do NOT sleep on your head. trust me.

Last night was fun. I played Diablo II: Lord Of Destruction from around 9pm to 11pm. The plan was to play until midnight, but my body had other ideas.

Shortly before 11pm or so, my eyes noticed the time and thought, "Yay, made it this far! Let's keep going!" The next thing I recall them seeing was "11:38 PM" and my ears were hearing a friend's voice: "Are you still there?" My mind picked up on this and was like, "Whaa?" Then I realized a few things had happened that I couldn't recall happening:

1. My game was no longer on the screen. It was shut down.
2. Notepad was open instead, pre-saved with the title "auto040428.txt."
3. There were odd sentences in that pre-saved mini-document.
4. My microphone was not working - I was unable to respond to my friend's voice on TeamSpeak.
5. Upon further investigation, it turned out the microphone issue was due to being MUTED in my audio settings, and the wrong microphone was selected in the recording settings. Two places that would affect TeamSpeak and prevent my speech from being picked up and sent to my friend's headset.

I was also freezing to the point that my teeth were ready to chatter. My body temperature had obviously dropped.

Explaining all this to my friend, he thought it was quite funny of course, and we agreed it WAS time for bed anyway. In closing he told me I oughta try some more automatic typing, so I thought, hey, yeah, why not? I closed out of my IM and TeamSpeak clients, grabbed a blanket, wrapped myself up in it, pulled my seated self as close to my desk corner as possible (I sit in the crook of two tables), and rested my hands on the keyboard. Then I let myself fall asleep, in hopes of capturing my dreams on my keyboard like I think I've done before.

Ha. So I hoped. THIS time, I woke up at 8am to excruciating pain all throughout the left side of my neck. It was so bad it radiated down my left arm. Which, incidentally, I noticed was not on my desk. It was hanging limply down by my side, seemingly caught by some kind of material. My eyes opened and couldn't quite figure out what they were looking at. Then I realized that my body was arched forward somehow. Ah, I thought, must be I conked out at my desk as planned and my forehead is on it. Yet, it didn't feel hard or smooth enough to be my desk, or even my keyboard! It felt as if I were touching more material.

I went to move and was restrained by what I recognized as my blanket, followed by another bout of excruciating pain down the left side of my body. My mind became more and more alert with each protest. Finally I had a better picture of where I was: My couch. Somehow, at some point during the night, I'd moved myself over to the couch and conked out there. Not sure how I did that, but I obviously had.

The strangest part was my position on the couch. The blanket somehow became wrapped around my body enough to be cumbersome, yet my arms were still loose - in fact, too loose. Their dangling nature became obvious to me as I realized I'd fallen asleep in an arched position, in effect sleeping only on my head and knees.

Weird, huh? I've been known to sleep in odd places and positions, but this one takes the cake. And now I've got the stiffest neck I have ever had in my entire life! And, nothing on Notepad. Drat. I'd /really/ like to know what I was dreaming about LAST night!

Anyway, I've learned one very important thing from all this: Do NOT sleep on your head! You'll get a stiff neck if you do!

Incidentally, this is what I /did/ write in Notepad:

sleepy
so sleepy i can hardly take it anymore
bout to fall asleep
fingers moving not really hinking just listening to them talk
to each other in team speak
very cool
getting dizzy
whoa, hi
tired eyes
so old so modern
five to twelve
dice on a table
1058pm

1106pm

1131pm
so tired
my fingers will simply do the walking for a while
ca't hthink too crazy
red tint man
wrapped up in my clloak
made of woo and sand
like the weather and the wine
i love him yet he won't love me back
insensitive or no I ton't thinkk so
warmth
drool

Don'tcha wonder what goes through my mind? LOL

~nvnohi

WHOO HOO! I'VE GOT MY OWN BUSINESS!!

Yep! It was launched this past Monday. The site is www.techietutorials.com. It's an online teaching site. You'd have to read the page to really get an idea of what that means, but in summary, I plan to help people learn about their computers by using a program called WinVNC. Right over the internet, in real-time. Cool, huh?

Well, it is. I've already experienced a couple setbacks, well, not setbacks, but obstacles. The first was with the site itself. I had it all happy and then I checked it out away from home and discovered the centering was gone, and the paypal link wasn't working properly. So, I had to fix that. Mozilla's great, but you want to make sure you proofread all the html before unleashing it! I had to add a horizontal center attribute to it.

Anyway, the main concern I'm currently having is that perhaps I'm being too difficult for my clients already. I had written this nice, long instruction set on how to install VNC and get the IP address I need to tap in, but then I realized just how long and complicated it was when I put it into html format. Then one of my first clients seemed to think emailing me was enough for me to tap into her system. That made me realize that people will not understand how it works, even with all the explanation in the world. So, I decided to look for an autoinstaller to help me out a bit.

I discovered AutoIt, which is also free software, and it seems to work very well. Took me most of tonight to figure out the scripting (which I'm new to). After several trials and errors, I'm now satisfied that my first script will install VNC on my client's pc without any fuss. It's mainly getting people to understand that I need their IP address that's the problem now, I'm sure.

Regardless, I've got my own business, the site's been up for almost a week now, I've had several hits... all word-of-mouth, but still! MY OWN BUSINESS!! I don't anticipate a large volume of clients right away, but I do think it'll take off sometime down the road. One nice thing is, just because they saw my site, a couple people have asked if I do websites for people, too, which I most certainly can! In fact, I'm doing one for someone right now. I'm sure the business will sprout before I know it. n the meantime, I'm keeping my part-time job, lol!

Well, I'm dead-tired, so I'm gonna conk out here for a bit and then conk out on my bed where I /should/ conk out. ::yawns, head disappears::

~nvnohi

Date Code

OMG!! I just realized why I've been using a date code for as long as I can remember!! It's because I'm a GEEK!! And computer-oriented!! See, back when I was in Junior High (or was it before that? I can't remember anymore), I created what I thought was an original dating system. I felt that Saturday, April 10, 2004 was simply bloated and inefficient, so I made it into this: 4200404106 - where 4 = A.D. (3 is B.C., not that I've ever used it much), 2004=the year, 04=the month (April), 10=the date (10th), and 6=day of the week (Saturday). I've used this system mainly for notes and poetry but it has graced other things as well. At some point I began adding a dash to the end with a number after it to indicate the order I did a set of things in (paintings, poetry, etc, on the same date). And more recently, I've taken the day of the week off and added the time in the military format: HH:MM:SS. This is very helpful to me with digital pictures and is the reason I figured that out. Also much more efficient than adding a dash-number to the end as they are definitely consecutive.

So anyway, I was just researching C and stumbled across Cygwin again. That's when I noticed that other people have also used this type of system! Computers are naturally inclined to use the year first, month, then date, because that is technically the correct configuration to accurately sort by date. You do it by month, day, and year, and you get it all sorted by month. If you have more than one year in there, that means all the Januarys are together regardless of how you want them. Anyway, at cygwin.com, down by "smartmontools," there's an example of a similar date code as I've been fondly calling it for some time now. Their date is 20040225 (obviously February 25th, 2004).

Anyone familiar with Unix will probably recall that its logs use a similar code, too. Since earlier friends never figured out my own code very well, and my geeky friends never even ask me about it, I'm concluding that it's a geek-thing, something that geeks are very aware of either because it's the way their brains are wired or because they deal with computers and so they've got that experience. Regardless, I'm so happy I finally found what seems to be a correlation between my date code and a computer's!! ::does happy geek dance::

Happily dancing over here,

~nvnohi

breakfast in cyberspace

Listening to DI.fm again and a cool song called "Star Track 4.3.2.1" is playing by Hypnotics. While enjoying the tune, I'm also eating breakfast. You know what? I finally found a use for that bake-it-yourself-bread from Schwan's. I don't have a bread pan so I've been making it in a square glass dish, which as you cooks out there might imagine, creates an odd loaf of bread! Needless to say, it's usually quite hard on the outside and by the time a couple days go by, you need to take a hacksaw to it.

Well, in comes imagination. I actually /like/ crunchy stuff. However, I dislike getting airborne crumbs in my favourite keyboard as I eat, so I decided to crunch it into manageable bites ahead of time and have them with breakfast. Not bad that way, especially since I'd smothered it with butter before baking so it's very tasty. Anyway, this morning's breakfast:

* some of my world-infamous Gwaqmu (Grits, cream-of-Wheat, Amarynth, Quinoa, and corn MUsh mixture)
* pancake syrup in the Gwaqmu
* bacon
* strawberries
* crunchy buttery bread
* water
* Earl Grey tea

Cool, huh? The fun thing to do is scoop out the Gwaqmu with the bacon and bread, and dumping the strawberries into the warm Gwaqmu makes them warmer as well, so they don't hurt my teeth with cold. Awesome.

How things come full circle. I remember as a kid dipping toast into my Cream-of-Wheat and eating it with butter and syrup all over it. Now I'm 27 and the only thing that's changed is the materials I do the dip-and-eat thing with. Still Cream-of-Wheat and dry bread, but now I've added stuff to the Cream-of-Wheat and changed the kind of bread I use. Plus I've added strawberries, bacon and Earl Grey in place of stomach-hating milk.

I think I'm coming down with something. I woke up last night with an odd hack in my upper chest, and now I've still got that now and then plus a tired feeling in my shoulders and back. Damn. It's spreading. I can feel the little germs moving around in there. So long as they don't annoy my throat or stomach, though, I suppose I don't mind that much... just when I was getting back into singing, too. I bet it was the ice cream I had yesterday morning. Stupid ice cream. Why must it taste so good?! Oh well, back to breakfast...

Oh! Anyone else out there happen to catch www.fark.com this morning? Either someone hacked into the site or they defaced it themselves as an April Fool's joke. Regardless, it was definitely related to 4/1. I wrote more about this in this month's edition of Mind Your Pixels.

Tired and geeky,

~nvnohi