Note for essay: “alcohol ad. note sense of belonging.”

So. SBC shut off our internet cuz they’re dumb. Speakeasy will get ours up by friday, supposedly.

Apparently SBC’s Phone division is every bit as inept as their DSL division! It’s good to see that level of consistency.

So I called up the Speakeasy guy the day our new DSL modem arrived in the mail. He said that even though the modem made it there ok, their side isn’t set up yet. For that to happen, our phone company (which happens to be SBC) has to come out and flip some switch or something (the window where they’d come out was between 8 am and 5 pm, and someone was supposed to be there the whole time… on a fuckin tuesday). After they do their thing, they’re supposed to call Covad (Speakeasy’s DSL company, as it were) and they’re supposed to turn something on at their end.

Well, I got up Tuesday morning around 9ish, and sure enough, no internet. So now I’m wondering if SBC did something stupid.

I imagine there’s some on-off switch that says “DSL Availability” for our apartment. And all the SBC guy did was come over and flip the switch, which was set to “on”, not realizing that we still wanted DSL, just not theirs.

So I think tomorrow I’m going to call Speakeasy and see if maybe they were supposed to leave that switch alone.

Other than that, not much going on.

Stop… Talking… About… Sims… 2…

I didn’t even realize the game was out til about a week ago. And now I can’t stop hearing about it. So and So’s diary mentions it. /. runs two stories a day on it. Somethingawful.com did a (hilarious) bit on it. And now penny-arcade reminds me of just how The Sims stole my life away the first time it came out.

But thankfully, it doesn’t run on Linux. And that’s one of the few times I’ll say that. Not cuz I don’t want to play it… but because if I were to play it, I’d put more time into it than I would Half-Life 2 (delayed again, btw), FarCry, and Doom 3, put together.

wow, that last one was all fucked up. Fixed.

Anyway, I remembered that other thing I forgot from last week.

It was a guy wearing a shirt with that Tri-colored logo, like they have for baseball and basketball?

Except instead of a basketball or baseball player? The figure inside was a Zerg Drone.

Two things.

1) They put a DDR machine in the middle of the lounge, bleh. But then there’s this guy that looks like Ron Gochez (a suburban Che` for you non-SDSU’ers), complete with cammie bandana rockin the thing like its going outta style. We’re talking jumps, spins, leg lifts, hand motions. It’s insane. He just got over 240 combos.

2) I can’t remember the second one anymore.

So, the other day I picked up Tres from the airport and took him to go pick up his car, at Tom’s house. This was pretty cool, cuz I hadn’t seen Tom in a while. When I mentioned that I was interested in playing guitar, his eyes lit up and he attempted to teach me a few things.

So I learned some barre chords, which are fairly hard, and a couple open chords, which are fairly easy. He started trying to teach me Bad Fish, by Sublime, but I’m not fast enough yet. If you’re familiar with the song, and you listen carefully, you can tell that its close, and I can personally tell I’m already getting better. So then Tom said, “here, borrow this guitar til you get your own”. To which I said, “sweeeet”.

So now I have a temporary guitar. It’s a Nylon 6-string Acoustic. I’d forgetten entirely about Nylon string guitars. And when I actually played this one I was surprised that I could tell the difference in the sound between steel and nylon string. Oh, and the guitar? Yeah. It’s a Royce. Yup, thats right. A Royce. Now for those of you wondering what a Royce is, it’s a guitar brand. This will probably be the first and last time you ever hear of a Royce brand guitar, even if you were to pick up a guitar tomorrow and become infused with the combined spirits of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bob Dylan (ooops, nm he’s not dead yet), and Frank Zappa (cuz in every five-man-team in which their-forces-combine in some communist idea that by giving up personal glory/power they serve a greater good, there’s always one guy who’s just kinda there cuz he’s worthless by himself [“Power of Heart”? what kind of crappy power is that?] So yeah. That’s why I put the Genius in France here.) Anyway. If you were to be infused with their combined souls tomorrow, and become the greatest guitar god(dess) EVAR, you’d still probably never hear of it, because its some no name brand.

Wow, that was a long paragraph. I still want to get my Ovation, though. I guess I’ll just need to get 3 guitars now. My Ovation, an acoustic Nylon string, and eventually an Electric ;o)

Anyways, gotta write a paper.

Guri is no longer with us. Eowyn won’t be shortly. These are probably things better left untalked about.

I’m beginning to realize I don’t like javascript. I mean, it seems nice and all… but it also sucks in every way perl kicks ass. If there’s a problem, for example, the script simply doesn’t run. Unlike perl, which will either say ‘hey dude, you screwed up over here, might wanna fix this shit here.’ or even just running and stopping after a few things.

No, it just doesn’t do anything. I get a blank page. And thats not even for big errors. That’s just misspelling a word, misplacing a punctuation mark.

Oh well.

I want these.

Ah. Our contract with SBC is finished as of September 10th. We’re kinda deciding between Speakeasy and Cox. I’m leaning toward Speakeasy, because even though its $10 more than Cox, they’re more than friendly to running servers. Which you can’t really say for any other ISP. Especially SBC. Unfortunately, it looks like currently their cheapest Static IP service is $60/month, which is a little out of our price range. But I’ve dealt with dynamic IP’s thus far, another few months won’t kill me.

Anyway, we’ve yet to make any plans with regards to our email service, so if you notice I’m not online for a few days, its cuz I’m waiting for internet. Don’t send me anymore mail to my SBC account, btw. Use the email address at the top of this page… my ‘rohan’ account.

This is interesting. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Apparently my political ideology is somewhere around Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and The Dalai Lama… something like a Socialist Libertarian… which fits, I think.

In other news, I’ve made some serious progress on my web-journal. Right now it reads from a file for certain info, then posts that info into a webpage. As of right now the only way to add posts is to edit this file, but I’ve started work on the ‘add entry’ page. Then I work on handling replies. Then I can pretty it up ;o)

btw. If you ever had any doubts about Third Eye Blind having some … err… songs inappropriate for mixed company… download Slow Motion by them. They don’t even try to slip in innuendo… its just right there.

Leon, the best damn common goldfish ever, passed away yesterday. He was about seven years old.

Ok, I was prematurely interupted by a Star Craft match.

Back to the guitars.

The one I want looks like this. Though I’m not sure about which color.

Anyway. So you may wonder what the difference is. Well, it’s lighter, its not as bulky, and the action is great. Action being how easy it is to hit the frets. It just felt right. For a while I was really weirded out by the rounded back, so I didn’t even try one, but I actually like it better having held one. It’s also the same one Clare has, and she loves hers.

I’ve also learned two chords now! I know a C Major and a D Major. w00t. I’m on my way to becoming a rockstar…

I need it. At first, I went to Scotty’s Guitar… I figure, hey, support local stores wherever possible. So I stop on by, look around, and find this Fender DG-8 Acoustic starter kit for $250. Comes with case, extra set of strings, tuner, picks, and a teacher DVD. Well, as it turns out, that set isn’t thought of very highly. I guess that makes sense, as it is amazingly cheap.

Well, every day since then I’ve been to Guitar Center. I’ve messed with Yamahas, Taylors, Martins, Epiphones, Fenders… and then Tristan pointed out an Ovation. And so I went and picked one up to try. Oh my God. I still can’t play guitar, but now I want to more than ever. And I want this one.