) but in any case I am enjoying losing myself in the whole world and drawing maps and being vaguely worried about new locations before plowing through them. I enjoyed writing the MM3 maps a bit more but MM4 may get me back in the swing of guide writing. It went so well that I was in enough of a groove to arrive 1+ hour late to a party I'd rsvp'ed for and not really mind.
Oh, I also read through the Might and Magic Compendium, a book I got 4 years ago, to create maps of Might and Magic V before I even played it. Having this sort of book right next to my computer is a tremendous help in using it. Having remote desktop connection also works well, because I don't have to send any files home from work until I'm sure I'll use/download/save them at home, and maybe this will help me cut into/remove in the future the big raft of mails to myself I can't remember why I sent them, which often have many duplicate file attachments.
I also had the wonderful experience of finding damaged Wheat Thins(or the generic equivalent) cracker boxes at a Dollar Tree. They were marked down half-off and I remembered how I loved them as a kid but they seemed so expensive.
Only bad thing that happened was that the CD I left lying on the floor a few weeks...well, Simba rubbed against a canister of air freshener I'm probably never going to use and it landed right on the CD. Oops.
Other catch-up stuff: I paid off my Home Equity Line of Credit in full on the 24th. So it took about 2 1/2 years since I got my first check, although it was really the last 1yr+ when I started taking big chunks out of the debt. It was into 5 digits and now my goal is to kill off my retirement plan loan, which is a bit less, and it is already getting paid off at $250 a month. I set up a spreadsheet at home to track the payoff, and it's fun to tinker with paying $X extra a month and seeing how many years are removed. I did a lot of planning of the sort where I decided I won't need escrow for my property taxes any more, and that may allow me another burst of a few thousand dollars.
I'm thinking seriously about leaving my company after cashing out my stocks a year from now, but there are some projects to do first. Before it was mainly because I wanted to see new faces but now I'd like to BE a new face and the more I get questions from relatively new people at work, the more I realize I could ask these questions, too. But I've put off updating my resume just because...well, I don't know what to do about that.
My offline diary has suffered a bit, which is a shame, because it should be so easy to access. I just say "woo, I'm home, I'll do my journal later," turn the computer on and go on to something else even though it isn't journalizable.
Finally when talking to silverstarhawk this morning for the first time in a while we mentioned we hadn't LJ'ed much. Problem with talking with someone you like on a Monday morning is, it picks you up enough to do the things you should be doing instead of IM'ing, so you often leave them hanging.
Well, I have an impressive list of stuff to do for this month and it is time to get back to doing it. I had a stretch last week where I browsed the Internet listlessly and tried to connect my thoughts--maybe partially related to finally paying the HELOC debt off and wondering "what next"--and I think I'm back to normal.
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10:09 am
[Link] | I saw a duck on the marble island in the center of a fountain as I walked to work today(wonder where the duck lived in the winter,) the second day in a row, and it put me in a poetic mood, which inspired me to write this not strictly true to life limerick.
A high-tech cube dweller named Murph
Got pushed around on his own turf.
He felt like a vassal
For his boss(an asshole)
And worse, he was paid like a serf.
Tomorrow I want to bring my camera. Just in case, again.
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11:23 pm
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1,039,750
I don't know if I've ever broken 1000000 in an arcade game. Well, a shoot em up. I got 1000000 in Super Basketball, which doesn't count because it is incredibly goofy and gives huge bonuses. But after several weeks of trying I cracked a million in Robotron! I'm inspired to do a guide featuring Ned, the narrator for my Deathlord and Magic Candle guides. I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with it. I've been procrastinating other writing due to Robotron and Carl Hiaasen and stupidly waiting around in general for county property tax and federal income tax checks I could've sent for much sooner but only did so earlier this month. But the thing about Robotron: it's so immensely pleasing to slip between two bad guys, or to loop around the board twice or cut back and either get into a firefight or line up 40 grunts, or sneak around trying to pick up humans while dueling just one enemy. And on the other hand there's the frustration of losing a guy early on in the level and having it pile up if you don't watch it--on the restart, the enemies are super fast.
Anyway, Robotron is great once you get the hang of the keyboard. I've been revising my strategies several times and think I have a good one, although my lapses in concentration mean I'll probably never be able to see if the score rolls at 10 million as a coworker did once. Hm, there are always cheats...
Oh and my cupboards are almost bursting with miscellaneous Dollar Store items. They actually have variety in them, and it makes the place feel that much more like home. My cats would rather have empty cupboards but I like having way more than enough for the short haul. Even stuff like a bunch of different boxes of cookies even though it will take me forever to eat them.
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10:13 pm
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2 left-wing limericks
An East-Coast elitist from Yale
Smirked down the campaigning trail.
He gained no plurality
But some techincality
Let him hold our country for sale.
A ne'er do well rich boy named Georgie
Begat a political orgy
Of cronies and pork,
Then pimped up New York
To give us this dope Iraq war, gee!
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12:12 pm
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A very thoughtful doodle trio
The sort where people start off with good points, but then things get personal and well they probably have better things to notice than you doodling. I find doodling something I've always wanted to try opens my mind that much further for later. So here are the maps I drew up, behind the cut. (Haven't used PhotoBucket forever.) I am disappointed I missed the 4 corners in the US(I started with Illinois & got crowded on the bottom of the paper,) and the southern scentral states come out looking a bit weird, and the whole West is too small, but it was lots of fun, and I'd be curious how other people did. Would've tried South America(too few nations) or Asia(breakaway ussr republics baffle me & drawing to scale would be hopeless because of Russia) but had a fun old time with these after I'd gotten tired of the map quizzes here.
By the way, if you want some real fun, try to match up Oceania and the Caribbean. I now have a useless quasi-knowledge of the capitals of each country(I figured I'd try the capitals test to gauge where each country was and pick up weird knowledge on the side) and, well, I just feel clever about it.
I had to write over actual meeting notes for one of these. But anyway, 3 pics below the cut, 40kb and 600x600.
( Maps of Africa/USA/Europe drawn from scratch )
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10:50 pm
[Link] | Today at work I had some hard letters to write--not emotionally hard, but just new-position-of-responsibility hard. A first day of school sort of thing, with new classes and such and wanting to make an impression that we need to plan certain things NOW or we will have that much more work to do in the future. Plus I'm starting to finger people at work that I don't want to look back and say "I spent 8 hours a day with them for X years."
I got to the library. I had hoped to find a penny as I had 34 cents in change, but I didn't find one until I went to Dominick's tonight. Oh well. It's all going to that PetSmart donation jar at the end of the week anyway. I loaded up on Garrison Keillor. Lake Wobegon Days was so wonderfully hilarious I read the footnotes, which included the 95 theses of someone repressed by his Lutheranism. It reminded me of a lot of stuff that bugged me. Then this evening I read Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. aftertherain80 had recommended it to me. He recommended another author I forget. But I enjoyed Hatchet--one of those books you want to get to the end of and don't want it spoiled. I'd tried to read it last Friday but the L was too noisy and I'm glad I started from the beginning. I'll see if I can finish the sequel The River tonight--looks pretty short and should move as quickly.
Pip tackled Simba for the first time ever yesterday. Usually Pip just bounces off when he tries although he made a wonderful somersault last week when he outright missed. But he had his black and white pal on his back and got a few good bites in before it broke up. Usually it's Simba learning from Pip, and then Pip stops doing special stuff, like picking up a ball in his teeth.
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07:24 pm
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Robotron and Casimir Pulaski Day
Today I had two meetings. One lasted for 2 hours, another for 30 minutes. During the first I brought a sheet of paper to take notes and plan out the rest of my week. Optimistically, I started writing in big readable letters but things started dragging on and eventually I had to write on the reverse side. To my chagrin I'd brought a piece of scrap printed paper that had a good deal of text on the other side(no sense just throwing the stuff out) and fortunately Whitney loaned me another piece. It's weird, when I have nothing left to say, I can get some really good ideas, which makes up for the time I worry about work over the weekend.
After the second meeting I decided to go to the library to check out more Garrison Keillor since I've really enjoyed Lake Wobegon Days, what I've gotten through of it. The library was closed, it being Casimir Pulaski day. I'd forgotten about that! But it reminded me of back in school when everyone loved Casimir Pulaski day because he was a Revolutionary War hero we never got tested on, but he still got us a day off school, largely due to the large Polish population in Chicago. Other US regions have other specific holidays(Patriot Day in Boston, which I got as vacation back when our branch was owned by a Boston company.) It was worth the 15 minute walk, which I marked up to a workout and just getting out of the building, to remember the extra fun time off.
Oh, and also, 3 of the last 4 workdays I've written more than 10k characters in daily writing at lulls. This is a good trend. I've also been playing Robotron, which has helped me cement a lot of principles I'd read in some old notes I'd found from a motivational speaker that came to our company. About killing off the big things first, putting off the small things, leaving certain enemies/issues to cancel each other out, and not beating yourself up due to a lack of luck or dumb people around you. It's been amazingly effective. I may write up a GameFAQs guide on all the findings, because it really illustrated some things to me. Oh and it gives a huge adrenaline rush. It may be juvenile, but can't be worse than paying a smooth-talking faith-healing quack two grand.
In one week I've increased my alltime high score from 262000 to 421000. But I'm still tripping myself up in one place: I start looking at my score when I get near a high score, or near the next 25k. This small distraction derails me enough that I usually only increase my high score by at most 25000 at a time. Once I get in/near that rare air, I get into just-survival mode. And I think I do that in life too.
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