Pain in the Wallet

Ended up going down the worst route... got an Arcade plus an EXTENDED fucking warranty. Never again. To add insult to injury, I'm not going to be able to use all the hard drive space from my Elite drive because for whatever stupid reason this XBox doesn't recognize a few of the games are already installed to the hard drive. Urgh. I guess I should be glad that's one of the biggest problems in my life.

FUCK THE XLOSS 3SHITTY

I smoked some salvia divinorum on February 17th, and again on February 2oth. The first experience was nothing to write home about, I had a strange feeling of pins and needles all over my body and distorted vision, but I didn't feel or see anything. However, on the 20th, shit got real. I took a hit, relaxed, and fell into another dimension. I didn't get the full trip effect for there was no full disassociation of body and mind, but I definitely hallucinated. I was hearing and seeing things that weren't there, or more accurately, seeing things that WERE there in a completely different way. I got the pins and needles sensation once again but this time it was accompianied by visual distortion that can be best described as "making the world 2D." I felt like i was running along boundaries that didn't exist where two colors from separate objects formed one contiguous plane. I could have sworn the music that was playing was describing the situation in my mind as it happened. I would like to do it again, this time for real. I want to break through and place my conciousness into another entity, whether it be a brick, a rabbit, or another human.

XBox in a Messbox

So I still haven't been able to fix my XBox and doubt the project will ever come to fruition now that I've found out my particular XBox fan does not use the standard plug. I need a 3 prong fan and I don't know if i can even get one anywhere. This blows. I'm thinking I may just buy an arcade version and say fuck it since nothing seems to be working as I hoped it would. At least all my save files will be there.

2D Game Notes

XNA 2D game creation notes:

• Create method for handling multiple tilesets per map of differing sizes
• Allow map file to specify tile set, tile size, layer depth, collision and occlusion properties
• Allow also to set parallax scrolling variables
• Create method for automatically loading relevant tilesets and objects into memory on map load
  

A Mental Stretch

At the moment I am watching an advertisement for an "indian head" coin. This coin features a Native American in a headdress, opposite a bald eagle. Who are they catering to? Are they catering to the people who were beat down, spat on and nearly destroyed by the invading European settlers? Are they catering to the DDT infested surviving bald eagles? Or are they catering to the coin collectors who... collect coins and think nothing of the significance of the embossed figures? In all honesty, I don't give a shit, this is more a mental exercise to help raise the mental fog I'm feeling.

Migration Utility Ideas

A short (or not so short) list of features to include in the migration utility GUI:

• Source/Destination project browsing by tree control (implemented)
  
• Attachment count/link count per project (not implemented)
  
• Total size of all attachments (not implemented)
• Listing of test linkages (not implemented)
• Validate valid source/destination fields via dropdown list (not implemented)
• Validate valid source/destination field values (list fields only) via dropdown list (not implemented)
• Allow creation of freeform transform code (not implemented)
• Allow creation of transform code via wizard (not implemented)
• Allow creation of transform sheets for each module: Requirements, Test Plan, Test Lab, Defects (not implemented)
• Allow user to choose migration options including: Migration without attachments, selecting source folder and destination folder when dealing with Test Plan and Test Lab modules (not implemented)
• Allow user to create destination folder on the fly by pulling destination directories into a tree control (not implemented)

If any other neat idea crosses my mind, I'll be sure to add it.

Joke in the Machine

Thank goodness I figured out the bug in the migration utility, it's really off-putting when record counts don't match up and you can't understand why. Tomorrow I shall test it on the unwitting system. Things next week should be pretty cool. I've been wanting to at least walk around Nashville since I started making regular trips down and it just may happen this time around. Even if it's nothing spectacular, it'll be something to do to kill an afternoon.

There once was a thief. This thief was distinct from ordinary thieves for he only sought the most valuable of commodities: knowledge. Reports of his burglaries baffled police; car gloveboxes broken into to steal instruction manuals, libraries raided, department stores with instructionless appliances, mailboxes with the names and numbers peeled off. Knowledge, the most valuable resource of all, was being hoarded by one man, leaving the world worse for wear.

Meatborn Civil Lickballs

So... I had a dream about being in what I believe was Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. I was a student in Dr. House's class and for whatever reason was sent to defuse a hostage situation occurring at said place. I was sent along with other people in the class to search through the factory to find two rooms with master mainframe data. I copied this data to some SD cards and destroyed the terminals in order to diffuse the situation. The cops commended my bravery but did not explain the purpose of my actions, nor offered any updates on the situation. Afterwards we headed to the basement of the factory. Along the way people got lost and disappeared and such, mainly because House told us to meet in the basement and we had no idea how to reach the place. After awhile everyone found the place, which consisted of a damp brick room with metal floors and a few giant metal slides. We inserted the cards into a machine located next to the slide and House encouraged us to act as he would when getting on a slide (by this point he was basically a paraplegic for some reason) so that meant no using legs. He yelled at me because, well, I had never impersonated him before and I was using my legs, so I prompty stopped using them lest I get fired. As each person came to the slide, they inserted their own cards into the machine, but the machine eventually got overloaded. It stopped working and shut down the power in the whole basement. At this point House mentioned something about "meatborn civil lickballs" in reference to the music someone began playing after the power went out. The whole time Sadie was also there as part of the class, researching a mass murderer named Williamson whos ghost apparently haunted the place. Then I woke up. What the fuck.