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May 26, 2002

Exams are next week, Monday is a day off. For 4th 9 weeks, I managed to get (I think) 5 "A"s and 2 "B"s. Exams will change the grade between A and B in like 2 of my classes...we'll see how I do. I'm "studying" for exams right now...first exam is Computers, last exam is Spanish, with some other stuff mixed in.

Believe it or not, I've almost had to consider adding a "Matt Pyro" section/folder to my web site and my My Pictures folder, thats how much of it I have. I'll post the highlights from our teacher-sanctioned Chemistry Adventure here:

Mrs. Rea and Matt...she wouldn't actually do any of the experimentation but let us take a pic of her giving the Stamp of I-give-up-do-whatever-you-want-Approval to the activity.

The Setup

The first try.

The second try...it keeps getting better.

The best fireball ever-it fanned out and hit the ceiling, also got his hand a little bit, but because it's so fast, it doesn't do any damage. I've done this sorta thing with a lighter, it's really cool, but a bunsen burner is even cooler.

Then we got bored.

and here's disposing of the leftovers in a sink.

Send comments to my message board or guestbook, please.

May 19, 2002

LAN PARTY 5

Location: Wellington
Dates: June 1st/June 2nd (Saturday/Sunday)

An invitation-only weekend of mayhem both on and offline, filled with anarchy, information sharing, and lots of music and food. To reserve your spot, please contact the coordinater (jkoebel@bellsouth.net) as soon as possible.

Episode 2: AOTC was extremely awesome.
Good points: Natalie Portman, yoda fight, JarJar acting intelligent, subtle humor even in wierd parts.
Negatives: Losely connected story in parts, some places required development and none was given.

Yoda was the best part of the movie, he was bouncing off of everything and jumping around doing flips and stuff. Total insanity. I'd probably recommend that everyone go see it as soon as possible-it's well worth it.

Here's (L to R) me, Vince, and Nelo at Bloody Machette a few times ago.

May 17, 2002

Pointless party-type thing this afternoon. Supposedly, it was a planning session for 4-H Solar Camp this summer. In reality, it was 3 guys and a hot girl and my sister together. The hot girl was lying next to me on the bed, that was very nice. :)

And in other pics...

That one had me laughing pretty hard.

May 12, 2002

Sunday. Mothers day. I wasn't really aware of this till I got up in the morning for church...turned out okay though. I haven't had time to get to the store so I didn't get my mom anything cept a card, but I am going to eventually. Like tomorrow.

Paintball on Saturday the 11th at Bloody Machette. The church runs it. It actually ran smoothly this time, that doesn't happen terribly often--churches aren't exactly the most organized places there are. Usually I go with people, I went alone this time but saw people I knew at the field, so it was cool. I broke Matt's paintball gun pretty bad when I tripped over a cypress thingee in the woods and then the gun got trampled by some dumb 12-year-old who was tailing me so close I couldn't avoid the cypress. I've got to replace the grip because the ASA was torn from it, shattering the plastic it attached to. I have no idea where to get parts for a TL+, so the gun will probably wind up at Jerry Leslie's paintball for a few days if they don't have it, or about 2 hours if they do have the parts for it. Kinda sucks, o-well.

I was messing around modding my computer's startup logo to some different things. I've got it narrowed down to these:

I'm liking the middle one, that's what I'm using now. The first looks slick but not the desired effect...the third has artifacts I'd have to fix before I could use it, cool looking though. Also hidden inside NTKERNL.EXE is this image:

There's a whole set of images like that one that are generic "windows powered" instead of saying a specific version. It looks cool, might need to change that color though.

May 9, 2002

Today was a relatively uneventful week. School actually was good for once. Stuff is ending and it's mostly review == I can sleep a lot of the time. Calculus we're doing derivitives and that's "fun"; I know how to do it on Maple also so it'll be easy for homework. limit() and diff() are your friend.

I'm not sure I like the layout of the site. Hard to read in some places. I liked the background image better but this is clearer.

And in totally unrelated news, I set my hand on fire. On purpose. For fun.

Story about the lighter:

The gas station woman didn't want to sell it to me.
Her: "Your too young to be buyin that."
Me: "You dont see me buying ciggerettes."
Her: "You might be finna smoke sometin else."
Me: "You don't know we have that."
Her: "True your right. Thats a dolla 19."
(ching ching)

I have videos for my friends who request it, everyone else, just imagine it. I need to find out how to make VirtualDub capture a single frame instead of having to PrintScreen and crop the image.

Paintball this weekend. If you're a person we don't like you're not allowed to come. If you've been told by David not to come back, I guess that covers it too. :-/ It's pretty cool though.

And finally, my pimp car. Matt says it's leaking oil but there's no oil stains on my driveway; I honestly don't know what to think. So I'll watch for oil stains and get my oil change done soon, they check the hoses and stuff at the same time. Before then, though...

I don't know how that got there...

April 30, 2002

Hmm. I'm not sure what to report. Weekend was pretty decent I guess. Fun Depot w/ some old friends on Friday night after work, then worked most of Saturday and Sunday. Payday on the 6th will be a decent amount of money, probably like $120-ish. About $60 will go for paintball (paint mostly) from Jerry Leslie's, the rest towards a new computer. Ohh wait...the first paycheck of the month is where I have to pay insurance. Well we'll see then it'll probably be mostly gone before I even get it.

I've got about $230 saved for a computer.

I'm estimating that it'll cost me $800. $220 board (Tiger MPX), 2x$140 processors totaling $280 (AMD AXPs w/ L5s bridged), 1GB of DDR for $180...$80 of fans (ACK!!!) and a $170 Sub-Server case w/a 350W PS yields $930...maybe I'd go w/ a less expensive case...There's a 12-bay full tower that is only $70 with a bigger p/s lowering the total cost to $860. Fun fun fun...most of my summer paychecks will go to this computer, but it'll last for a LOOONG time.

School was interesting today-I took my camera to school and took pics of people/classes that I go to. They're pretty generic (Mr. Harr took a pic of me for some reason...crazy guy) and I took pics of Matt, being crazy as usuaul.

Fire is fun. Totally harmless, too-it's just a flashfire.

April 21, 2002

Just got back from a LAN party that was on Apr. 19-Apr. 20. Lots of fun there-read about it on the Lan Party 4 section After getting back I slept for like 18 hours. Only woke up once when someone called my cell phone, I stayed up for about 10 minutes, then back to bed. Got woken up at 10-something in the morning by parents saying "Get ready we are going to church in a half hour." and was like, WTF, I'm sleeping. Ohh well, 18 hours is enough sleep I guess.

Got my paycheck yesterday, $90-ish. Now it's time to start getting parts for my new computer. What do you think? I have a choice of two boards-there's a dual AMD board (Tyan Tiger) w/ integrated LAN and 64bit PCI slots, or there's an ABIT board with onboard 5.1 surround sound, LAN, 6 USB1.1 ports, 2 USB2.0 ports, 2 Firewire ports, 6 IDE channels (12 drives), pinheaders for more of all of the above ports, but only 1 processor slot. I'm leaning towards the Dual-Socket A board, but the huge IO board is very, very tempting.

No pictures today because they have their own section. If you want to discuss, use my guestbook or my General Discussion forum at the top of the page.

April 18, 2002

HALF DAY SCHOOL TODAY! w00t w00t!

I had Matt and David over in the afternoon, we hung out, and messed around with my Intel webcam, making cool videos of flinging ourselves at high speed onto my bed. Videos will be available soon on Matt's web site, and I'll post the highlight pictures a little bit lower on the site.

Tomorrow, I'm going to a LAN party at John's house. Never had one there before, and it'll probably be with people I don't know, like from his school. Of course, most really "good" LANs are like that, with people who are kind of random.

Now, for the pictures:

Matt's getting excited about something...

Flinging myself off my sister's scooter onto my bed. First try...

And the second try. 00000000000wwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...

Here's Matt at it.

And again, he looks freaked out in this one.

And here goes David, LOL!

Vid clips from the web cam will be up relatively soon on Matt's web site. Go check it out in the mean time.

April 17, 2002

Well I don't know quite what to say here. I just got back from the National Honor Society induction. Everyone went up on stage, shook Mrs. Cozi's hand and took a candle lit from the Candle of Wisdom in their 5-pronged thingy. Filed down, lined up, recited the insanely long pledge like a cult, and blew out the candles. Then left. The entire thing took about an hour. It was both better and worse than I expected-I was kind of hoping it would have more ceremony to it, but glad it was super-short, cuz I was going to go crazy listening to people with unpronouncable names giving speeches that could have been plaragized off of each other.

I also fixed up my TV tuner setup finally. The Cable Descrambler doesn't work on my cable system...something about the dBA being too low and the signal degrades or something (Whatever) but it's unuseable, it does work though. So I got 25-feet of shielded Cat5 cable and gold-plated connectors, and have a nice 30-ish foot antenna in my room now for my TV card, which means I get decent reception. I can also record the TV to DivX format...only problem is, its 200MB/minute w/ sound. I'm working on getting it lower...

And finally for today, there's a message board you can talk about this site's content on. An article particularely interest you? Talk about it. Have a problem with (or agree with) my stance on religious matters? Tell me in the message board. I'm hoping people will have fun with it.

Now, for the pics. This one happens to be a friend of mine being just a LITTLE bit too descriptive with what he's doing in his away messages. Name blurred to protect the not-quite-innocent.

And while we're on that subject...Read this, it's very interesting.

April 11th, 2002

Today was a test in Spanish. The prompt was that your friend was coming over, and you had to suggest things to do together in a "letter" style format, like an e-mail. So I wrote about going to the mall and robbing all the stores, and having girls over. I get away with this type of thing because even if I don't have the highest grades, I make some of the more intelligent contributions to the class...or at least can answer the questions I'm asked even while sleeping.

Been mega bored lately-my paintball gun stopped working properly, but I'm going on Saturday anyway. Probably going to get it fixed soon. Taking it to Jerry Leslie's store in Jupiter, I trust them, unlike Mike's paintball. Bloody Machette on Saturday, lots of people who shouldn't be allowed near a paintball gun are coming, such as, well, I won't say names. But lighting their sorry asses up will be pretty fun.

Which reminds me, taxes are due April 15th. That's this Monday. That means if I don't have them postmarked by Monday I'm in some shit. That's a bad thing. Maybe my mom took it to the post office already, I don't know, I haven't seen the form since I let her look at it to make sure I filled it out right (first time doing it.) $50 refund will be nice...$107 + 50 = $157, + some more from selling Magic cards to Zach = $207-ish, which is nearly enough for what I am buying for my next computer: A Tyan Tiger MPX AMD760 board w/ onboard LAN. for the low price of $215 + shipping. Awesome deal, really...and by the end of the summer, I'll have the DDR and the processor(s) for it too.

I made this in Bryce 4 the other day:

It's a christmas-ball type thing...with a mountain torus inside of it. Interesting. But this is really my first attempt at using booleans to do anything serious like modeling new objects, such as I did for the base of this thing. Maybe I'll get ambitious and add ridges or something next time, heh.

And finally-my elite TV tuner card came the other day. This means: I watch airwave channels and FM radio on my computer (and with some software, non-encrypted cable channels too!) The setup is all across my room now, held on with butterfly clips and twist ties:

Pardon the fish, they're just really cool :) The y-shaped clear antenna is for the FM Radio, the black one attached to the 12-foot coax is for the TV. The hard drives hanging and directly in front of the computer are IBM 75GXP hard drives, that's my skateboard and backpack to the right.

Comments? Questions? E-mail me, or call 1-800-UP-YOURS.

April 4th, 2002

Happy Birthday goes out to Matt today, hehe.

Long time no updates...let's see what's going on. Report card wasn't bad but not great either - 3 As, 3 Bs, and a C in pre-calc. Figures. Ohh well, not bad.

I've got lots of el33t computer stuff, too-a WinTV Capture card that does Coax-Decode, two IBM hard drives I got for $13 and can get replaced so they work for free...lotsa fun stuff. Finally, my collection of old and outdated hardware is going to be worth something.

Church gets more and more pointless every time I go. Sunday = not a big deal, whatever, but Wedensday, I'm sorry, dumb, and I'm not gonna start going on a different day. It's a waste of my time enough when they are talking religious stuff, but when they don't even bother with that, just do some wierd skits and things, it's unbearable. Zz zz zz zz zz...Church on Easter w/ a 102 fever wasn't fun either. Maybe I got some of the people sitting next to me sick...? Dunno. It was some rather large asian kid who kept rubbing his nose.

March 22, 2002

Matt had a LAN at his house the 20th and 21st. LEET OWNAGE. I'd say it rates on the same level of fun as the first LAN party--the 2nd was by far the most fun, the first was pretty good but it was cramped quarters. Read about it here.

I also finally got my stuff together for a new computer...only to find out that the motherboard refuses to POST. That really sucks, now I gotta buy a new one, and cuz of the differing memory architectures, it'll prolly end up being another proc+memory as well as the motherboard. Ohh well...looks like I'm gonna actually have to go into work once in a while now, though.

And I discovered something relatively cool:

I'd left a CD on my window sill...the CD is, undoubtedly bad (it was a burned coaster anyways) but it made a cool looking reflection across my ceiling. On the other side of the room there's more too, it's HUGE. It's coming from near my left eye though so I keep it closed or I'm going to go blind.

March 18, 2002

March 17, 2002
Paintball is REALLY pissing me off. I spend money to fix my gun but it doesn't work. Ohh well...I had a good time hanging out w/ Robert & Bou at Jerry Leslie's paintball up in Jupiter. They're pretty cool, and they actually seem to know about the "lower-end" paintball guns like my fish, instead of not having the slightest clue. Anyways-I'll go over there probably on Wed. morning before the LAN again, whatever.