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IvanF's Windows9x Tweaks & Dweaks for Your UI! - Thursday, April 29th, 2004 Y2kk Update: Fuck. I feel like I just graduated. Or rather... I feel like everyone else around me did... but as for me?... I feel like I’m stuck in the middle. I feel like I’m stuck in the mud. Because truth be told, clear as mud... ... I feel like a failure. Because you’d think... you’d at least assume... that after three years in the engineering corps of one of the world’s most recognized universities? That at least I’d feel like I had a future. But I guess that’s always been my weakness... I’m always living in the past... ... and always appalled by my past... Because you see, I’ve stumbled across a sort of crossroads as of late. It’s usually around this time that I get into menial, meaningless contact with old high school friends of mine... Take for instance my old childhood best friend. For almost three straight years now, I’ve been the one who calls him, only to have him refuse my messages. He’s given me excuses why he ignores my calls, whenever I’ve seen him in person - that he’s afraid I’m mock him for his love life, that I never take up his offer of a dinner with his friends, none of which I have ever met or whatnot... But nevertheless, despite all the times he’s ignored me, despite all the times that he’s desperately shown that he wants nothing to do with me, I still always call him. The last time being around Christmas actually, only for him to never return the call... And you know what kind of sucks right now? For once, just for once, I actually don’t want to call him... I really don’t see a point in doing so. He doesn’t care... and I only care that he doesn’t care, and nothing more... But he was my goddam best friend in high school! He was my only remaining friend from elementary school. I can’t just hide from the fact that I know him... I just can’t shy from the fact that I knew him... I can’t just run from the fact that he knows me... and yet?... And yet for so many others from my past, for so many of my other high school peers from the past, even when we meet, I pretend like I’ve never known them before. Before high school ended, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t be one of those asshole, elitist college pricks who ignore everyone from the past, simply because it doesn’t conform with the goals of the present... But the fear – the fear of something intangible – eventually gets to you, you know? And breaks your naive heart in the process... A while back, I got a call from one of my other close high school friends, and he was looking for a reunion of some sorts. He invited me, which was kind of him, but... Yeah, there was a ‘but’. I responded with a ‘but’... Not just because he asked to see me during my goddam exam time (after he was done of course, though I was not), but because? Well?... because I was scared of seeing him. I didn’t know what to say to him, honestly. It’s not that our conversations would be meaningless, because I simply can’t do meaningless small talk with a straight face. But rather, I’d try to put meaning into our conversations, and it’d just end up awkward like always, because I always try to pretend like he’s still my friend. I always try to convince myself that he’s still my friend. But he’s not. Friends don’t just say hello. They talk. They walk. They smile. They fucking keep in contact. And I’m just as guilty for all the above as any of my friends are, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m trying to keep friendships that simply haven’t been there for years. And now I’m afraid... I did the same damn thing to my elementary school friends when I left for high school... and I forgot all about everyone I knew and promised to remember in high school long before my first term at university was even up... And now I’ve reached a similar crossroads all over again, and I know, I just know the history will end up repeating itself. And I don’t like the fact that it will one damn bit... And I don’t like the fact that so many of my friends are leaving. But what the fuck can I do? ... There’s really only one friend that I’ve kept in contact with since high school. He calls me every week, making me feel guilty that I’m never the one who pays for the phone bills... He’s probably the closest friend that I have. Hell, the mere fact alone that he’s the only damn person in the entire universe who regularly reads my updates makes him automatically the best person in the world in my eyes... But the thing is, he’s moving away. Technically, I shouldn’t find that a problem – afterall, we do live in different cities already, with me around Toronto and him in Waterloo... But he’s moving out of the country this time. For good. And to be honest, every time in the past when he did stay in the good ol’ US of A, it kinda got lonely and frosty up here in the north. We still talked over e-mail, but it just wasn’t the same. He still called whenever I wrote a ghastly movie review that he refused to agree with, but it just wasn’t the same. And now the problem is, I’ll have to change the meaning of my words, and twist them around in ways that I simply do not wish to see fit. Because from now on, e-mail will be the same. Rare telephone conversations will be the same. Because goddammit Powell, they’re going to become the norm... I hate to sound oversentimental, and in many ways, I’m trying too hard to be sentimental, if only in the hopes of redeeming myself for all those lost years where I simply haven’t given a damn. But honestly... If there’s one constant in the universe I’ve never liked, it’s change. And I’m going to miss him. No doot aboot it. Regardless of how often I still hear his voice, I’m still going to miss him. Because dammit, things just won’t be the same. On more than one front, actually... The battlefield lines... it’s war in them trenches, you know?... Because it’s not just him that’s leaving. My best friend, or at least the nicest friend, that I’ve made at university is moving away as well... Hell, I still remember the day I met him. I really don’t need to reiterate it, considering I wrote about it more than enough the day it happened on my download site, but still... just for the memories... just for the memoirs... I was banging my head on the concrete wall outside of a tutorial room at the time. I had tried making new friends at university that week, and ended up getting stuck with a bunch of guys who didn’t give a damn about me, and thus I couldn’t give a damn about them (including the bastard from this year, but that’s a story for another day...)... But as I was banging my head senselessly against the wall (since there were no high school lockers in the area really, like I always banged my head on in high school), an innocent-looking guy from Pakistan started snickering at me. And when I looked up, I asked him what was so funny? I mean, I had honestly forgotten that mashing my brains apart on walls could be strange to somebody else... We talked a bit, then we left when we learned we had no goddam tutorial that week (God, we freshmen were dumb... obviously, I haven’t changed...). I met him on the subway ride back that same day actually, finally caught his name, and what do you know? I made my first friend. And through him quite honestly, I met all my other friends in university, or at least the ones who have actually impacted on me. I owe him a lot for that... not to mention all the papers and projects and studying he’s helped me with like a brother. Ditto on that, but that’s besides the point... And now he’s leaving. He and another friend of mine got jobs at RIM in Waterloo this year. And because they’re on the 16-month Utoronto co-op system, they’ll be leaving tomorrow for a foreign place to stay and an entire year off from university... And they’re not the only ones. Almost half, if not more, of the people I care about in university are leaving for greener pastures, at least in terms of minimum one year co-op positions at least. Another good friend of mine is going to work at Celestica, another will be working at MD Robotics, and one of my other friends is actually going down south to California to work at Actel for the entire damn year... And congratulations go out to all of them. Absolutely. I can only wish them the best of wishes, and a God Speed, a Good Will Hunting, and a God Bless Us, Everyone... But of course, my true motifs belittle and belie my not so diligent wording. I mean, I’ve tried being happy that they all got great positions. I’ve tried being proud of them, for working so hard at interviews and getting the job done. And I’ve tried, I’ve really tried just to want to be able to smile a genuine smile whenever they discuss their travel plans or when they say their goodbyes to their friends. But as the selfish, fucking bastard that I am, everything I want to be, and everything I want to believe, is a lie. I mean, what happened to never leaving a fucking man behind?... ... I have only myself to blame. It’s my fault and only my fault, and yet I’m sort of relieved that it is... I’m still in the hunt for a job, but co-op positions are pretty much now out of the question, meaning I’ll be most likely going back to an empty shell of a school next year... I’ll have little to no friends left over, with my only good friend remaining in another Engineering division than mine. I’ll have no-one to help me in labs, no-one to study with in the libraries, and no-one to complain about the fucking Maple Leafs to. I’ll have nobody to mock the Pakistani Cricket team with, nobody to nip coffee with, nobody to sip global politics with, and nobody – and I mean nobody – to listen to me rant and whine and cunt and complain about all the crap things I only release on these goddam webpages of mine... I’ll have little to no friends left, period. And if I want to stay sane in this university, I’ll have no choice but to make new ones... ... and ay, there lies the rub... ... ... replacement friends... ... Fuck you, replacement friends. ... Because the cycle of my life – of all life, perhaps – is repeating itself, like the sands of time and the gusts of God’s wind... My friends were once considered in my eyes as replacement friends. But no longer... they’re all I have, and they’re all I care for right now... and once again, my friends are moving off, and I’ll try to keep contact with them. I’ll try to keep e-mailing them. I’ll try to keep messaging them over ICQ and MSN... But it won’t be the goddam same as it used to be, now will it? I won’t be dragged to the International Student Center anymore, and be forced to smell the feet of fifty praying Muslim men who took off all their shoes at once... I won’t be carried off to foreign restaurants anymore, where the ethnic owners mock me for being a Chinese devil with no good taste in foods (but that’s a story for another day...).. Hell, knowing me, I probably wouldn’t even study anymore. If it wasn’t for our study groups, I don’t think I ever would’ve even cared enough for most of the midterms I passed or whatnot in the past (the ones I failed are an old testament to that...)... To be honest, I don’t want to make new friends. Because undoubtedly, they’ll make me forget all about my old friends, the ones right now that my mind refuses to lose. The ones my mind simply cannot come to grips with, of simply slipping out of grasp... And who knows? Perhaps just like that one close friend of mine from high school, maybe I and my university departees will be keeping in touch? Maybe I’ll even get lucky enough to fail fourth year and rejoin them back in the graduating class of 2006?... yeah... if only I were so lucky... I can win the fucking lottery then. By sheer dumb luck, with dumb being the key word... In a way, I know what would’ve been perfect. If only I had gotten a co-op job at RIM, I wouldn’t be feeling this sense of loss, worthlessness, and indictment that I am right now. Not as badly, at least... If only I could’ve moved to Waterloo with a job in hand, I could’ve stuck with two of my closest university friends, while getting to watch all those movies I’ve refused to watch with my close high school friend in the process... that is, if he was staying in Canada. And that is, if only I had gotten a fucking job at RIM... But I didn’t, and it wasn’t because of anybody else but me. It’s my fault and only my fault, and you know why?... Because I didn’t even apply... Not to RIM at least... and every place else just shut me out... ... You know what’s really been haunting me as of late? It’s that damn graduation formal night of high school of mine... In my early university years, I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing my obsession just standing there, silently and stalkingly weeping in that torrid dress of hers (note to myself: never tell her that if I ever see her in person again...), all alone, waiting for a man to sweep her off her feet for a final dance at the ball... and I goddam dropped the ball... But to be honest, while I still think back to that moment from time to time, it no longer guts me inside as much as something else does... something that I never would’ve predicted... I got voted as person most likely to succeed and be rich in life... At the time, I just shrugged it off. If the class knew me, they would’ve known that money was the absolute LAST thing I wanted in life (although I obviously am obsessed with all material possessions other than my checkbook)... But you know what happened to me that night, because of that one damn meaningless trophy?... I started wanting to be somebody that I simply cannot be, nor want to be... I wanted to become rich, not because I wanted the money, but simply so I can live up to the standards of my fellow classmates. I sadly wanted to become successful, if only because five years down the road from then, I wouldn’t feel terrible for letting everyone down, for not being the person that thought I would be... Fucking retarded of me, eh? But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s been plaguing my mind for the past goddam month or more... Because almost four years down the road, I still can’t live down the fact that people expected me to be somebody that I’m simply not... and that I’m simply not the person that everyone expects me to be. It’s my eternal weakness – not just of living in the past, but of living vicariously through the eyes of another... I don’t want to be rich, because I don’t want to know the pain and toil and turmoil that does along with such a desperado fate. And yet I can’t stand being myself anymore, if only because of goddam peer pressure from friends that I no longer have! From ghosts of graduation pasts... from friends that were never even friends before in the first place! Just misguided bigots... with a meaningless ballot in the end that like everything else in life, I took far too much to heart... But the fact that so many of my friends are leaving soon... that so many of my friends will be gone... for jobs, for personal gain, and for other reasons that I simply do not know.... well then... I just can’t shake the damn feeling of a mid-life crisis already creeping up and down my goddam shallow excuse of a spine... Leave no man behind. But I guess, I’m no man... ... Take it like a man, I always say. And eventually, I will... The cycle shall repeat itself. The circle of life shall go on... My friends will leave me, and make new friends and alliances of their own. I’ll stay behind, regardless of whether I can still find an engineering summer job or not, and end up making new friends in fourth year from all the students returning from their co-op job positions... My close high school friend from Waterloo will still call me from time to time from America, and I suppose once I get his phone number, I’d put a few hits on my own bill, if only I paid for my phone bill that is... I’ll eventually forget all about some of the friends that were never that close anyhew, and perhaps realize that some of my friendships with some of the lost were stronger than I ever realized when they were by my side... The cycle of life shall repeat. Over and over and fucking over again... yet things just won’t be the same... I’m going to miss them. All of them. I really am... things just won’t be the same... ... and, ay... well... I sure as hell have a lot of wanton years to go on, to not only get a fucking job, but to just try to figure out to myself, what the fuck do I really want? What the fuck do I want with my future? ... blah blah blah... yadda yadda yadda... you know the drill... Change is the only fucking constant in the universe, and surprise, surprise, change in the only thing that I hate in this goddam world (... next to Sony, FOBs, and just about every single movie out there, but that’s besides the point...)... I’ll deal though, you know? Right now I shudder at the fact that a Y2kk Update just two years down the road, will be of me complaining about ignoring my university friends the way I ignore most of my high school friends right about now. No doot aboot it... But if there’s anything I’ve learned from the past. If there’s anything I’ve gained from living in the goddam past... it’s that I always end up becoming the person that I fear most. It’s almost as if I always end up becoming the person that I absolutely hate most... As if I know the future... Which means... why, who knows then? Maybe I will become rich and successful someday then... ... someday, maybe... ... ... I mean, "somebody’s gotta graduate at the bottom of their class. How do you know it’s not your doctor?"... ... ... yeah, well, in the meantime, time to send out some more job applications then... ... and time to wish my friends – all my friends, especially those who can’t hear me – a God Speed, a Good Will Hunting, and a very meaningful, God Bless Us, Everyone... ... leave no man behind, lest we ever forget... ... fuck, I feel like I just graduated... ... not that they’d ever read this webpage of mine, mind you... |
Whine to the no-name whiner at: flamemycrowsoft@hotmail.com
- Well, since my cool little ivanf@flame.mycrowsoft.com e-mail address
only works every other day (just like a good copy of Windows95...), I'm switching you guys
over to my hotmail account. I only use my hotmail one for unimportant stuff like e-mails
from new friends, flames from not so new friends, and other insignificant stuff like
mandatory online lessons from my university... So go right on ahead, and flame away,
because as soon as I get enough piss-off letters, I'm opening my own flame IvanF section @
flame.mycrowsoft.com -
[ c. bored visitors who will never return...]
Sunday, March 28th, 2004
Y2kk Update: I almost got run over by a truck the other day.
Ah, good memories...
I’ve gotten a bit too cocky on the mean streets of Toronto, it seems... The light turned red at an intersection on Yonge St, near Bloor. I wasn’t anywhere close to the stupid white lines that you’re supposed to cross between, and normally, it doesn’t really matter. Since Yonge Street is always busy with pedestrians jaywalking, I rarely see cars flooring it near intersections where they know a half dozen school children may just cross out of sheer, shitty boredom... And considering I’ve done the same about a few hundred times fold in the past year alone, even though I wasn’t close to the stupid white lines, I began crossing the street anyhew. I was an absolute, motherfucking, canucking idiot though...
I didn’t look to my left.
While drivers in cars may be smart enough to slow down before hitting a red light, apparently fucking truck drivers aren’t. It was almost too late for me actually... I jumped back at the very last second, and my goddam head was still spinning – still only a fucking inch off of where the goddam truck would’ve hit me and torn apart my brain.
Guess I got lucky, eh? And ay, there lies the rub...
They say that when you’re close to death, your life starts flashing before your eyes. But the truth of the matter is, unless my situation doesn’t count despite my heart beating out of my chest, nothing races through your mind except for one fucking thing:
"God, that was stupid."
... or, "God, this fucking sucks". Take your pick. Apparently, I chose both...
But that’s not to say that the whole mythos of life flashing before your eyes is... well... a complete myth... Because as soon as I caught my breath from that goddam truck incident (who ever thought a massive truck could stop right on the white line going 70 km/h?...), my life did start flashing before my eyes. I looked back at how damn stupid I’ve been for the past few weeks, wondered whether I was really even close to be the decent human being that I had always hoped I’d turn out to be, and realized something...
My life? Flashing before my eyes?... it really, really fucking sucked...
I got a strange omen later that night, which only fed the fires of my continuing recap of my meaningless, existentialist life... You see, for the first time in God knows how long, one of my old high school friends just coincidentally decided to contact me over ICQ later that night (even though he’s put me on his invisible list for the past three years, I think...). You see, him and I used to be close... Hell, I started my fucking download site, hoping that he of all people would read it... he didn’t, but that’s besides the point...
So what did he want from me that fair night?...
Seems he’s become quite the nostalgic redemptionist as well. Seems he’s been rounding up the whole high school gang, hoping for one last sentimental hooray by revisiting our old high school and then having a reunion dinner later that night... The thing is, I actually had a real excuse to turn him down. He set the date of this little soiree right smack dab in the middle of my final exam season... but of course, that wasn’t the only reason on my mind for rejecting his offer right away... The truth of the matter is, my little close encounter of the fraidy cat kind with the truck that morning sort of taught me a little lesson...
I really don’t care about my life very much, now do I? Not when it comes to anything outside of my own home, mind you...
And to be honest, except for that one high school friend who has actually kept contact with me over the past three years, I really didn’t give a damn about this perfect stranger now talking to me over ICQ... And I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to show up at some little barbecue of a dinner, only to make an ass of myself by panicking every damn time someone I used to know but never cared for would simply ask for my name... To be honest, I miss high school. I really do... I just don’t want to ever go back and burst my bubble, by fucking reminding myself of how damn worthless my time there really was... or how worthless I really was...
Ah, the memories... all the joys I’ve felt...
That was the kind of shit that was racing through my mind the minutes after that truck nearely raced over my fucking foot without even stopping or tooting its horn to care... And it’s not like it was a life changing event or some crap like that for me. It just put some things into perspective, that’s all... or at least, provided a bit of Clarica clarity to the situation at hand... Because sadly enough, after I nearly died that morning, I tried thinking back to my high school friends, only to realize that I didn’t care about them anymore... not enough to actually contact them, it seems... I thought back to my university friends, and realized that as enjoyable as they are to hang out with, I’ll probably just end up ignoring them five years from now like I do with my high school friends. Hell, in just a couple years time, I might already pretend like none of them exist when we cross each other’s paths, whether I like it or not... I thought back to school, and realized how fruitless just being there without learning a damn thing has been to me. And if I actually have learned something at university except the experience of not learning anything? Then I guess learning has been a complete waste of my time as well... to be honest, I really don’t know what wouldn’t be a complete waste of my time...
And you know what the saddest part of the whole damn epiphany was for me?...
It seemed the only thing I cared about...
... was the fact that I was too fucking busy with midterms and projects, to write on time for this goddam Tweakui website’s bloody hell fourth anniversary... March 15th, 2004 indeed...
All I wanted to do was write. Write for some no-name website that the entire world doesn’t care if it even exists... Yet I do for some odd reason. I care that my website exists, and care that the world doesn’t care that my website exists... and ay, there lies the rub for me... because sometimes I just don’t get how something so meaningless, could goddam provide the only bloody hell meaning in my life besides my family, it seems...
And I was seriously pissed off as hell when I couldn’t write on March 15th, the anniversary of this website’s incarnation... I mean wow, four years of just writing shit on five different websites, none of which anybody ever reads... The years go by faster and faster each and every fucking season, it seems... I must be getting old...
I had some decent reasons why I haven’t been able to write on this website for God knows how long now, and much of it is actually due to the fact that contrary to my own popular hopes and dreams, I’m actually still fucking stuck in the middle of homework limbo when it comes to school. I mean, count’em – I had three – yes, fucking three midterms in the span of a week, and I sure as hell know I didn’t do well on a single one of them... The week of my website’s birthday, I had my first of the three midterms I believe. And I knew right when I opened up those test papers, that I sure as hell wasn’t going to get anything close to a pass in the course... But I tried my hardest anyhew. I mean, I’ve pulled miracles before. Why not now?... but it seems that my luck has run out. I got fucking 27% on that goddam midterm worth a fucking 37% of my final mark. Unless my petition to the professor rings through, it’s now all but impossible for me to even muster a 50% as a final mark in the course... And the midterm’s class average? Here’s the real kicker... I was hoping for a low average. And once again, the class delivered... a lovely 62% class average... Oh, how wonderful for them, I sneer...
What a wonderful, Wonderfalls life, indeed...
It’s not like the rest of my marks are going the way I planned either... At least I have the sad excuse for that 27% midterm of mine, that I failed it so miserably because it deals with Electrical and Mechanical equation crap, when the only thing I seem to know well is goddam stuff dealing with computers... But then what’s my sorry ass excuse for the 40.5% I got on my Operating Systems midterm? The very fucking same midterm that I thought was easy beyond belief, even after I wrote it and walked away, expecting a 90% or some crap like that... If you read my download site about three weeks ago, you’d know that I wrote a petition to the professor to get my midterm remarked and possibly dropped... and, well... I got the results of my petition just the other day. Not only was my demand flatly DENIED, but the professor didn’t even fucking show mercy on my goddam remark! I’m still fucking stuck with a 40.5% in the fucking course that I fucking thought was embarrassingly easy, when the class average after the remark just jumped from 61% to a fucking 65%! I mean, what the fuck is up with that?...
And without any new television shows since the February sweeps besides goddam reality TV, reality has been indeed cruel to me... Hell, I’d even take a new episode of Smallville over this shit. Now THAT’S desperate...
But it wasn’t my midterms that were really keeping me from ever updating this
webpage of mine in time. It was my sorry ass, fucking labs and assignments that killed me
softly, each and every day I was forced to work every damn hour of the week to finish
them... I mean, I expected my networking assignment to take only a day or so. I had a
genius of a partner who was so damn smart at his networking shit, that I knew I
couldn’t do anything for the lab without him screaming in my face at how incompetent
I was... He told me to my very face that he was going to do the whole lab. And of course,
I volunteered to just let him go through with it, considering I had little choice in the
matter... anything I wrote, he’s just disregard and erase, and I personally
didn’t mind, mind you...
That was then. This is now...
The fat fuck.
In case you didn’t read my download site the other week, my partner blamed me for our lack of a perfect mark for the first lab. I wasn’t that pissed off about it at the time though... I mean, sure he went to the professor and talked about me behind my back. Sure he literally cried wolf to the professor that I was an inept freeloader who costed him his perfect mark, but why should I care? Even though it really wasn’t my choice to do so, he was right – I did freeload on the first lab... and besides, how could I possible stay mad at the fat, sweaty pig, when he was oh so sadly denied to abandon me and our group after talking the professor? He wanted to splinter from the group – instead, he was stuck carrying my ass for the rest of the year, and I was lovin’ it... a guilty, cruel, distasteful pleasure, but I was lovin’ it... I loved the look on his face the day after... the TA told me all the nasty things he said behind my back, and here he was, forced to work with me yet again... I cherished the moment, if only out of spite and revenge... and once again, I brought myself to believe that I wouldn’t have to do a damn thing for the second networking lab... Once again, he told me to my face that I wouldn’t need to. And I was more than happy to oblige. He did seem like a good person in the end, afterall...
That was then. This is now....
The fat, fucking fuck.
He fucking went behind my back a second fucking time! He went to the professor a second time, this time without even telling me, and what do you know? I don’t know what he goddam said to get his way, but he did this time. Two weeks into the fucking assignment, he managed to get himself out of the fucking group, and now what? I had no fucking partners! Without even telling me that I was now alone, I was forced to do the entire assignment in HALF of the time allotted, since everything that was actually done, my fucking fat partner took... Whether this was my fault or not, I didn’t really care anymore. I was pissed as fucking hell at the fact that I wasn’t just fucking stabbed in the back once by this fat fuck, but twice! I mean, yes I admit I freeloaded, but only because he wouldn’t let me do anything for the lab. Yes, I admit it was partly my fault that we didn’t get perfect on the first lab, but only because he wouldn’t even comment his own code to explain to me how the hell it worked... And now what the fuck did the fat fuck do, but fucking leave me alone with no partners to do a fucking lab meant for three fucking people! I mean, what the fuck is the matter with him?! I may be a freeloader, but I sure as hell ain’t no goddam traitor...
I learned of his betrayal late in the week. I was understandably pissed off as hell... even more so when the stupid fat fuck completely ignored me for the next three weeks of my life, proving to me that this fucking poser is only polite to the people he’s forced to work with, and not even the people who tried to be his friend... I pity whatever company hires him in the end... But whatever. I tried to play nice with him. I really did. And I was even polite to him after he stabbed me in the fucking groin, although I really wished I had judo chopped his fat ass instead... I guess we’re both guilty of putting on an act. He’s also guilty of putting on a couple hundred pounds as well, and sweating profusely whenever he even tries to speak, but that’s besides the point...
So two weeks ago on a Thursday, even though all my friends wanted to work on another lab that was going to take forever to do, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the goddam networking lab that is now due this coming Monday... I mean, sure I had two weeks left until the due date. But my mind was racing, in ways that only fucking trucks and fat fucks could make it spin and twirl...
And I did it.
In one fucking day, I did it.
The entire lab.
Or at least, almost everything that needed to be done for the lab...
That’s the power of being fucked, it seems... I worked my ass off for almost 24 hours straight, because I was having living nightmares then and there that maybe, just maybe, my stupid traitor of a partner was right about me, about my freeloading... I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted to prove me right. And although I still know that if I ever showed him my code, he’d say it was a worthless pile of shit, I now know in the pits of my heart that I was not the bad guy here. In one fucking day, in sweet-sixteen fucking candles of hours, I finished almost everything I needed to do for this lab. I showed it off to my friends, and like friends always do, they widened their eyes in astonishment, for doing in one fucking day what they still haven’t completed two weeks down the road with three men in each station... That’s the power of being fucked in the ass, it seems...
Too bad I got fucked by the TA, yet again.
You see, I admit I took shortcuts in my program... I admit my programming style is atrocious at best... but it works, doesn’t it? It works, dammit... but the TA didn’t exactly approve... About a week ago, he ordered me to rewrite massive amounts of my code to adhere to his set standards, which really seemed to form out of fucking mid-air during midterm season. So what choice did I have? I rewrote every single goddam thing that he told me to rewrite this past week, and I’m sure that even with all the changes (which took me seemingly forever to do, might I add), that he’s still going to lambaste and make me feel like a pile of shit when he marks the final version of my code... but still... what’s done is done. The assignment is finally due tomorrow night, and unless the final tests of my program completely fail at university tomorrow morning, this horror of a lab will finally be complete... Time wise, I can’t say that the lab was so bad. It took one and half days to write the bulk of the code, and three days this week to change it all to my TA’s fucked up liking... It wasn’t the Timaeus turmoil of it all that kept me shaking my head at it all day long after that goddam truck almost hit me, though. It was the fucking emotional impact, of having absolutely no-one to trust, it seems... I thought I was being friendly to my partner. In turn, he leaves me hanging out to dry with goddam buzzards ripping at my neck, and maws of kites nipping at my liver... He made me sound like an idiot to the professor, and he made me feel like an ass in front of the TA. And then when I finally started to build my confidence again, my code got shot down by the fucking TA... God, what a waste of my time...
But three or four days of non-stop programming wouldn’t be enough to keep me pried from this website void of prying eyes, now would it? Pray tell... especially not with the emotional baggage of that goddam fat fuck cabbage, dumping all his darling, grandmotherfucking shit all over my ass... There was another lab that was running at the same time as this networking one, concurrent with all those goddam midterms that were burning my ass with bladed steel and jaded feel... The thing is, after getting 40.5% on the godddam Operating Systems midterm that I thought was goddam easy, I was embarrassed enough as hell to fully swear to myself that I would work my ass off to get the best mark I could get on the next operating systems lab project...
And the truth of the matter is, I did work my ass off.
After that single day where I skipped out on the OS lab with my friends, just to work on networking while burning the midnight oil, I spent the next entire week and a bloody hell half, entirely devoted to Operating Systems and nothing else. From 11 in the morning to 11 at night, for every day starting from Friday at the end of one week to 1 pm nine days later when it was due, I did nothing but sit by the goddam computer, bemoaning to my swollen head as to "why the fuck won’t this work?"... hell’s bells, one entire week into the lab, and what did I have to show? I had promised myself that I would work my hardest, day in and day out, to get this lab done. And I was working hard... it’s just that, what the fuck did I have to show?...
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
This fucking lab was impossible.
No matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t even get the first fucking thing to work in the assignment. By literally build 700 of my OS kernel, I still hadn’t even gotten the most basic of functions to pass the tests we were given... And truth be told, thanks to the stupidity of the GDB debugger given, I couldn’t figure out why none of my bloody hell functions were working. I literally had a momentary, nervous breakdown in the labs on the seventh day. Because hell, even God got to rest on the seventh day, so why the fuck couldn’t I? I was almost tempted to watch The Passion of Christ that night, just as a form of comic relief, but I figured like always, the book has got to be better than the movie, so I saved my cash and went to sleep...
Every single fucking morning... I got up at 9 am, went to sleep at 2 am, with nothing but Operating Systems in between... and no matter what the fuck I did, none of the goddam tests that I was supposed to get working did anything but goddam crash and fat fuck gloat... It wasn’t until the very last fucking day of the assignment, that finally everybody else in my circle of friends started working on this bloody hell assignment... suffice to say, they didn’t get very far (not like that affected their marks compared to mine...)... But at least they finally revealed to me one goddam thing that I wish they had told me a goddam week before... that the bloody hell tests the professor implemented in the code weren’t the only way to see if our functions were working... I had been under the impression that we were using virtual files and virtual processes in our Operating System.
I was wrong.
God, why the fuck didn’t somebody tell me?...
I checked the directories that the operating system was located in... and goddammit, why the fuck didn’t somebody tell me?... I don’t know why the fuck every single fucking test failed from the professor, but my operating system was almost working perfectly! When my functions create a file, it literally creates a file on the hard drive! When my functions decide to read, or write, or lseek in a file, it fucking does it properly! When I change directories, when I fork a new process, it fucking reads it from my own output statements. And with just a few hours left until the deadline that the OS assignment was due, I couldn’t care less about the fucking tests the professor made just to screw me over... I had tangible proof that my code was working. And I had no choice but to submit my assignment, fully knowing that it wouldn’t pass a single test the TAs would throw at it...
I just didn’t expect them to fucking care less that my code actually works.
And actually... I didn’t fucking realize that my code wouldn’t work....
I spent nine or ten fucking days working on this assignment, for who? For what? For nothing?... As expected, every single fucking test the TA tried with my code failed upon bootup. And when he was about to give me a goddam failing mark of <gasp> 40% (ironic, no?), guess what the hell I begged him for? I pleaded that he let me prove to him that my code works and that something is wrong with his tests, and so he let me boot up my own code and test it in the ways that I was using the day it was due... and guess what the fuck happened?
My code crashed. My own code, with my own tests, fucking crashed. Right away. Every single fucking one of them.
Why me, honestly? Why me?...
This lab was impossible...
He gave me a failing mark for the time... eventually, by just trying my code on a DIFFERENT computer than his, I was able to prove that it all worked, without changing a thing from the code I submitted for the assignment... He still didn’t show much mercy though. He barely gave me a passing mark. For more than one fucking week of pure work, he barely gave me a passing mark... what the fuck is wrong with him? I showed him the code worked and that something was wrong with his tests, and yet still he clung onto the goddam naked belief that the professor’s tests are infallible... and my biggest mistake? It was following the TA’s group schedule and getting marked first. By the end of the day, they realized that except for the absolute brightest minds in the goddam school, every single fucking test of theirs failed with our code. The functions of fucking 99% of all students didn’t pass a single one of their tests, but luckily for the people who got marked later, they still managed to get 70% and 80% from having even LESS than what I was able to show to my TA... all because the TAs finally realized that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t our fault their goddam little tricks of the trade weren’t working... But did my mark change? Nooooooo... I wanted to fucking scream in my TA’s face, I really did. He seemed like a nice guy at first. He wasn’t though... he was a fair marker. But that doesn’t mean he was nice...
And me? Think twice... between the TA, the truck, and the fat fuck... I really shouldn’t have been nice... I worked so damn hard on this assignment... and got nothing in return... I’ll never make the same mistake twice, lest I forget... lest I be burned...
Ah, the memories... all the joys I’ve felt...
Heh... I almost got run over by that truck the other day...
And that’s been my life. My saving grace. My saving Ryan’s privates... Squid pro quo, I have nothing to give, and nothing left to care for. Honestly... When I don’t give a damn, I get screwed. When I play nice, I get screwed. When I try my hardest, I get screwed... and yet through all this, through all of these shits and giggles, sifting eyes, and swift kicks to the groin, the only thing I really cared about... was the fact that I fucking didn’t have the time nor the conscience, to update this website when I wanted to...
That’s my only regret, sadly.
I may have been wrong on many things, but missing this website’s fourth anniversary?... it was truly my only regret...
Goddammit. Pass the duct tape...
I almost died. And my only regret, was that nobody would ever know.
I guess this website of mine, as meaningless as it is for what it was meant to do... for what it was meant to be...
... it’s still a symbol of my one true hope... the only damn dream I still cling onto like goddam saran wrap, it seems...
For somebody out there to bloody hell care.
Because I sure as hell didn’t.
... and that scares me...
Wednesday, December 31st, 2003
Y2kk Update: What a way to ring in the New Year!... I mean, I just got a brand spanking new e-mail from my Spaceports server the other day. It seems that... umm... they’re sort of... well?... going bankrupt... no thanks to me, of course... and because of that, they’ll be wiping out my accounts that house my http://support.mycrowsoft, http://games.mycrowsoft.com, and http://flame.mycrowsoft.com websites on January 1st, 2004... which will be in about one hour, now that I look at the watch I ain’t wearing... How sweet of them, don’t you think? But I guess the Enron of the online world has to cut their losses somehow, and it’s not like I’m losing much in the process. Nobody ever checked those goddam websites anyhew through those urls, and I’ll probably set up new servers on untrustworthy providers like Web1000 or some crap like that... but still... when it comes to Christmas giving season? I guess it’s the thought that counts. And just like the rest of the online world has seemingly given me over the past year of 2003 or so? From Spaceports, I’ve gotten nothing else than the goddam middle finger, an "Up Yours", and a "yours friendly" IOU...
Not that I don’t deserve it of course...
But did I really deserve the computer virus that plagued my computer this year?... now, technically, all things considered, the MsBlaster virus that infected my Windows2000 computer should be thanked for one reason and one reason only: because it somehow garnered for me a record breaking number of IvanFian e-mail responses from fans!...
...
Two of them!
...
Count it, baby! Two responses! Booyah! Oh yes, indeed...
The fact still remains though... I can lose a girl I think I love... I can fail miserably in university... I can even build a schism within the breaking points of my family, and almost lose a loved one... and yet... the only thing that ever got people to actually respond to something I wrote on my websites, was the fact that my computer got fried from a frickin’ lowly virus?... the thing is, I used to be called the human computer virus in high school, considering I definitely had a penchant for ruining whatever software or hardware I got my hands or feet or penis on, with merely the flick of my wrist of the most subtle of taboo touches... But I still pride myself for never actually getting a real computer virus on my own (well, except for that stupid ass CIH virus that came from my friend on a copied CD, but that doesn’t count, for reasons I can’t think of right now, so...).. The thing is, I’ve never been actually stupid enough to open e-mail attachments that have stupid ass names like most of the world seems stupid enough to do... But then again, it’s not like I ever get any attachments anyhew... I got zero ILuvYou viral bugs for one reason and one reason only: nobody loves me enough to even doom me to e-mail spam by adding me to their goddam mailing lists... I’m that popular... popular science, that is...
But the MsBlaster virus changed all that. If I’m going to ever look back at 2003, which was a terrible bore of a year, then I’ll forever remember it as the year that I spent a whole goddam month with a computer on the viral fritz, simply because I was too damn lazy to download the simple patch to fix the damn exploit, even when I had broadband internet in the summer... And besides affecting me and seemingly affecting my entire Tweakui population of two, the Welchia virus (made to fix the MsBlaster virus, although it did far more harm than it ever did good) infected my cousin’s new computer, and now I never hear the end of it when it comes to computer virus questions... Since he’s quite a newbie at these kinds of things, he keeps insisting to me as if computer worms were a new innovation this year, as if he’s ignoring the past 20 years of crap and crap like that, of nerds in basements like mine, creating little proliferating, digital tribbles and tribulations, for stupid ass users to stupid ass download every stupid ass day, for the next 42 meaningless years of our stupid ass lives... and no, I’m not bitter... whatever gave you that idea?
In the end, the MsBlaster virus caused no damage to my computer, as eventually I did get the SP2 patch to work (after downloading the 120MB SP3 and SP4 patches on bloody hell dial-up, and realizing that neither would install), but still... the online world is now susceptible to viral infections, no matter how much smarter you are than all those brilliant desk office jockeys, who open up any Christmas attachment with porn or Starbucks or Paris Hilton in the goddam title... you’d think they’d learn their lesson by now, and you’d think makers of viruses like the Welchia virus would’ve learned their lesson that only an idiot would use a virus for good (unless it was the programmer's intention to go for a certain level of dramatic irony... et tu, Brutus?...)... but either way, bring the idiots on, I dare do say. Because at least I’ll be sure as stupid ass hell, to get at least one goddam e-mail (if only from myself...) as long as my bloody hell computer doth blow up in my face... and maybe I can get a new computer out of it while I’m at it... I’m quite the positive thinker, now aren’t I? Always have been... doubt I always will...
And as for the rest of 2003?...
... well, my 100 shares of Nortel Stocks are at $6 CDN now, after buying them at $1.69... that’s still a long devil may cry from the $120 that I promised in high school that I’d sell them at, but chances are, I’ll only need to hang on just a wee bit longer... about the length of my pride and my dick... ain’t that right?...
... umm... ain’t that right?...
... hello?...
...
Ah, screw it... and that’s exactly what Americans are probably doing to Saddam Hussein behind closed doors right about now. Hell, I bet George Bush took a second thanksgiving trip over to Iraq sometime for Christmas, just to give a good screwing to the former dictator himself... The thing is, 2003 will probably forever be remembered and iconized by the media and by goddam leftist universities, as the year of the second Gulf War. But the thing is, I really don’t see why this war was such a big deal, except for the fact that ol’ Bush PRed the thing all over the damn place in hope of being re-elected next year... afterall, we’re always looking forward to the next good war... As Canadian Air Farce said today:
"American Tax Dollars Spent? : $88 Billion...
Weapons of Mass Destruction Found? : Zero...
Never having to say, ‘I’m sorry’?... priceless...
There are some things that money can’t buy... for everything else, there’s American soldiers..."
... but in all fairness, I never gave a rat’s ass about the war in Iraq, win or lose, right or wrong. The media completely blew it out of proportion like they did the war in Afghanistan, which according to certain newspapers, was meant to go on for ten bloody hell years as the next Vietnam, or the next... umm... war in Afghanistan, whatever the Russian hell that’s supposed to mean... Now, you can screw me if you’d like. Lord knows I’m desperate for some right now, no matter the source... but if I were an American, I’d definitely reelect Bush. I ain’t going to argue that the war in Iraq was justified or not. I’ll simply go on the record as saying that if the next President decides to pull out of the Middle East, if only out of goddam false campaign promises to goddam McGuinty keep, then the whole country of Iraq will get royally screwed in the ass... and so will America, as all the hundreds of billions of dollars spent will all be for nought... Now, if I were in high school and forced to listen to all the girls I used to like, rant their little cute asses and trendy glasses off about how wrong all the wars around the world really are, then I’m sure I’d actually give a damn about what happens to Iraq, or what already happened in the war that was supposed to be a complete disaster for humanity (which the same leftist newspapers as already mentioned before wrote dozens of articles about, of course). All I know, is that in the engineering part of the university I go to, where 90% of my friends are Muslim from Pakistan and the Middle East, absolutely no-one I know said anything about the Iraq war. No-one even seemed offended by the war, and quite frankly, they seemed to almost ignore it completely... besides calling George Dubya Bush an idiot, of course.
And you don’t have to be against the Iraq war to goddam know that...
There were other factors in the year 2003 that affected me far more than some distant war that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks... First of all, the Columbian Shuttle Accident. Of course that didn’t affect me directly. It’s not like it hit my home or anything... but it hurt to see the space program hit so damn bad by this failure, simply because I’ve always been the hugest proponent of space travel that I know of... well, okay, so I’m more of a proponent of components like phasers and warp drive than I am of puny little xeon drives that can’t even accelerate to half the speed of light within a century... but still... NASA has been in trouble for years. And although I wish I could care more about the astronauts that died than I do about the space program, the truth of the matter is... all I care about, is progress. All I care about really, is sadly not humanity, but of what humanity can achieve, of what I can read as tangible gains in the latest edition of Popular Mechanics for kids... I guess that’s the engineer in me talking... and lucky for me, I don’t have any of the old girls I liked in high school, slapping me back down to earth right now for not believing that Iraq and the Shuttle explosion weren’t omens of the umpteenth end of the world or some crap like that... and, well...
In other news, Canada just got a new Prime Minister... it was truly PM day - an early Christmas present - Paul Martin day to be exact... but, umm... Oh, right. Nobody cares. Sorry about that...
Though there was some Canadian news that probably did hit other parts of the world hard... in the back pages of the newspapers at least... I mean, there was that SARS thing, the most overblown media outcry that I’ve ever experienced in my life. And it certainly wasn’t helped by Mel Lastman, our mayor, who claimed that there were about ten times more SARS victims than there ever was at the height of the so-called outbreak... But while I’ll duly note that nothing of any consequence happened thanks to SARS, except for a Rolling Stones concept that made the world pretend like they actually cared about us Canadians for once (as long as they get their $10 million, that is), I will admit that while the so-called epidemic was going around at least... that... well?... people were pretty damn scared here... Hell, people were more afraid of contracting a virus that barely anyone has ever been affected by before, than they ever were of a repeat of the September 11th attacks or the end of the world thanks to Mars being so damn high school close, or some crap like that... and to be honest? I never liked how so many Canadians simply scoffed and claimed that America deserved to be attacked that god-awful, autumn day. Even I’m not that goddam callous... and as horrible and mangling as this may be to write, I truly almost felt as if it was just desserts for us Canadians, when we got stuck with SARs and Mad Cow disease and West Nile viruses all over the place this year, at least according to the newspapers, who are always looking for the next good war... of course, it’s not like I cared about any of these so-called plagues. More people die from the bloody hell flu each year than they do from all three of these viruses combined. Hell, I bet more people died from the MsBlaster virus in some form of another than they ever did from SARs... but still, when I started seeing the Chinese in Chinatown here, wearing goddam face masks with goddam, designer Hello Kitty stickers attached to the goddam fronts?... well then...
Now that truly was scary... I never want to go through that again...
In other news, I actually voted for the first time in my life, not like it mattered – Premier Dalton McGuinty swept into Ontario power (which has no power... hydro speaking, at least), annihilating everything in his path, including his own campaign promises... But I never cared that he broke each and every one of the promises he made. Hell, I even expected it, sort of like a running joke... Afterall, lying is one thing... politics is another...
And then of course, there was the grand ol’ blackout that affected most of Ontario and practically half of the American Eastern Coast. And while that may have been big news for my Middle Eastern friends at university, who finally got to feel at home for once (since apparently in Pakistan, they have scheduled blackouts every damn week to save power), I really couldn’t give a damn about the blackout and the ensuing heat wave, if only because it’s not like I do anything else than just sit on my ass in my non-air-conditioned house anyhew, doing absolutely nothing except thinking up ways to do absolutely more than nothing the very next day... And if I totally recall properly, the blackout happened just after I had come back from my Vancouver trip or something, where I spent more time on the internet than I did in the so-called wilderness forests of BC. And conveniently of course, the forests that I did actually drive through somehow managed to light themselves on fire the moment that I left... but that’s a story for another day...
On a more personal note, 2003 royally sucked in the ass for me in every living, livid, Saddam-Hussein-of-a-lice of a goddam way... I lost the girl that I cared about... I almost failed my goddam second year at university... I lost contact with most of the high school friends that I had managed to keep as conversationalists in first year... and oh yeah, I almost forget – the fucking Maple Leafs lost in the first fucking round of the playoffs! Fuck you, Phile! Fuck you, and fuck you more for all those goddam snow storms that you’ve fucking stolen from us this fucking goddam year!...
... oh, wait... that’s a good thing... nevermind...
I mean, while they were rare and sparse, I do have some decent memories of the year 2003. It’s the year I went to Vancouver, where despite my best despot and Home Depot efforts to maintain my brooding block of wood mentality, I did enjoy some of the sights... 2003 is also the year that I started actually accepting my role at university - I believe my friends call it "cold indifference" to exams, actually... makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like a good ol’ Canadian winter in anywhere but goddam Winnipeg (hell, I’d never want to live in a place without a goddam hockey team...)... and, well... okay, I guess I don’t really have any more decent memories of the year 2003 after that. So sue me. But at least it’s a start...
Oh wait... it’s not... it’s an end... well that’s just fucking swell...
For all good things must come to an end, and as we wave goodbye to the menace of the year known only as 2003, we welcome in 2004... as the year the fucking Maple Leafs better win the goddam Stanley Cup... Obviously, I have my hopes up high, for a new year where a) I don’t get royally screwed in the ass by school, b) I don’t royally screw in the ass the friends that I still have, and c) where I hopefully do get screwed straight in the ass (somehow, I guess... dildo anyone?... umm, wait... that’s not right...) by a girl that won’t shatter my heart into a thousand dangling pieces of cold, battered stone... and oh yes, let’s also hope for a year with more computer viruses for online sympathy, more goddam wars for more leftist "yet another end of the world" complaints, and more SARS epidemics for more goddam concerts with goddam Hello Kitty stickers stamped on the goddam Rolling Stones’ foreheads... because as we all know, as the saying goes, Keith Richards can’t be killed by conventional weapons...
And with that said, the countdown to the final minutes of 2003 are ticking away as I very well write this (yes, it takes me an entire hour to goddam write an update this stupid ass long... so sue me...). So without further adieu, because my 2003 sounds like so much goddam fun, now doesn’t it?... I guess I have no choice but to grant you all...
... a God Speed, a Good Will Hunting, and a God Bless Us, Everyone in 2004...
... for some things are priceless...
... God save America... God help us all...
... and for everything else?...
.... there’s Mastercard...
Friday, November 28th, 2003
Y2kk Update: No, I’m not dead... thank you so much for caring... although considering how rarely I update this supposed flagship website of mine anymore, I might as well be considered dead... dead, I said... because all things considered, with all good things coming to an end, honestly, who throws a shoe? Honestly? When was the last time I actually updated this Tweakui page of mine? God only knows... along with those few readers of mine who’ll actually check the date of my last update, but that’s besides the point...
The point is, I still don’t really have anything to report... well, nothing out of the ordinary anyhew... Everything’s just been <gasp!> normal for me, or Normal Again for me at least, I’m sad to say... Sure my computer is on the Fritos fritz again right now, sure my cousin’s been complaining about the Welchia virus killing his new computer softly but surely (serves him right for getting an 17" LCD monitor for practically goddam free... grrr... jealous arrgghh...), and sure I’m getting screwed royally in school... in marks at least, and not in the places that I always hoped I would get screwed in university... if that sounds good, that is... So you see? Nothing out of the ordinary... absolutely nothing out of the ordinary of the everyday, whatsoever... because sadly, all the above for me?
It’s all Normal Again, I always say... whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean...
... but... well?...
... there was one, tiny, tinsy, itty bitty thing that bugged me quite a while back, I’m afraid... I was pissed off as hell that day, considering it was a Saturday afternoon by then, and I frickin’ had to wake up at 7 am in the goddam morning, to get up and go to some stupid ass, university co-op seminar on the goddam weekend... The seminar itself I whined and complained and kicked like a baby about on my download site all those weeks ago, but the aftermath of my weekend at Bernie’s or whatever kind of crap?... well... that was sadly quite a bit more interesting than anything those socially elite retards at the podium had to say about the co-op presentation...
Because you see... as I waiting in line at the McDonald’s at Toronto Union Station, something just a tad bit peculiar was going on with the girl in front of me... First of all, I shouldn’t known things wouldn’t move smoothly with a mouth like hers, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean... I mean, just from the way this girl was dressed, you could easily surmise that she was some sort of mountain climbing, vegetarian hippie or some crap like that... minus the vegetarian part of it all, otherwise she wouldn’t have ordered a burger at McDonald’s of all places... but the thing was... umm... when her order finally came in... when the man serving her finally came to her with the Double Cheeseburger that I heard her explicitly order?... ummm?... the thing was... this was pretty much an exact quote of what she said... after she snapped...:
"No, DAMMIT! I ordered a Double Cheeseburger... WITHOUT cheese!!!"...
... and, umm...
... well?...
WTF?!...
The man sighed as he rolled his eyes, simply said, "yes, ma’am", since the customer is always right... and although it took another two or three frickin’ minutes of me waiting in line behind her sorry ass, her double cheeseburger "without" cheese finally came in, and she finally left after inspecting the damn burger for the next two damn minutes of my life... and the saddest part of the whole exchange?... was that I was goddam stupid enough to actually order a double cheeseburger right after she had left... because the thing was... umm... I may not be 100% sure or 100% McDonald’s Pure Beef sure that this was what really happened, but... umm... The Double Cheeseburger that I was served?... came almost instantaneously... and the thing was... umm?...
I think it was the same damn Double Cheeseburger that that god-awful, psychotic hippie in front of me had opened a can of whoop ass on, and licked and tossed with disgust...
And the even stupider part of it all?... heh... I didn’t even complain... I just took the burger and left for my train... What the fuck was I thinking?... What the fuck was I smoking?...
Or the better question is, what the fuck was that girl smoking when she groped all over the double cheeseburger she actually did order, only to throw it back and demand a double cheeseburger without bloody hell cheese, of all things... Now, since that co-op Saturday seminar day, I’ve asked this very question to four different friends of mine, with none of them getting the answer right: "there’s a simple solution to this:... Why the fuck would the girl order a double cheeseburger... without cheese?!..."... I mean, doesn’t it ruin the whole damn point of the goddam double cheeseburger? Doesn’t it defy the logic of ordering a burger with the opening title of "cheese"?...
Like I said, there’s a simple solution to all this... the thing is, in North America at least, McDonald’s has a different burger on sale each day of the week. On Saturdays, Double Cheeseburgers are on sale... and this hippie of a girl, was trying to goddam cheat the system and cheat The Man, by getting her double hamburger at the same discount price as the goddam double cheeseburger... and she sadly got away with it, although not without those token rolls of the eyes from me and just about everyone else waiting behind her worthless ass in line... but still... a deal’s a Mcdeal... she had her break today, by practically breaking the man serving her and my goddam Double Cheeseburger in half... she got what she wanted (though I can’t say she was Lovin’-It), and she certainly had a motive that a cheapassgamer.com guy like me would surely appreciate...
So that’s normal then, right?... there’s nothing technically wrong with her, right?...
... right?...
... umm?...
...
... no comment, I see...
... but still...
... like I was saying a long time ago, in this very update far far away, nothing’s really happened in my life out of the ordinary... everything’s been just rosy and peachy, at least in terms of normalcy... double cheeseburgers without cheese included...
So it’s all Normal Again, yet again, I always say... whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean...
... except...
... well?...
... umm...
It’s just that... there was this other day, when I was strolling through The Bay (a huge department store attached to The Eaton’s Centre, the most upscale mall in downtown Toronto)... and the thing was... first of all, I found it quite a bit odd that a fully clad, fully aged Nun, wearing a blue robe from her head to her heels, and about a half dozen rosaries on her neck and wrists at least, just happened to be strolling through The Bay as well, looking around at all the expensive clothes even though she could barely walk straight without tripping her 60 year old legs on that Christian gown of hers... but at first, I just shrugged the whole sight off before me. I mean, nuns have to shop too, right? She could be heading to the discount clothes section, to buy some stuff for some needy children as an early Christmas present, right?...
... right?...
...
.... umm?...
... the thing was... she didn’t exactly head to the clothes department that I thought she would... because instead?... umm... the Nun sort of... headed straight to the sports wear department of this upscale store, where every single damn shirt was like a hundred dollars or more... and after I just stood there, astonished that a Nun, let alone a 60-year old lady, was starting to look at ski jackets of all damn things... the thing was... she then took a U-turn after browsing and bruising quite a damn bit, and then lo and behold, where did she end up checking next?... umm?...
... she started looking at the FUBU wear...
... the FUBU wear...
....
... the fucking FUBU wear?!? What the fuck?!?...
...
... umm?...
... no comment, I see...
The thing is, I doubt she bought any of the two hundred plus dollar shirts there. Hell, I doubt she bought anything in the store at all... but still... although she may have had a holy motive in mind (to examine commercial products to see how evilly they’re priced or something, I hope?...), the thing is... umm... she certainly didn’t seem to be disgusted with the clothes that she was looking at... she certainly didn’t seem to mind the fact that they were overpriced so damn devilish... and hell, for a moment there, I thought she was actually going to try some of that FUBU shirt shit on!... and maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t a real Nun. Maybe she was Jamie Kennedy with plastic surgery or some crap like that, or Michael Jackson hiding away from all his sexual molestation charges (no extra plastic surgery required then...)... maybe it was some actress from Ryerson university, still donned in full costume, doing all the shopping for her carnival troupe? Afterall, I’ve never actually seen a Nun wear that many rosaries all at once... but still... umm...
... umm?...
...
... definitely no comment...
... see no evil, hear no evil... right?...
...
... ahem...
... So like I was saying, my life’s been nothing but normal since my last Tweakui update... it’s true... it’s damn true...
... because like I always say, it’s all been Normal Again, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean...
...
... although...
... umm?...
...
... it’s just that... umm... I know I should expect this and all, considering I go to University of Toronto engineering, one of the international student capitals of the known world... but it’s just that... You see, I normally expect the people who come to Canada to at least know some English, or at least some Engrish or Engalish... or hell, AOL... even some Aussie English, the worst of the worst (though Chinglish speakers need not apply...). And for the most part, for the latter years and the latter day saints at least, that assumption holds true... pretty damn true... and yet?...
... umm?...
... apparently, knowing English enough to pass the U of T ESL tests certainly ain’t enough... unless just being a graduate student automatically lets you pass every single damn English test with a bloody hell A even without doing a single damn question...
Because the thing is, I came into the computer labs one day, and caught my friend from Pakistan trying to talk to some graduate student from the Middle East about how to use his e-mail on the school computers... And the thing was, as soon as I got into my friend’s visual range, he practically and suddenly just leapt at me, jumping at the opportunity to get the hell away from whatever hell he was in, leaving me with the Middle Eastern guy that he was calmly talking to just a second ago... so thinking that my friend’s mad cow dash was sure as hell weird, I started out by being friendly, and asking the graduate student guy what he needed help with on the school computers... and what did he reply back?
... heh...
This was basically a transcript of our conversation...
Me: "Hey, welcome to U of T. You need some help with your e-mail?".
Him: "NO! I need help with my e-mail!"
Me: "... umm... alright then... I heard that you wanted to forward your U of T e-mails to your home account."
Him: "NO! I want to send my e-mails to my home account!"
Me: "... "
...
Me: " ... umm... yeah... that’s what I said..."
Him: "NO! I want to send my e-mails to my home account!"
Me: "... yeah... well... okay then... Just let me make a forwarding file here... There. Done. Now, all you have to do, is write your home e-mail address in it there, and all your university e-mails will be directed there right away."
Him: "NO! I want to send my e-mails to my home account!"
Me: "..."
...
Me: "... umm... that’s what I just did for you... Just write your e-mail address in the file here."
Him: "What did you do to my computer?!"
Me: "... like I said... it will now send your U of T e-mails to your home e-mail account..."
Him: "NO! I want to send my e-mails to my home account!"...
Me: "..."
...
Me: "... umm... right..."
...
... and?...
... umm?...
... okay...
... alrighty then...
... obviously, the conversation didn’t get very far from there... for the next five minutes, I just kept on repeating myself to some Middle Eastern guy who could obviously speak English, but obviously couldn’t understand a damn Canadian dime worth of a word of it... Eventually, I simply asked him to type his e-mail address into the file, and he did, not knowing what it was for, as if he had Alzheimer’s disease or some crap like that... And after all the forwarding crap had finally been done for him? After ten or twenty minutes of this pointless crap? What did he say then, instead of a thank you?...
Him: "Okay! Now! I want to send my e-mails to my home account !"
Me: "... umm... right... you’re welcome then..."
... and then I walked off... What else could I do, except maybe find a damn translator or some crap like that?... and yet this wasn’t the only time in the past month that I got stuck with someone who simply refused to listen... Just the other day, as my friend was walking down the corridors with the Lego motor set we’ve been using for our Computer Hardware projects, some Chinese graduate student, with a voice just like Kermit the Frog’s I might add, stopped us in the middle of the stairs (while my friend was still holding his fragile set in both hands, I might add... how considerate...), and said:
Him: "A Lego motor set! Can I have it?"
My friend: "No... It belongs to the school."
Him: "Oh... Can I borrow it then?"
My friend: "Umm... no... it belongs to the school..."
Him: "Oh... Where can I buy it then?"
My friend: "You can’t buy it. You can only borrow it from the school for projects."
Him: "Oh... Can I have yours then?"
My friend: "Umm... no... you have to be part of our ECE341 class to sign one out."
Him: "Oh... Can I sign yours out then?"
My friend: "No. You’re not part of our class."
Him: "Oh... Where can I get a Lego set then?"
My friend: "I already told you! You have to be part of our class to sign one out!"
Him: "Oh... Can you give me yours then? I promise I’ll give it back..."
...
... and...
... umm?...
... no comment, I dare say...
...
... suffice to say, my friend sort of walked away then and there, while I was left to deal with the inept Bill Nye, the Chinese science guy, about why we didn’t just hand him over about $500 in Computer Hardware equipment that was signed out in our bloody hell names... but still...
That’s all normal, right? There’s nothing out of ordinary there, now is there?... Like I’ve been saying, nothing’s happened in my life that’s even worth mentioning in the past few months of whatever kind of humped up, horny hiatus that I’ve been on...
... out with the old, and out with the new news, I always say... it’s all Normal Again I’m afraid, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean...
... providing that?...
... umm?...
Well, you take the good with the bad, I always dare to dream to say... Because I heard some of the best damn news I’ve heard all year long just the other day on the news. It seems that the Orgasmatron for women is finally in the testing phases, and if you’ve been living under a rock, the Orgasmatron is just a little implant attached to a woman’s spine, that induces sexual arousal and intense orgasms by just the flick of a switch... hell, apparently as they were merely installing the device in the first test female, she started screaming and moaning on the surgery table itself... now that’s progress for you! And it’s about damn time (although if I was the surgeon... I’d get a little distracted from that, don’t you think?...)!... because you see, doctors have known for years now, if not decades, that orgasms are one of the most easily reproducible, pleasure effects in the human body. All it takes is a couple electrical impulses, with about the same charge you can send in a damn mouse click actually, to make a girl cum like there’s no tomorrow... and the thing is... yes, I know... although Viagra is popular as hell with the men, the thing is, sexual fixer-uppers are still considered taboo for women, as most of them were so turned off by the surgery needed for the Orgasmatron that the doctors actually had trouble getting test subjects for the early trials... But for the first few women who actually did go through with the procedure?... according to the news, one of the women, who hadn’t had an orgasm for four long years, had explosive orgasms each and every damn time she had sex with her husband with the implant on...
Now that’s progress for you!...
... now, I really shouldn’t be the one talking here... I mean, unless this implant can even make a guy like me look good to a woman, the thing is, implant or no implant, I’m never ever going to get someone to come to cum at this rate... As the ever horny, ever geeky, no-name whiner, the thing is... I’m a virgin today, and if Virgin Records has its way, the only luck I’m ever going to get, is making a damn vibrator work for goddam once with my goddam engineering skills... But the thing is... even though I know that my eternal desperation and sexual damnation will never, ever pay off in the end, I still can’t stop thinking of the orgasmatron, and all the joys it could bring me... of all the hope it could wield... Because you see, all my life, I've never really cared about pleasing myself in bed. All I really care about, is getting a damn girl to have explosive orgasms in bed, twenty goddam times over in a single fucking night... Sure, I know that if I ever do find a wife and need some implant to satisfy her needs, that I would never truly be a man in the world’s eyes, and blah blah blah... but do I really care? As long as the woman I love is hugging her breasts and holding her breath in a euphoric state after it’s all said and done, do I really care whether it was my own goddam Dick of a dick that did the job, or a wonderful wonder of technology that I only wish that I had invented?... dammit, sure I have other aspirations in life, like getting a job to make my parents proud, or actually getting more than a couple of visitors to actually read my goddam website updates for once... but still... in all honesty, and in all travesty... truth be told, beautiful be bold... the thing is... All I’ve ever really dreamed of in life?... has been to turn through passionate, hot, hourly sex, an otherwise normal, sweet, succulent, subtle and shy, virgin of an everyday girl... into an always wet, always horny, always masturbating, silky as a slide, sex slave...
... and what?... WHAT? Is there really anything wrong with that?...
... wait... don’t answer that...
... heh... just the other week... I admitted to one of my old friends over MSN Messenger, that ever since Grade 7 hit, I can’t get to sleep at night without dreaming of tentacled, sex demon porn in my head... and this all started, long before I ever first caught a glimpse of anime manga porn in late high school (which is the best damn porn on the face of the planet, thank you very much...)... and I admitted this all to my friend, believing that as a fellow guy, he probably has the same damn affliction as I do... but... umm?...
... he claimed he had no fucking idea what I was talking about... and I have no reason not to believe him, but...
It’s all normal though, right?... The dreams... they’re normal, right?... the dreaming?.... isn’t it?...
...
... isn’t it?...
...
... hello?...
...
... ah hell, AOL, screw it all. Whatever I dream at night is my own business, I guess... and that’s normal... I’m sure of it... I think... though normalcy is all relative... isn’t it?...
...
... isn’t it?...
...
... not like it matters. Because it’s all Normal Again, I always say... the Cheeseburgers without cheese? The Nuns shopping in The Bay to sell FUBU on eBay? The guys at my own school who either refuse to learn English, or refuse to listen to a word that an underling like me has to say?
Yup... definitely... indeed, and for sures... It’s all just relative, as far as I’m concerned... it’s all just as goddam, fucking normal as you can get... for sures on that... Absolutely nothing has happened in my life the past few months of any worth of words in detail... except?... well... except the little things in life you treasure... except the little things in life that are as ordinary as they come, of course...
... of course...
...
... because of course...
... it’s all Normal Again, yet again, I always dare to dream to say... it’s all Normal Again, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean...
Saturday, September 20th, 2003
Y2kk Update: You know, I’d like to say that this update has been four weeks in the making... but it’s not... that’s my other update... my other update has been four weeks in the making. My other update – that’s the one I’ve been itching and ready to write, yet have been goddam struggling to start for the past damn four weeks. Last year, I started a new tradition on my Tweakui site, of recanting the best written and woven parts of my past Y2kk year of updates... but traditions just aren’t the same as they were in the good ol’ days, if they start up and end the exact same year... and the thing was, I’ve been wanting to write my Best of Y2kk Updates for the past four weeks. I’ve been ready and really, really, ridiculously able to write my Best of Y2kk Updates for the past damn month... and yet here I am, so damn pissed off that I refuse to start on what I hoped would be a decent update, only to delay my Y2kk Special for yet another week because I’m too goddam lazy to write...
I’ve mentioned at least a dozen times on my websites alone that I’ve pretty much lost my zest and zen and passion fruitopia for writing... but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have any left, mind you... fruitopia, I mean... which is why I’m finally updating this more than neglected Tweakui site of mine, even though it won’t be with that Y2kk Special Update that I’m sure two of you four readers out there must be salivating over in anticipation... Instead, a small crisis has popped up in my life. A little problem roared it’s Aurora of a twinkle of a hydra head at me, and royally screwed my computer up from hell and back... And seriously, it wasn’t my fault!...
... well, not most of it, anyhew...
The thing was, the weekend that my brother came home for the, um, weekend... something strange started happening with the computer. After he installed a new version of MSN Messenger on my Windows 2000 without even telling me, a little bug started appearing out of nowhere, out of the blue... For no explicable reason whatsoever, I couldn’t copy and paste in Windows anymore, as if I was back in the DOS ages instead of the DoS days or some crap like that... And whenever I would try to log into hotmail or some crap like that, the damn javascript on every single page I tried with Internet Explorer wouldn’t goddam run anymore. And when I checked the control panel for any clue why my computer was screwing up so badly, it turned out that whatever was ruining my computer was ruining my Add/Remove Properties as well... and honestly, if I didn’t have Opera installed as a browser on my computer, I would’ve gone insane by the just end of that first damn weekend. Internet Explorer would barely load pages properly anymore, and refused to even open up new windows whenever I demanded it too, citing that there was no goddam memory left. ICQ wouldn’t load anymore unless I booted it up along with the rest of Windows. And goddammit, how the hell was I supposed to function when I couldn’t even goddam move files from directory A to B except with the goddam DOS move command, thank you very much?... troubling times were definitely brewing for my computer, that’s for sure... the only thing on my mind though was...
Same old, same old... so... what else is new?...
I mean, my computer busts into binary bursts of bits every single damn week, I swear... so this was nothing new or novel to me... And it became immediately apparent to me about two weeks ago that I was dealing with a virus this time around, when I noticed that for some odd reason, no matter how many times I deleted it from the registry, a file named "svchost" would keep loading up in the CurrentVersion/Run part of the damn Local Machine... So thinking that svchost was the virus itself, without bothering to look any sort of crap up on the internet, I immediately deleted the file in the System32 directory... only to find that... ummm...
That wasn’t the virus. Because the goddam file?... the file came back... the very next day... the file came back... I thought it was a goner... but the file came back... it just wouldn’t stay away... and I couldn’t figure out goddam why...
So realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to deal with this sort of crap with my manual labour skills alone, I decided to leech a bunch of virus scanners off the internet. I downloaded them all with my dial-up connection over the past week, thank you very much... I downloaded Avast Antivirus, F-Prot, McAfee, Adaware, Spybot, a bunch of other programs I can’t remember anymore, and oh yes... the 35MB trial version of Norton Antivirus... the only problem was... F-Prot found nothing... McAfee found absolutely nadda... Adaware just removed a bunch of cookies that I delete every five minutes without noticing it anyhew... spybot did exactly the same, slowing than my deletion finger ever could... And Norton Antivirus? That was the real kicker... I had spent an entire afternoon downloading that one damn program, only to find that it goddam wouldn’t install on my stupid, damn computer. And why? Because I didn’t have the latest damn service pack for Windows2000, that’s why! All because my computer was old and rickety and in desperate need of some lovin’ and help, the stupid Symantec bastards wouldn’t help me... talk about being broadband impaired... and talk about being in bed with Microsoft here, or just being lazy ass as hell with their installation files... what a waste of time...
Only one virus scanner even remotely found anything odd with my computer... Somehow Avast Antivirus, whatever the hell that company may be, actually did the job and found errors in two files: "svchost" and something in dllcache, I think... It called the virus the "Argonot" virus or some crap like that, and I’d figure that any crap program named after Toronto’s crap CFL team would be sure as hell worth deleting off of my computer... the only problem was, Avast couldn’t repair the files. No matter how many times I tried, I’d just get an error message back, even during boot-up scans, saying that the two files were invulnerable to whatever the hell Avast was trying to change... So what choice did I have but to delete both files manually? It wasn’t hard, of course... my deletion finger has been trained and honed to perfection over the years... and since Avast noted that these were the only two files that were actually infected, and that all the other dlls and exes on the computer were clean, I felt safe and reassured that nothing could ever go wrong in my pleasantville of a computer life ever again... tra la la...
That’s when I checked... the registry... and the file?... the file came back... the very next day... as if it had never left in the first place...
The thing was this time, Avast didn’t detect any problems the second time around. But the goddam svchost file was back, and causing even more of a ruckus than it had before I royally pissed it off. And the goddam problem?... well... since the files kept coming back, I just figured that this would result in some sort of cat and mouse game or some crap like that, until a virus scanner could finally repair the corrupted files. So each and every morning, I would simply delete svchost and its accomplish of a scapegoat file and hope for the best... only to find that I never got any results in the end, except that the virus was coming back more faster and more furious and more furor than ever before... and eventually, I noticed that svchost was constantly running in memory. So thinking that maybe after I deleted the file, the virus would just replicate itself from RAM back onto the hard drive, I cleverly deleted both the file from the hard disk and the program from memory at the same exact time... it was crafty, no?... I should’ve won a Nobel Prize for my efforts... unfortunately for me though... I’m not as bright and bulbant as I may think I am...
Because the computer?... ummm... the very next time I booted... ummm... it wouldn’t boot up anymore...
...
... it sort of died...
...
... oops...
So what else is new, right?... so what choice did I have, but to completely reinstall Windows 2000 and format my hard drives in the process?... I didn’t lose anything much that was important, although some of the movies I lost I had wished I could keep, considering I’m now back to dial-up speeds... but the thing was... after spending an entire afternoon just waiting for the damn Windows2K kernel to finally reinstall itself, what did I find?... after checking everything damn registry key on the computer and noting that everything was fine, I logged back onto the internet, downloaded a copy of the newest Radeon Catalyst drivers... only to find hours later that... ummm...
... uh oh...
"An error has been generated by svchost.exe"... again...
... ugghh... drum roll and roll eyes here for me, please...
I couldn’t see how the virus could survive a full hard drive format, only to come back a friggin’ hour later. And I couldn’t even perceive how a virus could get back onto the computer, considering I thought it had gotten onto my damn hard drive in the first place thanks to a file or e-mail that my brother received from his friends... but when I checked the registry, I noted something a little different in the CurrentVersion/Run part of it all this time around... the boot up program no longer read "svchost" like it did a week before... because, umm...
...
... oh no...
...
... it read...
...
... WTF?...
...
... "MSBlast"...
...
... insert unnecessary dramatic pause here...
...
... ah, dammit, Powell...
This whole time!... this whole frickin’ time... if only I had known... I mean, it explains everything, now doesn’t it? Most likely, one of my brother’s friends had the virus and transmitted it to us through an open port (I have no firewalls) while the two of them were chatting, or I simply could’ve gotten it from someone who has me on their e-mail mailing list... and it’s no wonder why every frickin’ time I deleted the virus it would come back, considering there’s probably a million gazillion Dr. Evil computers out there who are sending the virus to my damn computer as we goddam speak... Because in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, the MSBlast virus has signified the end of an era and a start to a new reign of cyberterror. For once, the intelligent and advanced when it comes to computers are actually vulnerable to goddam virus attacks. I mean, just a month ago, basically the only real way to get a virus was to be stupid enough to open up attachments to the absolute stupidest e-mails you could possibly get from friends... although the Anna Kournikova virus was tempting, but I digress... But all thanks to the goddam MSBlaster virus, that’s all a thing of the past... that’s all a Link to the past... the stupid MsBlast program, instead of coming in exe or scr or pif formats like every good virus would, just scans open ports on your network, from ports 666 to 777 or some crap like that, and infects every single damn computer it can find on the goddam net, even if they aren’t on your address list. And the stupid thing is... even after a clean format, all because somebody is still uploading the virus to me without even knowing it, I got it back on my stupid hard drive before I was even able to get my damn video card up and running again... now there’s progress for you... but nobody likes the progress of a damn viral...
... confound it, Hexadecimal!... although, um, nevermind... I’m loosing it...
So first things first, I downloaded every single damn MSBlast removal tool I could find on the internet. And the first time I used it, it worked, right?... it said the MsBlast file was removed, and I immediately put the check up program in the start up part of the Start Menu, just in case... but the thing was, for all the other times I ran the computer, MSBlast was never found... and yet every single damn time I used the internet, the same damn, ominous message would creep back up: "svchost has generated an error" or whatever kind of Mr. Robotico sort of crap... and the thing was, if I no longer had MsBlast on my computer, provided that it didn’t leave my svchost file scarred and charred beyond recognition, what the hell did I have?...
Turns out, after looking it up on the internet, there are already six variants of the MSBlaster virus, and the damn MSBlast removal programs only remove a couple of them... so God knows what kind of goddam MsBlast virus I really, really, ridiculously have on my friggin’ useless computer... but judging from all the errors I’ve had? After looking it up on the Symantec website, I’m betting that I have the Welchia virus or Welcher’s Grapes Virus or whatever you want to call it... you see, one can surmise that this wimp of a Welcher’s virus was built with a noble purpose in mind, if that’s even possible... unless the designer built it with a great sense of irony along with an iron fist, but I digress... What the Welcher’s Grapes of Wrath virus does, is it uploads itself to your computer just like MSBlast does, downloads the latest Microsoft patches while you’re not looking, and fixes your computer so that MSBlast and it’s own self can never infect your computer ever again... so it’s a good virus, right?... except for one damn problem...
It’s causing more problems than MSBlast ever caused...
Welchia is using up massive network bandwidth. Welchia is pinging the Microsoft servers to hell. And Welchia seems to backfire on most computers, causing faults in the svchost file (which I found is an essential Windows2000 file) rather than actually downloading and installing anything productive, and thus absolutely ruining everything there is to love about computers... and the symptoms sound exactly like the ones on my computer. I can’t uninstall programs. I can’t install most of them either. I can’t run ICQ. I can’t run Windows Media Player. I can barely run Internet Explorer. And I can’t even log off of the internet when I goddam try to disconnect my modem... the only difference is, supposedly the Welchia virus adds itself into your WINS directory and ceases to run once the year 2004 crops up. So I checked my WINS directory, only to find that I don’t seem to have a WINS directory on my stupid computer... so I set my calendar date to 2007 anyhew, just to make sure, only to find that whatever virus is killing my computer is still doing it, long after its expirary date... so chances are, I don’t have the Welchia virus... because if I did, after two weeks of having it? Goddammit, my computer should’ve fixed itself by now...
So I decided to try fixing my damn computer manually. If you want a job done right... well... don’t trust me, but what choice did I have?... Even though it was a real pain in the ass in more ways than one, to just navigate through the Microsoft website without javascript and without the ability to open up new windows in Internet Explorer (and of course, the site didn’t run properly in Opera... naturally...), I finally did find the Windows 2000 service pack SP4, which is needed for all the goddam patches that fix the security flaws on my computer (thanks Microsoft... for not letting me just install the patch on my computer without more of your programming crap). The only problem was... I’m on dial-up... and once the SP4 downloader started downloading... ummm... it said it had 40MB left to go...
... that’s a problem...
But at least that didn’t piss me off... Sure, being forced to download a crap service pack in order to install just a few megabytes worth of patches that the whole internet needs is real piss off, but 40MB really isn’t that much for me, considering I often download even 200MB files with my 33.6 modem... the only thing that really, really, ridiculously pissed me off though... was that when the downloader finally finished gathering its temp files, what did I find?... Not only did the stupid svchost file generate more and more errors, as if it were crashing and crying for goddam mercy... but the goddam Windows service pack installer goddam crashed on me too, claiming that it can’t update my friggin’ computer, and now I have no goddam frickin’ way of figuring out where the 40MB of temp files went on my computer... the installer program says they no longer exist, and I sure as hell ain’t downloading all that crap again on dial-up when there’s better things to browse than goddam Microsoft files...
And that’s where I stand today... After about half a week of putting up and not trying to deal with whatever the hell virus I’ve got (and it ain’t the original MSBlast... otherwise all my removal tools would’ve found it by now...), I’ve finally become desperate enough to download the full 140MB Service Pack 4 installation package, so that I can finally patch my stupid ass Windows2000... The file is about 80% finished downloading as we speak, so obviously, I’ve had my modem on all friggin’ day, even though Internet Explorer now no longer loads... and if the stupid service pack won’t install itself thanks to whatever virus is corrupting my systems, I’ll just go into safe mode and run the installer there, since now I know the stupid installation files aren’t going to delete themselves and run and hide like that stupid Windows downloader did to me... and alas, alack, and Aladdin... there was a point in the sands of time when I thought about returning to WindowsME, and I did... I reinstalled the Windows9x kernel on a separate partition, since older Windows have no svchost file for the MsBlaster virus and its variants to infect... but the problem was... ummm... I couldn’t find the Win9x modem drivers to log onto the internet, and the damn system wasn’t plug and playing and detecting the modem, even with standard drivers, so... ummm... back to Opera in goddam busted Windows 2000 for me...
And that’s been my last week. I’ve been sick as hell, on more than one front... my throat has been sore as hell, my ass has been even sorer (don’t ask...), I’m now coughing up a hurricane Isabel of a storm thanks to my goddam month long lung recovery process. And I seriously doubt that even the Service Pack will fully repair my Windows 2000 build, even if I do manage to patch it from any further MSBlaster anal infiltrations... overall, it’s been a less than productive week for me... I mean, I’m Kentucky fried... my computer’s fried, although for once it’s not entirely my fault... but still, regardless of fault, except for general protection faults, nothing seems to work anymore in both my life and my goddam sanctuary of a cyberlife... and oh yeah, I think I’m going to die a virgin too... not like there’s a surprise...
...
WTF?...
...
... cue the unnecessarily dramatic response...
...
... because goddammit, it all sounds like so much goddam fun, now doesn’t it?...
...
... but like I said... what else is new?...
Friday, August 1st, 2003
Y2kk Update: Well, I wasn’t gone for long... not like anyone could tell, if anyone ever does read this website, considering I rarely ever update this website of mine anymore... But I came back a week ago from a two week excursion into the wilderness of the British Columbia and Alberta parts of Canada. And after finally getting out of those places, conveniently (and suspiciously) right before all the roads I had traversed started burning down from forest fires, I can truthfully and honestly tap my shoes together and finally say... that although I don’t get out much, and though I’m no avid evangelist of travelers, it’s true, it’s true... that at least, quite frankly...
... there’s no place like home... even if the place you visit is exactly like home, but I digress...
Now, I’m not sure if most the world even knows what or where Vancouver, British Columbia is, so I might as well point out that it’s on the Pacific Coast, right next to the Washington state border... in Canada... not that most Canadians know where Canada is mind you, but that’s besides the point... Now, trust me – there’s really nothing special or much there in Vancouver. Hell, for most of my journey there, I only cared about three things: the fact that their goddam rainforest trees were taller than most of their buildings, they seemed more obsessed with salmon that most New Yorkers are about sex, and the fact that goddammit, their damn traffic lights blink like little light bulbs that... um... blink, for no goddam apparent reason whatsoever! I mean, it was throwing me off, goddammit! Seeing all those flashing lights that mean absolutely nothing... here in Toronto, green lights only flash for two reasons: a) as an advance green, meaning that one side of the road can start moving first, and b) that the damn government is too damn cheap and Ernie Eves lazy to fix the damn lights. But I swear to God, Vancouver BC is goddam backwards! I mean, what the hell is the stinkin’ point of goddam blinking lights? To catch my attention? Or just to disorient myself back to the Orient?...
And that was the thing... you see, I stayed with sort-of-relatives in Richmond, a medium sized suburb south of downtown Vancouver. And the thing was... ummm... considering I live near Toronto, and visit Markham and Richmond Hill quite often, I thought I would’ve been accustomed to seeing so many damn rich Chinese, fresh off the boat, parading around the streets in their Beemers as if it were Hong Kong.... But visiting New Hong Kong and living in it are two completely separate things, I now realize. Because goddammit, first things first, I started feeling goddam sick at all the Chinese food I was forced to suck down! I mean, the reason my parents don’t eat out very night, is because all the Chinese restaurants are at least ten or twenty minutes from our place back home... But from the place we were staying in Richmond? Or if we had stayed literally anywhere else in goddam Richmond?... Goddammit, there was nowhere to hide from Chinese restaurants or anything Chinese!... or anyone not rich in Richmond, mind you... I mean, sure I’m Chinese, but honestly, it’s just goddam strange to see goddam Chinese outnumbering the white folk thirty to one on the goddam, psycho B-line bus systems that Vancouver seems to have. And with all the restaurants around?... God, the relatives I was staying with just kept shoving us asses to every single restaurant within a thirty block radius. And it was only a matter of time until I got sick of even my favourite of damn foods... And the crappiest part of it all, was that thanks to their Protestant heritage, my relatives refused to let me waste any food. So, ummm... let me get this straight... They would order like ten plates of food, all for me and my brother, even though we didn’t want anything else to eat... And then they would force us to gluttony it all down, simply because it’s rude to third world people if we threw a single bite of food out?... so, umm... can they explain to me then, why the hell they ordered so much food in the first place?... Why? I’ll tell you why... because we were guests... and restaurant prices were cheap... and because we were goddam living in Canadian Hong Kong, which as proud of my Chinese heritage as I am, I am not willing to live over again...
Vancouver is backwards, I swear it is... and goddammit, scary too... We rode their skytrain or whatever the hell they call their subway in the sky. And quite frankly, I prefer the claustrophobia that only a filthy, trash bag ho of a Toronto subway can give... And nice weather be damned. The real reason why I was scared stiff off by Vancouverine public transit... was that it was all goddam run by Skynet or some crap like that. I mean, goddammit, they have Microsoft Window chimes and goddam Star Trek Majel computer voices talking in their goddam buses!... In Toronto, we’re blessed with either eerie silence, or a sixty year old hag telling us what stop we had just conveniently missed... But in Vancouver? Goddammit, everything was just so nice and clean and jim dandy, that it goddam seemed like a damn scene out of Demolition Man or some Robocop crap like that!... I mean, not only were the trains nice. Not only were the buses superficially nice. But the people there? Except for the odd occasion or two, the damn people wouldn’t goddam stop smiling!... Here in Toronto, I may smile every time I see a gang member brandish their five iron or their two four with a nail on top, but honestly, I reaped no joy from seeing no goddam Grim Reapers to be in Vancouver... the city was essentially spotless. It had goddam fifteen story trees just cleaning up the damn place everywhere, like lumbering janitors or some crap like that. Hell, they even had a massive national park in the middle of their goddam downtown district, and why?... because they’re backwards... or more to the point, they’re scary...
Things just don’t work the same in the West Coast pop part of the world, I’m afraid... I visited most of their malls, from Richmond to Pacific downtown, and all of them sucked... mainly because they didn’t seem to have any goddam video game stores next to their token Electronic Boutiques, but that’s besides the point... But there was one mall that was decent: Metropass or Metrocentre or whatever that goddam Square One rip-off was called... But the thing was, as massive as that mall was, the strange thing was... it still couldn’t get my attention... literally... I mean, my uncle had dropped my family and I off at a Future Shop centre which he called a "huge mall" in Burnaby (another Vancouver suburb). The thing was, there was a Future Shop there... and a Sportschek... and a Save On Foods store... but that was about it... And for the next two hours, while my parents shopped at yet another Chinese mall nearby, my brother and I roamed the streets, just trying to find anything else than an A&B Audio store to shop in, and quite honestly, we didn’t find anything... we didn’t even see anything of interest... So when the time came, we all returned to our Future Shop rendezvous spot, and my uncle asked if we had gotten enough of the "huge mall" yet... I couldn’t help but roll my eyes then and there, and idiotically claim that if a Future Shop and a couple of dollar stores consists of a huge mall, then Vancouver really is three hours backwards in time, as far as I’m concerned....and that’s when... um... he drove us one minute away into a huge parking lot... took us up an escalator... and landed us right smackdown in a mall, just a total of three walking minutes away, that spanned three floors and seemingly three goddam blocks... It wasn’t the biggest mall I had ever seen, but it was massive. And after we had shopped there a while (and found nothing of interest, although the Playdium at least was colourful...), as we were leaving the parking lot, I looked straight ass back at where that goddam mirror of an oasis of a mall had been... only to find that... ummm...
I couldn’t find it. All I could see, were goddam skyscraper trees... stupid, goddam trees as far as the eye can see... and no mall in sight... and hell’s bells, it’s true, it’s true - Vancouver truly is scary...
No, wait. British Columbia itself is scary. I mean, we didn’t manage to stop in most of the cities in the province, if there are actually cities in a province that has less the population of Toronto, but we did take a ferry to Victoria... and while I enjoyed the boat ride there and back thanks to some stunning sunset scenery, I can’t really say the same pleasing things about the capital of British Columbia itself... I can’t remember if the city had any goddam flashing traffic lights like its psychotic, brethren city to the east did, but I do remember that the goddam trees were even higher here. Hell, although Vancouver and Victoria literally have no skylines, considering their tallest buildings are essentially small condos, I might as well consider the cities having skylines, if only because their goddam trees are goddam taller than even I can see without blinding myself thanks to the goddam Sun... and that’s all Victoria was: retired white folks, Chinese tourists from Vancouver no less (I guess, we fit into that category), flowers that royally pissed me off, and goddam trees just littering the streets... all we could do in Victoria, was first smell the roses, and then sit around in its piss small Chinatown, which strangely enough, literally had no Chinese in it... (which was a definite, eerie first for me, to see old white folks outnumbering us in a Chinese restaurant... yeah, that was a first... although seeing a cute Caucasian chick actually working in a Chinese grocery store certainly didn’t give my eyebrows and something else a skyrise...). And yes, although I said it a while back, I did use the term litter. While Toronto has garbage, British Columbia has trees. And considering I’m not some Skynet tree hugger (I’d rather be an alien face hugger, thank you very much), I think I’d rather stick with my old Diablo of a mantra, that there’s no place like home...
And the other city (if you call it a city) that I visited in British Columbia was none other than Kelowna... and oh, how I remember my high school glory days... A gal I once knew always used to claim just how much she hated the Toronto and Ontario regions. She hated the pollution. She hated the people. She hated everything there was to hate in the big city... And after Grade 12, she came back to our high school so full of jubilation and life, and why? Because she had visited Kelowna, and partied there all summer long like the Sun don’t shine up her ass... And visiting Kelowna, I could see why she was just so jubilant. I mean, it was completely a tourist city, where all the young and attractive men and women go to, just so they can get drunk and laid. I mean, I stuck out like a goddam sore thumb with my parents’ camera all attached to my waist like some... umm... tourist... which I was, but that’s besides the point... Because I was surrounded by girls in bikinis, and guys going topless, and girls going topless, and some really young boys going really wild from it all... And there was some really beautiful water. Here in Toronto, our water at best is yellow and green, or brown if we’re lucky. But Kelowna was golden blue, almost as blue as the sky itself, if such a thing were possible. And there was hikers there, and people riding naked on boats, and girls getting drunk on the beach... and in some ways, during summer at least, it was anti-Torontonian heaven... which is quite frankly, why I hated it. As a goddam geek, how could I not hate it?... All the guys that ever shunned me, all the girls who ever scoffed at me, were all embodied there, in that very goddam town, with their goddam dancing and their goddam perfect bodies and all. And did I gawk? Sure, I gawked... only to find that most of these people weren’t nearly half as attractive as I thought they were underneath their fashionable clothes. They were no supermodels. They were no studs. They were no knockouts, even though I kept dreaming that they were before they tried fitting into bikinis that just weren’t meant to be fit in... And besides the drunkard, cuckold people, the city was completely dead. Outside of the dismally small waterfront were literally dead paperweights in the streets. And the native townsfolk just walking around aimlessly (and quite shamelessly, might I add), were just plainly shaking their heads and fists at all the tourists in the area, myself included. And there was literally nothing to do outside of the two blocks of waterfront activities – there were no restaurants, and no stores... it was just plain, eerie, Toronto subway silence... The place was dead outside of the outdoor walls. And I could never consider a place like that to be lively. It was like shooting fish in a bottle... I don’t know what that means, but I’m sure it ain’t good...
And the great thing was, by the middle of first year university, this girl from my high school classes actually started agreeing with me... You see, since she hated the Toronto region so damn much, she decided to depart for the University of Calgary, Alberta. But the thing was... half a year later, when I caught her visiting her friends back home, I asked her how the cowgirl, all naturalist life was taking to her, and the thing was... she was bored... she was bored out of her mind... and she was homesick. She missed all the clubs and bars in Toronto. She missed all the people who just stare at you on the streets. She missed all the unruly people, all the unholy evangelists, and all the little nicks and crannies that makes life in the big city just so damn eventful... And quite frankly, after visiting Calgary, Alberta on my trip the other week, I can plainly see why she was just so goddam bored... I mean, it was a weekend. In the big city, weekends mean lots of bustling activity in the city... But in Calgary, which supposedly was a big city?... first of all, the streets were deserted. I literally saw no one but ourselves and Chinese tourists roaming the goddam business and shopping sectors of downtown. And when my family and I went up the Calgary Tower (which is so damn short that it might as well not be considered a tower), upon looking down, we could officially now state on the record... that Calgary was nothing more than a ghost of a town... and then we laughed at the Saddledome, which looked so damn ugly that it was no wonder to us why the Calgary Flames were going out of business, but I digress... And after roaming about a lifeless Chinatown, and after seeing some of the Calgary countryside around some Olympic park or some crap like that, we left. Because quite frankly, except for visiting a McDonalds with Mad Cow Alberta beef and the novelty of no tax, there was absolutely nothing to do in the so-called big city of Alberta anymore. Sure, I will always remember the memory of my brother making me tap to a Sharpshooter in our Calgary hotel room, but besides that cherished charm?... we saw Calgary for one day, and already, it was more than enough... and yes, I feel sorry for that gal of a friend I once had... sniff sniff... may she rest in Olympic-sized boredom, it’s true, it’s true...
But that’s Calgary, you see... and as for Vancouver, with its invisible shopping centres and lack of highways? And as for Victoria, with its lack of buildings or normal folk whatsoever?... well, that’s just Western Canada. I can deal with the fact that as soon as the Ontario-Manitoba border hits and the time zones change, there’s nothing to do in this damn country anymore... But as for America? Our relatives drove us down to Seattle for a day, to visit some of their long lost friends from Hong Kong. And in the process, we were granted to a massive banquet in the heart of Seattle’s Chinatown, in one of their greatest of restaurants no doubt. And our relatives got nothing but the best for us... A massive bowl of sharkfin soup, a bucket full of Vancouver crabs in cheese, and God knows what else, considering I must’ve blanked out during the whole course meal... because of course, our relatives made us eat it all again. Just one of the damn bowls there would’ve been enough to feed my whole family, or the whole of Africa for a day, and yet I was forced to eat half the meal by my goddam self... And while I was passing into limbo and limber unconsciousness, I caught a glimpse of the final bill... and saw that even when you convert the American dollar, the meal we just had was still less than half the price we would’ve gotten it back home in Canada. And quite frankly, I don’t know how that’s possible, considering the Canadian dollar is worth about six American cents, but still... as remarkable as that was, it didn’t make me think any higher of Seattle than I did before...
Because first of all, it was nice to finally see again a city with high rise buildings, actual highways with actual traffic jams, and blue water waterfronts all at the same time (and no, Calgary doesn’t count – for a city that’s "on the rise", their buildings and offices sure are pathetic...). I mean, in Vancouver, the roads were basically bare except for the odd biker or chipmunk or two, so I was literally praising the gods when my family and I got stuck on a Seattle highway, a real highway, for an hour or two... But there was only one thing and one thing alone that I wanted to see in Seattle... there was only one thing and one thing alone that I would measure and gauge the entire, damn city on... I went into Seattle with a purpose. I went into Seattle with a target... because I had heard about a sale... a sale of video games... at Target. A clearance sale at Target, a store that you boo hoo Americans have yet to share with your friendly fire neighbours up north... And when my uncle brought us to one of those damn stores with the damn ugliest logo I’ve ever seen in my life?... well... I went straight to the video game section... and, um... excuse me, but... WHAT?!!!...
... the prices were higher than their Canadian counterparts... if such a thing were possible...
And that was it. Game over, man. America sucks... I don’t care if Starbucks will rule the world, or if Seattle’s Best Coffee will annihilate Tim Hortons in Vancouver. I don’t give a damn if Frasier and Roz will ever get together, or if Niles and Daphne will ever get a decent plotline again. All I care about, was that Target failed the test... so out of American spite, I went to the Best Buy right next door to Target, and picked up about $50 US of cheap games and movies just to curb my duty free anger... and, um... I should’ve known though... I don’t blame America for this. I can only blame myself... or actually, my mother... because I was wondering why my mother was actually willing to pay for the games and electronic stuff herself, after the damn US machines thought my Interact card (sorry... "debit card") was a damn credit card or some crap like that... Because you see, our family owns washing machines. And each week, my mother gets a dollar or two of American quarters by accident... and since the banks won’t exchange them for us here for some goddam reason... well... I should’ve known... the total at Best Buy was $54... and goddammit, can you believe it?... my mother paid in quarters... or at least, she paid for the first $35 in quarters... and then she paid the next $10 in dimes... and then pennies... and then finally, at least she finished off the rest in Washingtons... but uggh... We were paying in line for something like a goddam fifteen minutes, and as much as I wanted to nudge my mother out of the way, considering there were five people waiting in line after us, I knew I would never willingly embarrass my mother in such a way... I would never embarrass her as she was embarrassing us, I pray to God... and uggh... but at least, I consider it fair payback. Target ended their $5 Xbox game clearance just a day or two before I came. So I ended up ruining Best Buy with fifty frickin’ dollars in unwrapped quarters in just return... not that it was my plan or anything, but still... well... suffice to say, I’ll still be feeling the aftereffects of that for years to come... paging Dr. Freud, I presume...
So let’s face facts. Vancouver is a scary place to live, with its clean air and sentient transit systems just ready to go Terminator. And Victoria has no secrets, except that its nothing more than a bore... and Kelowna is filled by nothing else than boars of men... and Calgary is?... well... Calgary... they have boars in their stampedes, a lack of gas shortages, a few flocks of seagulls, but seriously - that’s about it... And Seattle? Sure, they have coffee. But I hate coffee. I wanted video games. And yet even a big American city like that one didn’t even give a damn for Redmond’s own oversized and overpriced console box... But there was one thing that I at least half enjoyed about my supposed vacation... The license plates in BC arrogantly refer to themselves as "Beautiful British Columbia"... and while that pissed the hell out of me along with their backwards traffic lights, I will say one thing: the plates were telling the truth. The province is beautiful when it comes to nature and Ogopogo... too bad the damn province made me providentially hate its over glorified scenery ass by its end...
There were three places in the Canadian Rockies that truly stood out, with all of them being in the Banff National Park, I think... Although there wasn’t much to see at 10,000 feet elevation, I must admit that I enjoyed the ski lift ride up there, and the memorable fact that we forgot to change the camera batteries by the time we finally got to the top... my mother was pissing for weeks that we didn’t get any pictures of the mountains up there, not like I cared about some snow and ice that we could see anywhere, mind you... Because as majestic as mountains are, unless you actually care about the sheer novelty of being so high up in the air on your own two feet, then there really isn’t much to do. I mean, we drove for two days... to see mountain goats, mimicked Micmac gods, and ten minutes of footage of bloody hell mountains in the distance... and we didn’t even feel high! Peace pipes aside, at least... I mean, sure the ski lift had brought us up an extra 500 feet, but honestly, I didn’t even notice the damn car had brought us from sea level Vancouver all the way up to nine thousand! And considering I couldn’t even feel a loss of air or gravity, what was the damn point of being on a damn mountain without even knowing you were? The mountains on bloody postcards looked better than the ones we were seeing with our own two eyes, and goddammit, even the sky looked fake with its impunity of purity... and the stupidest part of the Banff National Park, to me at least, just had to be the people who worked there... I mean, we had to wait ten minutes in line to get onto the ski lift, only to be blockaded by some bulk barn ass girl who claimed we didn’t know what we were getting into. When someone insisted that they didn’t care, the girl asked this old woman why there were electric fences around the park area. The old woman politely answered, "to keep us safe from the bears?...", and you know what the girl did?... she actually laughed in her face and ordered the old woman to sit her ass down! And what the fuck?!... ten minutes later, the girl finally gave us her two minute speech, as if it was her form of sex. She asked herself the rhetorical question, "why do we have electrical fences around the perimeter?"... and before any of us could care less, she retorted to herself, "to protect the bears from us, naturally!... and to protect us from them too, I guess..."... and, umm... What the FUCK?!! She laughed in an old woman’s face for that?... and then there were the other idiots in that ballpark of a national park, who didn’t even bother to secure the ski lifts safely for little kids who were going down (who later almost fell down a 15 foot drop until the kids themselves finally brought down the safety railing halfway down the hill), but I guess that’s besides the point... since apparently, the young and attractive Kelownans there don’t give a damn about us humans... instead, they literally just kept pointing to the signs on the grass, to keep the squirrels safe for some damn reason, out of all goddam endangered species on the list...
But there is one place that I have no real complaints about: the Athabasca Glacier... if novelty was ever considered cool, then this was the place to feel it... Because while I never cared that I was now officially 12,000 feet above sea level without even noticing it, I did care that without even knowing it, we had been driving on a 2000 feet thick ice berg for God knows how long... Because thanks to glacier movements in the ice ages, a sheet of several meters of dust and dirt had formed over the ice, allowing roads to be paved and crap like that. So remarkably, we had been driving on a mountain of ice for the past few hours... and didn’t even notice it... and I couldn’t help but think that was cool... And when we were driven onto the ice part of the glacier? I didn’t just enjoy the experience, because I could literally drink the water melting in the streams (and I can officially say, that the glacier water was the best water I have ever tasted... and that’s saying a lot, considering I hate both spring and tap water). It wasn’t just exciting, because I was able to crawl up some small ice hills to freeze my hands and ass in even larger streams just a little bit up... But I just found it all to be cool, because it was so goddam cool! And you know why?... Vancouver was always annoying. Hell, Seattle was also always annoying, because they were both a paradox of weather – warm in the air, yet cool because the goddam ocean breezes just kept causing more A/C to go up into the air for some damn reason (don’t ask)... But in Toronto, we have no breeze. We have no spoon. It’s either boiling or freezing, with Spring somehow managing an intermediate in between... and I love Spring. I may hate Spring water, but I love Spring... and the weather on the glacier? It was perfect 420 Spring... the air was slightly nippy, but warm by Toronto standards. The ice was a blast to slide on, as if I was skidding on my own university’s lawn like I do in the winters. And when my hands started shaking from the freezing cold rivers I was filling water bottles with?... priceless... I was cold! I was goddam cold in the summer, and I loved it! Call me an idiot of a Canadian if you will, but I just love the feeling you get when you’re ready to collapse from hypothermia... In essence, I loved the glacier, because it reminded me of home. It reminded me of... well... ice...
Which leads me back to my conclusion... and my start... my beginning... that there is no place like home... I’m finally back in Toronto, where we’re somehow getting more rain than forest fire Vancouver over there, thank you very much. And really, after seeing the West Coast, there’s really nowhere else I’d rather be than where I am now. We have shopping here. We have working traffic lights here. We have traffic jams, and actual highways, and off ramps that actually go places, I shit you not... We may not have been the home of Starbucks, but we’re the home of Tim Hortons. And we may not have been the home of Target or Future Shop, but goddammit, who the hell would want to live in the home of goddam Future Shop?... we may not have dirt cheap Chinese restaurant prices, and we may not have a Hong Kong just around the block... but wait a second – we do. We have Markham and Richmond for that, but unlike Vancouver, we actually have five or more other cities in the same district that are actually American, or where we have Little Italy, Little Portugal, Little India, Little Pakistan, and yes, even Little Canada, which is more than I can ever say for anything in BC... And the name of the province speaks for itself. BC truly is backwards. Three hours slow, and three thousand kilometres back. And it simply is not the place for me...
But I will miss my relatives in Vancouver. And I will miss the better Best Buys down south... and I will miss the Green card, not that I’ve ever had one mind you, but still... and I will miss American quarters, although I see my mother is stocking back up on them already (here we come, Buffalo!)... and I’ll miss the Sharpshooters in Calgary... and I will miss the tears of the glaciers, considering you’d have to be sick to drink the green ass water melting from the ice here in Toronto... and I will miss the blue waters of the West Coast, as much as I adore the brown muchmusic muck we have over here... But home is home, and as both Dorothy and Mick Foley and maybe even Mick Jagger would say, there truly is no place like home...
... and, well... Foley also says "Tables, Ladders, and Chairs, oh my"... but alas, I guess no place is truly perfect... but at least, I’ve found my place... because yes, I am the definition of homesick... rest assured, I’ve done my homework on that...
Monday, June 30th, 2003
Y2kk Update: This update has been four weeks in the making... or actually, it’s just been postponed for God knows how long, simply because I seem to inherit writer’s block (or writer’s laziness) every single damn time I try writing for this Tweakui site of mine... I mean, I really need a psychologist over here to analyze what the hell is wrong with me. I have no qualms about spending day and night on my download and noname sites, which nobody ever visits or reads. And yet I seem to have some fear of success or some crap like that, when it comes to the only site that ever garners any damn hits these days... Sometimes I feel it’s because my Tweakui layout just plain sucks, even to my eyes. And sometimes I feel I just don’t like the site, considering I write my least personal stuff on it. Or maybe it’s just the simple fact that out of all my sites, I have the least incentive to write what I do write for my Tweakui site? Because I don’t care about tweaking and dweaking anymore. I bought my ATI Radeon 7500 PCI card not long ago, and have yet to use it for anything but DivXs, because my heart just isn’t in computers and hardware crap anymore... It’s in movies. It’s in video games (as it has been since I was four). And as always, it’s in my private life, where certain people don’t talk to me any longer, but that’s besides the point...
But then again, there are certain moments that fit perfectly with this website, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, as a certain caller the other week promptly demonstrated to me... Because you see, while nobody I care about bothers to talk to me anymore, of course the people I want to shove off the phone and off a cliff seem to do exactly the opposite. I guess I have that kind of axe effect... Because the other week, I got a call from some sponsor-a-kid or some kind of donation place. And the thing was, back in Grade 8 and 9, I thought I was a reborn human being... I had just gone through Catholic Confirmation, and in my infinite wisdom, I tried to be better than everyone else by donating most of my money away to the Church and other charities... I did it all in the hope that one day, I would feel better about myself. That one day, I would know that I was a good person... But it didn’t take long for that dream to crash and burn. Because starting with the time in Grade 9, when my crush told me I was "mean", I finally started realizing something... being nice and being polite aren’t always the nice and polite things to do. I never once noticed how damn perverted I was, or how damn insensitive I was... or at least, I did recognize these traits. But I also realized that nothing I was doing would ever change any of that. Nothing I could do would ever change me. And over the years, I lost my zest for donating my money away. It wasn’t making me a better person, or at least, it didn’t make me feel like a better person. Because all I really cared about, was whether the people I knew cared about me or not. All I cared about, was whether I was liked by the people I actually can see and talk to... When I started donating, I donated money for me, and just for me. And unfortunately for me, that’s not what society tell us charity is meant to be. Whether society is right or wrong is not the issue... is the issue is, I have issues...
But enough sorry ass, sob stories from the past... The point is, I felt guilty while I was talking to this charity whiner on the phone, enough so that I was almost willing to cave in to his terrorist demands... until one thing happened... Maybe it was because this guy had woken me up at nine in the morning. Or maybe it’s because my voice has never sounded masculine in the first place, but still... um... for some damn reason, the guy over the phone started calling me, "ma’am"... and, um... I immediately corrected him of course. I told him I was not "the misses of the house". I of course told him that I was male, and that I was no longer interested in his offer... But instead of just giving up like any good telemarketer crap guy would’ve done, this psycho charity guy wouldn’t give up his T-1000 act and let me off the hook... and almost as if he was mocking me, for the next damn ten minutes of my life, the stupid bastard just kept calling me, "ma’am" this, and "ma’am" that, as if he was hoping that I was a weak, piddly female, willing to give into his hypnotically charming voice and pay for him his commission crap pay or some crap like that... and all I did was sit there, yawning, Amanda tapping my feet in disgrace, shaking my head that this sales pitch idiot was calling me a woman. Yet I still refused to hang up the phone, if only because I was still feeling guilty for being such a Scrooge of a bastard... The man eventually did hang up the phone, of course. By the time I left the phone and went to the washroom, at least... and when I thought I was finally safe to heave a heavy sigh of relief, just a few days later, guess who calls back and called me "ma’am" right off the bat?... and, um...
Okay, I hung up the phone on him, this time with no remorse. So sue me... but in a way, I still do feel guilty. Guilty that I’m not willing to part with just $20 these days for some sick kid I’ve never met before in my life... and yet willing to part with $300 CAN to buy a Microsoft Xbox as soon as I see it on sale... That’s a story that I already told on my noname site, but there was one small detail that I left out... You see, I was trying to get service at a Future Shop in my town. You readers know how I love those Future Shop guys... the thing was, I was trying to ask about two things: Wario World for the Gamecube, and the Xbox being $50 off right in front of me (I wanted to know how long the sale would last). The thing was though, there were three or four Future Shop employees all right there in front of me, standing by the Xbox section, seemingly with nothing to do... But every single time I asked for help?... um... they sort of ignored me... they sort of shooed me off like some pest of a zest of a Zazoo bird... and it didn’t take me long to figure out why...
Because there was a girl there. A slightly pudgy but overall rather cute high school girl, with Lord of the Rings in hand, ready to buy an Xbox on sale... and the thing was, every single damn employee in the section (all overweight males, naturally) were all crowding around her, even though she was simply buying what they should’ve assumed I would buy as well. I mean, if it was about commission, at least one of those guys would’ve talked to me and at least blinked a eye in my general direction... But no. Of course not. They ignored the heathen in me, and swarmed themselves around like the most carnivorous of cavemen, at the mere sight that they could only call heaven... And even when the sale was dead and done and the girl took the massive Xbox box to the front (where the girl cashier was eyeing her too... mmmm... but, um, nevermind...), all the men followed suit like suitors and leapt around her like laptop puppy dogs, as if in hope of getting some lap dance or some crap like that... and of course, I was left alone in the Xbox section. I waited there for five more minutes for those Future Shop bastards to stop waving their arms in the air, getting all their friends over to feast eyes on the beauty of a sale they just made... So eventually, I just got up and left. As simple as that... Even though I knew Future Shop was now owned by Best Buy, I decided to just screw the FS-BS, and head straight to Best Buy, where my brother and I got the Xbox for the same price... with actual service... and with no damn idiot calling me "ma’am"...
... unless calling myself "ma’am" would’ve gotten the attention of those damn Future Shop nerds, but that’s besides the point...
Anyhew, moving along, I might as well admit here my Day of Defeat. I haven’t gotten any calls back from any of the engineering firms I applied to. Apparently, I was supposed to call them or some crap like that, to generate some sort of rapport, but that’s besides the point... And after that, I gave out my resume to every computer shop I could find in town, only to get no replies back, simply because most of them are going out of business let alone hiring for the summer... So in the end, my summer’s going to be four full moon months of dullsville, with a hint of boring on the Sundae, Sunnydale side... But a certain few things have kept me entertained for this long at least, with one of them involving some of the worst ice cream I have ever tasted in my life.
Thank goodness for SARS, I say... that stupid virus may have wiped out all life in my little city of Toronto, but at least it got me and my family dirt cheap prices to the CN Tower... If there’s one thing about Toronto that the rest of the world knows about, it’s the CN Tower, the world’s still tallest, free-standing structure... I used to draw doodles of the tower when I was small. I even cried in Grade 2 when it was boasted that the Chicago Sears Tower would be built even higher (which ended up being a bunch of phallic bull in the end...)... So suffice to say, I was a bit excited to finally be able to sit 350m high in the air and have what I expected to be a decent, non-Chinese dinner for once... and, um...
Simply put, the CN Tower sucks, although I guess I really only have myself to blame... I ordered a tomato salad as my appetizer. And the thing was, I expected... um... you know, a "salad"... with lettuce... and dressing... and maybe some parsley on the side... and what I got instead was... um... a tomato... a slice of tomato... just a stupid tomato... with the most awful, grating, grated cheese I had ever tasted. Awful enough to remind me why I started gagging on Ethiopian food about a year or two ago, but that’s besides the point... So after throwing up in my own dish, it was finally time for the main course meal... and I ordered?... a salmon... and since I was used to Chinese restaurants, I thought I’d get a whole salmon. And in a way, I did... it’s only appropriate to cut off the head, and skin the scales, but... um... although the Salmon tasted alright in the end, it was kind of distressing how the amount of fish I got could’ve fit in a bloody tuna can or some crap like that... and the asparagus on the side tasted about as fresh as my own piss if you ask me... And for dessert? I got pecan ice cream. I should’ve known though that pecans absolutely suck when you suck them down on mass and practically choke to death... and while I only gagged once or twice, once from the pecans and once from the crap quality of the ice cream, at least dessert was decent enough to finally take that stench of the tomato salad out of my mouth for the goodness of all who breathe... and, well...
Okay, so I guess I can’t fine dine. So sue me, since that’s what my sister says. Apparently, all tomato salads are just goddam tomatoes... and apparently, I was supposed to order nothing but the damn lamb in such a fine restaurant, as the cook had no need to try make the Salmon worthwhile while I was paying with a goddam discount ticket... But the view from 350m high CN Donut was decent, right?... well... kind of... You see, first of all, I was getting motion sickness from the damn restaurant spinning on me. The thing was, the outside windows didn’t rotate along with the rest of the restaurant, and the distinction between the two ended up making me sit in the washroom until I was sure I wouldn’t have a reason to puke... again... And the view? What a goddam, horrible show... What view? As soon as we got up there, a weird fog blanketed the whole damn city. All we could see was the top of some bank building once every rotation... not to mention a gas shortage and a flock of seagulls, but that was about bloody it... And when we visited the observation deck, where you could hang outside at the 340m mark, and jump on a glass floor for fun?... I mean, hell, I jumped for ten seconds. Then I got bored... I then went outside and breathed in the smoggy air, which felt exactly the same as it was on ground level. Then I got bored... and honestly, we may have gotten the dinner tickets for half price, but honestly, they weren’t even worth this... The CN Tower may forever stand as the best phallic symbol EVAR in my heart, but in reality?... all it is, is a tall stick that gives you the short stick of the bargain basement as soon as you pay...
But at least the SARS discount virus going around didn’t amount to nothing for us in the end. Because my sister recommended that we take the offer of half price off to the Princess of Wales theatre, where Disney’s The Lion King musical was playing until September. And the thing was, I always wanted to attend a musical or opera, if only so I could see if all my relentless, ignorant bashing of the two was deserved or not... and what was my final verdict?...
Well, The Lion King had its merits. Certain singers played their roles rather well. I personally never found a single joke in the whole play to be amusing, except for maybe the moment where Mufasa pretends to fire Zazoo... but all that matters is that the crowd as a whole was practically giggling non-stop, and thus, I have to give credit to the execution... The actor who played Mufasa was by far the most accurate portrayal to the movie. His voice was strong, confident, and Darth Vader like at times. He also seemed like he cared about Simba, even though it just looked ridiculous on stage whenever he tried to roar or pounce or whatnot... And Scar was mostly decent in all his scenes as well. The slanted cave he was in helped create an atmosphere of evil, and he did do a lot of scratching of his chin at least, to make him seem somewhat intelligent... for an evil guy, at least... But as for the rest of the cast? Mufasa’s wife did nothing but wiggle a little toy Simba in the air. Nala was absolutely ruined if you ask me, when they changed her to a black woman and gave her rap references for some odd reason... Timon and Pumbaa got the kids in the crowd cheering at least, but they just didn’t feel nearly as animated as they were in the movie. Zazoo was annoying as hell, but I guess that was how he was meant to be, so kudos there... And Simba? Don’t get me started on Simba. The child actor couldn’t act a damn dime. Sure, he had great singing skills, but all he did was wave his arms around in the air like a flimsy toy, as if that would get our applause in the end (which it sadly did... if only to be charitably polite, ma’am...). He overacted and underacted every single scene he was in, and his facial expressions were far more cocky than the movie Simba’s ever were. And yes, I realize that young Simba was always meant to be presumptuous and ambitious, but at least he was endearing. At least he was innocent... this actor was not... he was just Pompeii pompous in the end, like the most bruised of grapefruit, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, but that’s besides the point... And I was hoping that such an awful portrayal of Simba was only due to the young actor, but when grown-up Simba appeared on stage?... God, he was just as cocky and just as obnoxiously loud as the kid before him. Even when he finally became king in the musical, he was still bulging his chest out with pride on Pride Rock, far more than the movie’s Simba ever did or would have. This sir, was no Matthew Broderick... he was Hans Solo at best...
But I guess I shouldn’t talk about musical politics, now should I?... instead, I should just stick to the lameass scenes that were added to the play... Now, don’t get me wrong. Every song from the movie was ported over with near perfection, with the notable exceptions of ‘I Can’t Wait to be King’ and ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’... Now, Circle of Life had a circle of dancing to keep us entertained. I especially loved the rendition of "Be Prepared", as the Hyena costumes and the moving Elephant Skeleton set were remarkably well done. But honestly, all that was happening onscreen for the biggest number of the film, ‘I Can’t Wait to be King’, was a bunch of stupid ostriches bobbing their heads up and down. Not to mention the flock of seagulls... but that was about it... And it was boring, not just because of the lack of SARS ADDS action, but because the boy wonder singer didn’t put any feeling into his mechanical rhythms and hymns whatsoever. He didn’t sound like he cared to be king, or even to get rid of Zazoo... And as for ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’?... well, I never liked that romance part of the movie anyhew, but it was royally ruined even more by some weird ass ballet thing the writers inserted in the middle to make the bloody show longer... And honestly, I swear to God, I mean it when I say every damn song they added to the musical that was not in the movie, absolutely sucked monkey balls. I mean, the songs were just plain awkward and just awfully straight-forward. While the movie songs had subtle subtext and meanings (‘Be Prepared’ meant to kill Simba), the new songs were glaringly devoid of any sort of originally whatsoever (except for maybe the mirror/reflection song, even though that was ripped right out of Mulan). I mean honestly, every single damn extra scene that was added was as bad as that Lion King home movie sequel, I shit you not... it was as if I was watching Aladdin, Part 4: The Lion King of Thieves or some crap like that, in front of my Oedipal pussing eyes...
And the musical couldn’t even get some key scenes right. I mean, I know it was damn hard to make the Antelope crushing scene even remotely as dramatic as it was in the movie, but honestly, that stupid Simba kid barely even looked like he cared as he was running on the spot from the shadows in the background, ruining the whole moment of drama for me... And every single fight in the show was lameass as well. I was hoping that the singers had a choreographed sword fight or something in the end. Instead, all they did was wave around their blades like my own sorry ass did in my Grade 13 John Wilkes Booth play... But I will give credit where credit is due. The musical was exceptionally done in certain parts, as the moment where dead Mufasa talks to his son wowed me both in the majesty of the words and the ambience of the stars in the background. And if this is any consolation to any Lion King fan who reads this, the musical did make me appreciate the movie a hell of a lot more. I never liked the film much in the past, but just recalling the majestic nature of certain scenes throughout this musical, almost made me cry at the remembrance of Simba trying to wake his dead dad, or of how damn scared Simba was of his family learning who was responsible for his father’s death... and it also makes me cry, thinking of just how much the damn Simba actors butchered these two Disney magical scenes of theirs, but I guess that’s besides the point.
All that really matters in the end, was that I found my half price ticket to be worth the three hours of Lion King prancing admission I got. I mean, when I get to see a show where really, really, ridiculously bulimic, mind-reading girls dolly around in tight, African spandex, how can I possibly complain?... and considering no damn Usher ever called me "ma’am", or bothered to 007 crowd around in their penguin tuxes all the voluptuous girls that I was spying with my little eye up on the balcony, at least I can say that the show was better than most of the crap in my life...
And as for me and my life, and this site?... the show must go on...
And oh, just to artificially inseminate some extra length into this update of mine, I’ll cut and paste my most recent download site update here. It’s short, but sweet... sweetly and sweatly ironic. I can sure as hell attest to that...
"It's just so degrading... the way life's so damn grating... and so goddam, fuckin' taunting... enough so that I times, I just don't care.
I know my life by all accounts is perfectly fine, but that doesn't mean I can't be pissed about it. I know that my life today is no different than it was yesterday, but that doesn't mean I can't bitch about it... Because yesterday afternoon, I got a little letter in the mail. It seemed that the professor of my electricity and magnetism course did change my mark afterall out of mercy, and apparently my new score was already updated on the university website. So thinking that a miracle had happened and that I wouldn't have to damn take that course over again next year, I eagerly logged onto the school website, only to goddam fine that my mark had changed...
... from a 47%...
... to a goddam 49%...
And there was still a fuckin' F next to my goddam name, standing for a big "Ivan F fuck you" with a lovely smile on the side... And honestly, why the hell did the professor bother to change my mark if he wasn't going to let me goddam pass? It was like he was just damn taunting me, waving before my hungry eyes a fish to feed, then striking and slapping it from my face before I ever got a damn bite... So what else could I damn do but e-mail the professor again? Because yes, I know he's bound by rules. Yes, I know he's bound by honour, and loyalty, and oaths, and blah blah blah. And I know he probably did his "best" or his "most" to change my mark enough to get me to the pass the course, and I appreciate that... but that doesn't mean I can't be pissed about it. It doesn't mean I can't bitch about it. And quite frankly put, I'm pretty fucked off right now. And why? Is there any question why?
Because I just got a letter back from that professor, and he confessed his condolences, that he tried and tried but just couldn't find the marks to let me pass... so he was hoping the 49% that he did give me would suffice for the committee to goddam pass me at least... but that's not what the fuckin' F says next to my name... and, well... What else can I do but thank him for his time? What else can I do? Beg him on my knees to lie to the committee that I earned a damn spot on the passable idiotF list? I think not... He has his standards, and I have mine. And I know the situation is now out of his hands, unless he wants to dirty his hands... and I understand why he refused to help me any further. I appreciate him trying... but honestly, why the fuckin' hell would he tempt me with a goddam 49%? Why the hell wouldn't he just leave my mark the way it was so that I wouldn't ever have gotten my goddam hopes up again? Why the hell couldn't he just leave me be when I was perfectly accepting of the fact that I was a goddam failure? I mean, honestly, who throws a fucking shoe?... Sure, I know that I'm the one to blame for my mark, not him. But that doesn't mean I can't be pissed about it. And that doesn't mean I can't bitch about it.
Because you know what? Now I officially know that if I didn't get blamed for goddam cheating by my goddam TA in the course, then I probably would've goddam passed the damn course... I agreed, under the table, with the TA, that I was willing to lose a percent or two of my mark for goddam looking at the back of the book. By his rules, I had cheated, and since he was willing only to dock a percentage point or two from my mark, it just wasn't worth it for me to bring the whole damn Fidel fiasco to the tribunal for retribution... but now I see that I put my goddam foot in my mouth. If only I could get that one mark back, I would pass the damn course, unless the 49% that the professor gave me was pity bullshit in the first place... and I know I was the one who shook hands, nodded my head, and signed away my name as the guilty party in that whole cheating fiasco. I know that I did break the rules, without knowing the goddam rules. I know this is all my fault, and really nobody else's. But that goddam doesn't mean I can't bitch about it. It goddam doesn't mean I can't be goddam depressed.
And what now?... well, I take my pitiful fight to the university committee itself. They might pass me despite that one lost percent... if they have any decency, at least... but until then? Right now, I'm preoccupied with the fact that my brother is damn pissed at himself for not "understanding" the plotline in Halo for the Xbox. I mean, I know he gets the story... he just doesn't absorb as much of it as I seem to do, and thus he gets jealous... thus, he gets compulsive... thus, he gets competitive... and he takes it out on me. Because I feel guilty. When he feels bad, I feel bad. And you know what sucks? He does this all the time, for every single game, and for every single damn movie we watch. He always strikes himself down for being the "dum" one of deh brothas, and I can't stand the fact that he does. He blows the whole situation not just out of proportion, but clear skies right out of the goddam water. And right now, he's down in the basement, brooding that I didn't care that he cares so damn much about a goddam plothole he missed. And why didn't I care? Because I always cater to him. And even though he knows that I'm goddam pissed at the letter my professor just sent me back, he still doesn't bother to cater to me. And sure, I can chalk that up to just human nature and accept it. And sure, I may love my brother for everything he is, and even for the things he does to me. But that doesn't mean I can't goddam bitch about it. And that doesn't mean I can't blow my own steam off on this website of mine.
This website was made for one purpose and one purpose only: to vent my frustrations before they vent me out of my own asshole, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean... and quite frankly, the reason my websites have been suffering lately, the reason why I still haven't updated most of my sites with anything decent for months, is because I just don't feel Mr. furious anymore. I don't feel whiny anymore, because it's all been said and done before, on this website no less... and because I always write as a routine, on Fridays, rather than on whim, when I actually have a thirst to write... But you know what? I may not have solved anything with this Y2kk Update of mine, but I do feel a hell of a lot better, if only because somebody got to listen to my problems for once...
... myself...
I guess I don't listen enough, because I talk too much... but either way, I still wish things would sort themselves out in my life. I know that my life is just grand compared to others'. I know that if none of this university bullshit crap had arrived in the mail, that I wouldn't even be upset right now... but that doesn't mean I can't be pissed about it. And that doesn't mean I can't bitch about it. And thank God I have a website for all the above... otherwise, I just might scream...
Or worse yet, I might just buy Scream, and scream that I bought a movie as bad as Scream, but that's besides the point..."
Saturday, September 28th, 2002
Y2kk Update: Well, I'm spent, with my hands feeling soiled after spending more than a fair share of hours turning bread into butter, and wine into, um... more butter, so to speak... And oh, nevermind. I never manage to get my metaphors and smiley similes to work out properly anymore. I'm just lucky that I managed to get my brother's DVD-ROM working a few hours ago, all thanks to a very old friend of mine. You see, my brother bought the Pioneer 16x about a month ago so he wouldn't be reduced to watching pathetic VHS tapes at his university suite. The only problem was, he was still reduced to watching pathethic VHS tapes, simply because his PentiumII 266MHz and its Matrox G200 card were simply unable to run a single DVD movie at more than 10 bloody frames per second... And since I've always been the frames per second kind of guy, I was determined to get PowerDVD working at all costs, even at the cost of my own wallet...
So because I had absolutely no personal use for it anymore, I gave his computer my blessed be, S3 Savage 4, a card so ouvertly obscure, that even the videophiles in my computer engineering class still haven't heard of it to this day... and they dare call themselves hardcore computer gamers, but I digress... Anyhew, short story short, I was shocked as hell as anybody when my useless Savage card, the one that can't even run NHL 2000 properly on my Duron 1GHz, was able to run DVD movies at nearly 60 fps. Sure, there was the occasional milli-second jump in framework, but it's true when I say the S3 had rekindled and regained my brother's moviephile secular existence in just a matter of mere minutes... and now he's taking all my DVDs with him to university, even the ones I plead with him not to, but that's besides the point. Because lo and behold, at least I can finally feel smug that my $150 Savage4 card actually does something right... and what, it only took me about three years to find it? Will the wonders of the world ever cease?
And God, if only I was able to build those wonders of the world, maybe I wouldn't have been slaughtered so badly the other day at school... You see, the newest novelty for me at the University of Toronto is the network Civilzation game installed on every computer. And what really sucks the Big City apple, is that after three games against friends and the not so friendly, I have officially concluded that I suck, what? I suck, what? Hell, my only strength in the game is typing in messages, telling the enemy where I am, so they can wipe me out and put me out of my goddam misery...
So just because I had nothing better to do on yesterday (except study for my tests this week, but that's besides the point), I downloaded Free Civilization for myself, just to experiment with the game mechanics... And you know what? You know bloody what? In my first game against the "easy" computer, they were killing me with Howitzer tanks by the time I had just researched bloody hell horseback riding. And God, sure my little archers managed to beat back the enemy aircraft carriers for a couple centuries or so, but it really stung when they started launching cruise missiles at me in the 17th century... And you know why I sucked? Besides the fact that I just suck at every computer game that is... It's because my friends told me that researching new governments was useless, yet I figured out by watching the computer on Friday, that if you don't upgrade to a Monarchy or Communism right away, your tech development slows to a Cro-Magnon halt. And, well... what? My friends and not so friendly couldn't have told me that just a little bit sooner? Because God, if I didn't know better, I'd swear that were actually setting me up for a can of ass whooping, entrenching my folds in the art of trench warfare every single life wrenching game, but that's besides the point... Because I'll get them back someday. I may sound like a cliche cartoon villain right now, but it's true. I shall have my revenge, and show them the very bread and butter that I'm made of, although that doesn't exactly sound too good...
Well, anyhew, enough with the senseless, endless, pitiful whining and, um, buttery emancipation, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean... Let's just cut right into the bread and, um, more butter of the story of the week, that my Mycrowsoft.com redirection services have been down for the past two weeks or so. As far as I know though, as of today, the servers are finally working again, although there's not really any point anymore, considering my hits for this site have reached a stunning peak of less than ten hits... If I can bitterly recall properly, the last time my Mycrowsoft.com servers inexplicably shut down without warning, my hits dropped from 200 a day to a bloody hell 50 a day over the course of just a couple of weeks. And now? And now? It looks like my hits have been cut into a quarter pounder yet again while factoring in the Subway diet, because nobody, and I mean nobody is buffering and bothering to visit my noname sites anymore... just great... just dandilion, God-awful Mandolin great... I'm officially the Neil bore of the internet. Welcome to the web.
Anyhew, because none of Mycrowsoft.com sites were working for about a week, I decided to procrastinate from homework for quite a while by setting up a backup redirection server at Ulimit.com. It's a French company, and although they still might go out of business just like so many American sites have from the dotcom crash, I've got my fingers and feet doubly linked list crossed that my new Com02.com redirection will serve as an auxiliary address when push comes to Great Depression shove... Anyhew, for those of you who actually care, here's a semi-evil list of my new internet redirection addresses:
http://ivanf.com02.com = http://tweakui.com02.com =
http://tweakui.mycrowsoft.com
http://ivanftweakui.com02.com =
http://tweakui.mycrowsoft.com
http://ivanfnoname.com02.com =
http://noname.mycrowsoft.com
http://ivanfdownload.com02.com =
http://download.mycrowsoft.com
http://ivanfmsn.com02.com =
http://download.mycrowsoft.com
http://ivanfoffice.com02.com = http://office.com02.com = http://office.mycrowsoft.com
http://support.com02.com = http://ivanfsupport.com02.com =
http://support.mycrowsoft.com
http://flame.com02.com = http://ivanfflame.com02.com =
http://flame.mycrowsoft.com
http://ivanfarchive.com02.com =
http://archives.mycrowsoft.com
http://development.com02.com = http://ivanfdevelopment.com02.com =
http://development.mycrowsoft.com
http://cows.com02.com = http://ivanfcows.com02.com =
http://cows.mycrowsoft.com
I doubt anybody will remember them, considering my download site is reaching critical hit lows each day, my noname site has yet to get even one microparsec of recognition, and my msn site has never exceeded the mark of five visitors a day... But sadly and strangely enough, a bunch of people now seem to remember me in the computer labs, simply because of one dandy trait of mine: I tend to walk around a lot, roam about, and simply pace back and forth, as if I was some important person, with something important to do... Now, any Y2kk reader will know the exact opposite is true. Afterall, I have literally nothing better to do in my life than rant and whine on this website of wine and, um, more butter, so help me God... But you see, since nobody ever reads this website, nobody at my school realizes know how much of a no-name loser I truly am. And strangely enough, that's why people actually seem to notice and remember my face... in fact, a least five people in the past week have asked me about that big black smerch on my face. Nobody's ever asked me about this bruise if a birthmark since Grade 9, when students were alerting the authorities that at home I beat myself up...
The thing is, I pace around the computer labs a lot, and I especially paced a hell of a lot this week after I finished my computer assignment early Monday. The thing was, since I was walking around, trying to help my friends before the deadline, it seemed like everyone else in the lab was taking notice how I was the only one in the room with the decency to help someone else out... You might ask where the TAs were, considering this was our lab session. And, well, leave it to U of T to pay a bunch of graduate students to leave their classes unattended and leave an idiot monger like me in unofficial charge... And to be honest, it was quite a funny sight. As I walked from friend to friend, there would always be a person inbetween who would cut me off, ask if I was the TA, and even when I would reply no, they would still jar-jar and beg me for hours and oodles of help... Most of the time, the questions were basic. A couple inquiries were about Java from the course I took last year, I had to give my own little tutorial on how to print in Linux a half a dozen times or so, and I especially admired the amicable guy, who even after I laughed in his face when he asked if I was the TA, still felt obliged to force upon me the big O question: where oh where, has the stapler gone?... and wow, that sounds good. That sounds wily. I feel so important...
But my favourite of the favourites has just got to be that one guy, that one first year guy who spotted me helping out one of my friends from across the room, and slowly began to raise his hand, imperial inch by inch, standard centimetre by centimetre, when he finally saw me lift my head up... Delighted that somebody out there had to decency to not tug at my hair for attention, I screamed out with a smile, "I'm not the TA!", and realizing that the dozen of so people that I've already helped didn't give a damn whether I was the TA or not, I just said screw that, I'm going to help this guy anyhew, and marched on over across the room, just to give him a tutorial on how to submit his project... Short story short, by the end of the week, I was used to be being asked for assistance from pretty much every able body out there, although that's still no excuse for standing up a certain friend of mine, but that's besides the powerpoint. And to be honest, when I first walked into university last year, the only thing that was on my mind was how I really wanted to be a TA sometime. Because I could never be a professor, since I barely had enough smarts to pass my first year. And yet the likelihood of becoming a TA is also as high as the Hood sinking the Bismarck, simply because unless I find some friends in high places, I need at least a B average in school just to sit idle in a tutorial classroom, like a screen saver on crack... or worse yet, butter...
But still, I've always had the innate desire to rant my ass off to anybody who demotes themselves to having to raise their hand. Basically, I want to be a TA just to deservingly lecture my students with God-awful Y2kk Updates, and watch them fraudily applaud at the end... just like how so many professors use their jobs to promote their books and papers, I guess I want to be a TA just to promote these sites... And to be even more honest, I did feel a certain element of power after helping out at least a dozen people on Monday. Because when it comes to life, when it comes to existence, it's not about right or wrong. It's not about better or worse. It's about standing high above the other's head, ready to give a stern lecture, when you suddenly and stubbornly realize, that the only thing that seems to come out of your mouth, is foamy, frosty, frothy butter... mmm, timbits covered in piss-poor, metaphorical butter, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean...
And okay, scratch one off. It looks like I'm never going to be an English TA...
Friday, September 29th, 2000
Y2kk Update: Geez, me haven't updated this page in a while. I've been too busy, um, doing nothing and, uh, thinking about doing nothing... I updated the Advanced Windows9x Tweaking guide with something about a Mapped Cache, but it's a crappy tweak that I just put on there for no reason... I do have a story to tell you about Future Shop, which is the equivalent of Circuit City if you doubled all of their prices... I bought a CL ModemBlasterUSB 56k V.90 from them for $150 Canadian bucks, brought it home, and it worked slower than my old Motorola 33.6 worth $25 bucks or something. So I repackaged the goods and prepared to return it a few days later to where I bought it. Afterall, I had bought RAM at Computer City before (which is owned by the same guy as Future Shop is) and I was allowed to return it with no problem... But that was because Computer City has competition here. Future Shop has no such thing like that... can you spell MONOPOLY?
I stood in the refund line for 40 minutes, gawking at that stupid, yellow sign that said "Satisfaction Guaranteed". And for crying out loud, there was just that one person in front of us, trying to return a Cordless Phone that didn't work... and, well, that guy in front wasn't really happy with the service, and I didn't know why at that moment, but... When I finally got up there, I was greeted by a phony hello and smile. I told my problem, that the modem wouldn't connect past 26400 bps, and she didn't understand a word so she called a computer sales rep over. He didn't understand a word I said either, so with those blank, staring eyes of his, he asked me if the modem worked at all. I honestly said, "yes". It just didn't work because of an incompatibility with my computer, and I'd like an exchange please. And how does he respond? He tells me I can't exchange it. He shows me my own receipt, and dimly in that spot where it's folded, it says in faded print I can't return any product that's been opened. Doesn't matter if it's worth $1 or $1000, I just can't return it. That's when my brother started screaming that he just lost $150. I called the manager over, and she looked like she didn't give a damn. She had probably had gone through this routine a million times that day alone. She told me the same stupid thing that I can't return it, because if I did, she wouldn't know what to do with an opened box... well, for a buck she could've just repackaged it for someone that it can work for, but I guess she ain't very managerial literate at all... so I tested her computer IQ, and started spouting out all the crap that I did to try to get it to work. Told her about the MTU, the RWIN, the Firmware Flash bios, and even the bloody 3Com V.90 protocol test site. No response. Not even a flinch in their eyes.
They then asked me which server I used. I said I tested it with Freewwweb, NetZero, Freei, iFreedom, 3Web, HomeFreeWeb, blah blah blah and another one I can't remember right now... heh, the two of them just stared at me with blank faces and told me they heard the modem works with AOL and Sympatico... geez, like I didn't know that... Eventually I revealed to them that the only smart guy actually sacrificing himself by working at Future Shop had opened the package for us to look at & inspect, therefore we had bought the modem with an open box. That's when she went into the back, pretended to talk to herself in a mirror, and then came out saying we can finally get an exchange - and that because of her generousity, she could get fired... Yeah, sure.. she should get fired for arguing with us for an hour and a half already... I was going to use that $150 to buy a 128MB module of Pc-100 RAM which should've costed $190 according to the weekly flyer... and what RAM does the manager bring me? A 128MB module costing $290... hmm... con-men, con-women all in little, red uniforms... We then decided to take the credits at the store and come back another day when they don't remember us and can't take as much advantage, but when we got back to the refund stand to get a new receipt, a new employee (actually, the 8th person I saw at that spot over those 2 hours) was gossiping on the phone. When we asked for our credits, what does she do? She asks us our story again, and we waited yet again for the manager to clear things up. It's a good plan though; keep switching the refund employees so their cluelessness can piss us customers off even more...
Future Shop took nearly 2 hours out of my life. I think I'll give those 2 hours to Best Buy, Circuit City, or even, if I'm that damned, CompUSA when they all storm the Canadian gates... heh, when I was leaving, I noticed a guy was bringing a defective DVD playing back to Future Shop... I sure wish I had stayed to see that machine wrapped around that manager's head...
Friday, August 11th, 2000
Y2kk Update: Well, today's the big day. I just uploaded a list of almost 100 Free Web Space Servers and a whole bunch of new advanced Win9x tweaks like how to double your shutdown speed and how to break through every Poledit security feature there is. But that's not the big news. Let the Armada community know that I, IvanF - the bloody no-name modder, am now submitting my resignation for modding retirement. Today I release my final mod: IvanF's No Name Brand Mod 0.60 for Activision's Star Trek Armada. The main new features are I increased the Z-axis space, I made the AI even harder, I added a complete uninstallation batch file, & I added in the Borg Tactical Cube to give every race at least 13 combat vessels. To install my mod, just extract all the files to your root Star Trek Armada directory. If that doesn't work, extract it to a temp dir and move all the files yourself.
Fragaday's VISE Exe Installer for IvanF's Last Mod: IvanFragaday-NoNameBrandSTA060.exe
Mirror Site for IvanF's 0.60 Mod Zipped: IvanF-NoNameBrandSTAMod060.zip
I have been modding for 4 to 5 bloody, long months now. Go ahead and read the bottom of this page if you don't believe me, but my first official mod came out on Friday, April 21st, 2000 with an update coming out every 2-3 weeks or so. I've given my sweat to this game. I skipped out on studying for my Physics exam just to get a new mod release out. As far as I could tell, I am one of the first modders; I released a full conversion mod while James Bryant was wowing everyone with his Cobalt Defiants. I added in the Romulan D'Kazanak not long after Jc did it to become famous. I was the one who made Scube a household name; it's not a SuperCube! It's a Scout Cube! And I paraded online for weeks back in April, telling all Borg players to try my Scube. Scube this, scube that... And yet no-one remembers me. No-one even bloody knows my name. The Sandman may complain about not getting instant responses, but I complain about getting none at all. I was the first to improve pathfinding. I was the first to introduce incredibly hard, cheating AI. I was the first to create a new detail level where even Pentium 166 users like me can play with good graphics. And you know what? I have gotten nothing out of this experience. Well, not much at least.
I cried out for game balance; the players cried out for sods. I had a dream for All Experience RTS Players to settle their differences out online with my mod; whenever there was a balance issue, I would be right there to fix it. They were to give me feedback, and unlike any computer game company out there, I would make their balance suggestion reality. But goddam, I can't even play hearts properly. What makes me think I can make a game more fun for others? I don't have the brilliant reputation of Jc. I don't have people drooling at my AI like Capm does. I don't have the legacy of James Bryant. I don't have the Sods of Sulu777. I don't have the hype of the Millenium Project or the Generations Project. I don't have the loyalty that binds together the Midas Array. I don't have the realism of the Ilu Maris Project. & I don't have the originality of Futility. I dedicated my mod to balance, not sods. I thought I released a damn, good mod, not just a flashy one with cute little advertisements.
But goddammit, no-one hears me now. No-one knows the name of IvanF. Very few care... But I'm sick of being a bloody whiner. If anyone wants to try my mod, please go ahead and accept my thanks in advance. I'd love it if you played it online with your buddies; it was meant to see the light of the net. I'd love it if you'd have the courage to post in the Official Armada forum and tell me how to make my mod more balanced. But what I won't do anymore is whine, complain, or grovel for feedback. I've spent too long on my knees, and now I'm just plain bitter. Kaleb, Marrel, Tim, Ares, the Prophet, Brazza, the Sandman, & all the other greats; geez, they're all so talented and all so very lucky for getting the feedback that they get. As for me, I'd die just for cynical criticism that would kill others or some other crap like that. But I'm releasing this last mod for 4 reasons, 4 horsemen: for fbrg, for Fragaday, for my cousin, and for you, Victor. Yes, you...
You know, I'm not really upset... I'm sorry if I offend anyone; I have a real habit of doing that. I'm just frustrated & if you ever take the time to read my websites, you'd know I love to go on tangents. No matter how pathetically down I may feel, I also know that at least a few of the 39 people who downloaded my 0.56 mod enjoyed it as much as I did. I remember that it felt good to hear that some of the 90 people who downloaded my 0.20 first mod had fun playing with the special weapons... and just because of that, I promise I will make sure I will not vanish in to the bitter cold night. I will write. I will respond. I will be remembered. I will bloody be known... Geez, aren't I the melodramatic or what? I'm really going to laugh at myself sometime for writing this all...
Um, and uh, oh... thanks for listening to me...
Sincerely, _________IvanF, the no-name modder, August 10th, 2000...
Thursday, March 15th, 2000
Y2kk Update: Welcome to the grand opening of IvanF's Tweak 'n' Dweak homepage at Tweakui.mycrowsoft.com, just one of oh-so-oh-so many sites on the Mycrowsoft Network! So far, the only thing that I have online is a S3 Savage page with Quake3 tweaks. Go check out the console commands and yadda yadda yadda on the left. Now who's better than IvanF? Everybody!... but not for long.
... Tweaking and Dweaking for the broadband-impaired since March 15th, 2000...