Recent Stuff...

1. i lost my green handkerchief the other day...!!! Fortunately; i had a backup. i have lots of backups for handkerchiefs, since i tie them to my backpack for colour, and i also keep extras inside. You can never have too many Bandanas...! Either you're loosing them, or someone needs one to wipe up their carrot rich vomit from a bus seat.
2. i ran out of yellow in my Crayola watercolour tray, so i had to get a new one. Yellow is usually the first to go, because i like to use it to lighten the other colours, Plus; if you add yellow to black, you'll get a really kewl, sickly Green...! So i got a new Crayola watercolour tray, even though i was thinking of getting this other brand, but i don't know that name of it... i remember the shop that i got it from, so that's practically the same thing...! The Crayola colours are a little too plasticity for me... The other watercolours would lay down 'flat' when they dried, as opposed to the Crayola colours, that would frequently 'bead up', especially if a patch was laid down a little thickly...!!! But the Crayola Colours are Brighter... and also, the store that i got them from ( Longs ? ) was right there when i got the urge to get a new tray, and the other store was all the way downtown, which i hardly ever visit. ( i used to hang out downtown ALL the time, when i was here the 'first' time ( 1985-1987 ), but it was alot different then, with different people...? ) So anyways, when i threw out my old tray, i accidentally threw out my 'good' paintbrush...!!! So i had to buy a new one, ( $8.49 )and this new one is not a scraggily as my old 'good' one, so it's actually MUCH better. Unfortunately; it's not making my painting any better.
3. i'm getting in the habit of buying new T-shirts, rather than washing them. It used to be that i could go to a Salvation Army or Saint Vincent DePaul's and buy a T-Shirt and Shorts for a Dollar or maybe a Dollar Fifty, and NOW... !!! T-Shirts and Shorts aren't much cheaper than going to Waldomart...!!! ??? They're like $4 each...!!! Ugh! But i hate doing laundry, so the convenience of not having to do laundry is an important factor in this equation.
4. Got a letter the other day from my 'Unit'...??? SSI is going up some unspecified amount, so that FoodStamps, which are now a Debit like Card, and not Stamps or even Coupons or Tickets...???...are going down $8 a month...!
5. Sent my old doodle pad to Marc Calvary.
6. i got a new doodle pad, and this one is much bigger...! more than twice as big, and i'm having a hard time filling up the area. You'd think that i could just draw things bigger, but that is not the translucent way. i have to draw everything at a particular size, and fill up the backgrounds with more details.
7. Sunday; December 4th. My Calculator wouldn't turn on, so i changed the batteries and it came right back up and didn't even loose any memory. If the power goes down too low, it puts itself into 'Coma' Mode...!!! Sometimes when it does this, it's hard to get it to wake up...!!! You have to leave the batteries out for several hours or over night, so that it gets hungry enough to wake up...! There are tricks that you're supposed to be able to do to help it wake up, but i could never get any of these to work and any of my machines...!!! ( ??? ) Fortunately; i've only ( ! ) lost memory Once this trip. As i tell everyone from time to time, it's GOOD to burn down your house every ten years or so.
8. One program i have on my Calculator is called 'Weird'. It measures how Weird things are in the world and then displays this quantitative amount, along with a message from the dead. The dead are not clear communicators, so this feature is somewhat less useful. i got the idea of the Weirdness meter from listening to Art Bell... He had a guest on that built one of these machines and he said that it accurately predicted The Death of Princess Diana and Various Earthquakes...!!! The principle is very simple, you just generate a whole bunch of Random Numbers and calculate their Average... Which should be ZERO...! When it's not Zero, then that means that The Universe is out of Synchronous with itself. The way i have mine set up, when it's Negatively not Zero, it draws a pie slice to the left, and when it's Positively not Zero, it draws a pie slice to the right. Lately; it's been generating alot of left leaning pie slices, which correlates strongly with the amount of sad wiggiliness i've been experiencing...!!! The dead are not telling me anything useful.
9. November 21: last laundry $8.75 ( ? )
10. i started a cold on November 20th, and it is STILL hanging on. Most of the sniffling is gone, but i've had a dry cough for about a week and a half... Typically, colds last a month in Hawai'i, so i still have 6 days to go.
11. i had to call the Cingular Service number the other day, since i got a new Debit Card, and i had to tell them the new expiration date...! i hate calling their Service number...!!! All the operators are Indian's and it is hard to understand what they're saying, Plus the connections are always very poor...! Oh, how i hate cell phones... i just can't understand how people can talk on them so much if their connections are even 1/100 as bad as mine are...!!! Maybe i have a cheap phone...??? So besides having to call them and tell them my new expiration date, i had to Log On to my computer account with them and Authorize my next Automatic Payment...!!! And 'Rusty' didn't tell me how to do this, so i had to figure it out on my own...!!! i hate having to figure things out on my own. i would be much happier if i never had to think again. Thinking makes my brain hurt, and the screaming hamsters in there become very surly. If only they would let me sleep at night.
12. i finished a book called In Code about this Irish girl that wins a bunch of prizes for her understanding of Modern Encryption Methods... and it discussed One Way Functions a little bit... So now i am interested in One Way Functions. These are mathematical do-hickies that are easy to calculate one way, but given the result, you can not figure out what the original input was...! It turns out that NO ONE has figured out a really good One Way Function that is Definitely One Way...! The closest they've come is The RSA Encryption Method, which is the Standard for Commerce and Spying these days... But they're just guessing when they say it's secure.
13. My elbow owie is coming along.
14. i have two new owies though, and one is getting worse, and one may ( ? ) be getting better. It's really no use trying to 'fix' them... i think they just have to run their course...???
15. i added a Magazines section to my side bar.
16. And a Glossary.
17. i also have a Second Blog; Intelligent Designer, under Fun Places to Visit. i keep meaning to work on it some more, but i get started on new projects all the time, and forget about the older ones... My current project is one that i started YEARS ago... Called Dots. It's a program to draw a collection of dots in a spiral. It sounds easy enough, but i want the size of the dots to Vary, and so the Radius has to change, and the spacing, and i want them to all fit snuggly together, and my brain does not want to cooperate with telling me how to do this...!!!
18. i told --?-- that i was going to add my address to my Resume, but it's so close to Chrstmsa that i'm afraid that if i add it now, someone will send me something Chrstmsay... and i HATE getting Chrstmsa presents... they are always so sad. i will add it in January.
19. i've decided to keep using 'sproogles'.
20. more later.