Forgot to mention this yesterday. When I got home from work, my mom told me she had seen a story on the news about how the US is in imminent danger of a terrorist attack, or some other sensationalist American news bullshit. In that story, they put up photos of suspected terrorists, and one of the photos bears a startling resemblance to one of my own photos. Check it out for yourselves:

The suspected terrorist on the news
A fairly recent picture of me

Freaky, eh? It was enough to scare the hell out of my mom. It’s also a bit ironic that the reporter said this guy describes himself as a big heavy metal fan, which is close to my own taste in music. This ADAM YAHIYE GADAHN guy is listed as being 5′11″ and 190 pounds, exactly my height and nearly my weight. Similar eye colour, identical hair style when mine is straight, though his hair is much darker. And, very similar facial hair (though mine’s grown out in the front)

Admittedly, I’m a bit worried about this. I’m not concerned with the feds too much, although the Patriot Act says they could come whisk me away into the night if someone sees the broadcast picture and a glimpse of me and calls the cops. I’m more concerned about some chest-thumping patriotic redneck deciding to play vigilante and shooting me, especially since the FBI considers this guy “Armed and Dangerous”.

Anyway, hopefully this will all blow over, but I’ll be laying low IRL for a couple weeks. Perhaps I’m being too paranoid, but this kind of thing is one of the reasons why I think the Patriot Act is a horrible idea.

Addendum to previous post: I found a couple websites that sell that husky plush I’m looking for, one of them has him in stock. The going price seems to be about $50, so I would get him this coming payday, but I really need to start saving for AC. I might have to hide the check card for awhile

Well, let’s try this again. I think I’m FINALLY getting a tail, this time from a wonderfully friendly fur in Annapolis, MD who goes by G. Neither Tailsmith.com nor White Wolf ever return my emails, so I figured I’d try someone on AIM. With any luck, I’ll have it in time for Swift’s Fur-B-Q party next weekend

I’m trying to find a plushie wolf from Douglas Cuddle Toys, they have a SUPER cute one who’s really cuddly, I saw it while helping G & Emi move into their new house in Annapolis. Most of the websites I’ve seen don’t sell that particular plushie, but she said someone in the NoVA/Maryland area gave it to her. So, if any of you know where I could find this little guy, let me know. He looks like this:

And he’s listed on the website as “1854 NADIA”. Thanks!

Ok, so I didn’t get my pics from yesterday uploaded. As I’ve said many times, work kills my brain, by the time I get home I don’t want to do anything other than listen to 2 Sense and eat a yummy dinner. I’m having a hard time even thinking of stuff to put in this entry. I’ll do the pics tomorrow, when I can also print my spec sheet to a PDF file and get it uploaded.

I had a hell of a scare this evening, too. I was in the bathroom about to take a shower, and I thought I heard movement and breathing from behind the shower curtain. Being the smart person I am, I went to my bedroom and loaded up my WW2-era .22 rifle (only gun I currently have ammo for), then went back to the bathroom. No one was behind the curtain, so I went out into the hallway and was about to check my sister’s bedroom when I heard a noise downstairs. I went down there, checked all the rooms and closets, nothing. All the doors and windows were locked, and I had just finished checking the front & back porch when I heard definite footsteps from my mom’s room. Since she had already gone to bed, I was afraid the intruder was in her room, so I went back upstairs and rested against her door. I heard the footsteps again, so I flung the door open, pointed the rifle directly at the first standing humanoid object I saw, and loudly said “Freeze or I’ll shoot ya” as I switched off the safety so the person would know I had a gun. My eyes then adjusted, and I saw my mom standing right in front of me! I rapidly switched the rifle to “Safety” and apologized profusely, she was just going to the bathroom. The sound I heard in my bathroom was probably the shower curtain moving, since the AC had just come on. My mom wasn’t too annoyed, she said she’s glad I didn’t just shoot whatever moved like some people would do, and she said it was comforting to know I’d have the initiative to actually pull a gun on an intruder, but she was still upset that I had waken up my sister in the process. Oh well, at least there was no intruder, I keep having these dreams about my dad breaking in
And something about stalking through my house with a big gun (it looks more like a shotgun than a .22) hunting down an intruder really gets the testosterone flowing, and brings out those animalistic hunting instincts

Well, I finally got around to installing the last of my computer mods tonight, and it was a much more involved job than I had planned. I installed lighted switches in my case to control two fans, my LED bar, and an auxillary port that I’m using to power another fan. I’ll be putting some directions on how to do this in tomorrow’s entry, along with pictures (should have taken step-by-step, but I didn’t and I’m not going to pull apart all that hard work). I think I did a pretty good job with mounting them in the side of the case, especially since I didn’t have precision tools capable of cutting steel available, just my Dremel tool and a small metal file. One of these days I should probably get a real wire stipper too, I was just using my Leatherman tool, which has a small stripping groove cut into the pliers. I also mounted a USB hub to the top of the system, which isn’t the prettiest-looking place to put it, but I need the extra ports, and it could be much worse. I’d like to mount a car-style cigarette lighter power adapter to the back of the system, but that’s a low priority installation, since it’d require me removing literally EVERYTHING from the case (static buildup from rotary cutting tools is bad).

I also transferred the Pawpets pictures off of my camera (what few there are), and took a bunch of pics of my computer, some plushies, my new collar, and other assorted items, which I’ll be uploading tomorrow, along with a full disclosure of my computer’s specs, since there’s no LAN Champion for awhile.

Speaking of LAN Champion, they’ve announced the date for LC3: July 17-18, 2004. Space is also limited to 55 people this time, since we can’t get the gymnasium at the community center (no AC in July = bad). So, all are welcome to attend, I can’t guarantee I’ll be there, but if you want to come, register ASAP at www.lanchampion.com. That’s the weekend right after Anthrocon, so you long-distance furs probably won’t be coming down for it (as if any of you were anyway), but there are other LCx events scheduled every few months.

Alright, enough rambling, time for bed! I need to stop staying up so late :-\

While working on my massive website overhaul, I hit a major snag: Flash and Photoshop don’t get along well. At all. I try to directly import a PSD, I get a BMP. I try to import a PSD into Fireworks (Macromedia’s attempt at graphics software), it gets mangled. I try exporting the Photoshop layers individually to a PDF, then importing that into Flash, I get something so garbled it’s basically unusable. I want to import my PSD files into Flash and have the layers perfectly translated into Flash layers, since Flash and Fireworks both suck at graphics compared to Photoshop, in my experience. However, since that’s apparently not possible, I spent the last several days breaking my site layout down into component images which represent each state of the site (link hover, link selected, etc). I have about 50 component images so far, and I’ll be needing more later on. I finally finished the bulk of this phase, got all the images imported to Flash, and got the pieces lined back up. Now, I need to animate the thing, with the help of Flash MX For Dummies. Aside from this being a learning experience, I’m hoping to turn this into a marketable skill, I just need a damn good printer to put together a not-digital portfolio.

In addition to downloading a bunch of games, I downloaded several thousand Photoshop brushes and plugins, so once I’m done with all this I can try my paw at real digital artwork, rather than just simple shapes with gradients and an occasional lens flare. That sort of things works if you’re like me and have simplistic tastes in website designs, but I’m hesitant to call my work “art”.

Aside from that, little else happened today. I watched Pirates of the Carribean again, that movie ROCKS. And Orlando Bloom is yummy. Murrrrrr…

My username’s colour is felix_j

Hmm, interesting…

Well, my attempt at hosting a LAN party faired rather poorly. Out of the dozen or so people I invited (directly or indirectly), ONE PERSON was able to make it. ONE. And, of the people who couldn’t make it, only three took the trouble to TELL me they weren’t coming, the rest of them just disappeared. I know it’s been a long time since I hosted a LAN party, but it’s never been this difficult to get people to show up, even on incredibly short notice. Oh well, I did have a great time, got my tail kicked at Starcraft. It’s just disappointing because this was my last shot at a attending a LAN party before August at the earliest, and I haven’t been to one since February (March if Madicon is included, which only barely counts), which is a LONG time between gaming parties for me. Maybe someone will host one on a weekday next month.

In entirely-unrelated news, I finally got a chance to go to the new Indian Trading Post store in our mall, which is a wonderful store, especially for someone like me who’s freakishly fond of wolves. I could have blown several paychecks there, but I held back, sorta. I bought three cool wolf posters, one with neat transformation/animal spirituality themeing, the others were just plain gorgeous. I also got this little howling wolf pup plushie, he’s SOOO cute in this “I need a hug” way, I couldn’t resist. And he actually looks like a wolf, too, no weird distortions like most wolf plushies I’ve seen. Now he just needs a name, I’m thinking something in Spanish would be fitting. My project for tomorrow!

Ooooo, off on a tangent, I finally named my other wolf plushie. I’ve had him since November, and he hasn’t really had a name until last week, when it just came to me in a dream: Lakuta. I haven’t the slightest idea what it means, but in this dream I saw a large wolf running through a shopping mall, and I remember it having a collar for some reason, with “Лакутьа” on a glowing tag. I woke up with the image still in my mind, said the word a few times, and it flowed nicely, so that’s my other plushie’s name now

And now, it’s off to bed I go, I was going to try staying up all day, but that’s not happening. Wee!

Yay for P2P file sharing! I finally finished downloading Need for Speed: Underground this afternoon, and it ROCKS! The graphics are decent (won’t let me run it at 1600×1200 though), the gameplay is amazing, and the new racing wheel is a perfect fit, especially when converted to right-hand drive (British style, shifter on the left, driver’s seat on the right). I started with a Miata, since it’s the best car available from the start, but I eventually want to get a Nissan Skyline R34, definitely my all-time favourite Japanese car.

I also downloaded a truck-driving game called 18 Wheels of Steel, which is pretty good. The graphics blow, and the engine goes nuts at any resolution higher than 1280×1024, but there’s one detail that makes it suprisingly realistic. The transmission requires you to get the RPMs down rather low in order to downshift, something overlooked by every other driving game I’ve ever played. Why is this so important in a trucking simulation? Because in a car’s manual transmission, there are a series of helper gears called synchro-mesh, which allow a smooth transition between gears, and more forgiveness when downshifting. A truck rig transmission doesn’t have these due to the high torque, so in order to shift you have to get the RPMs just right, especially when downshifting. Too high and you’ll either strip a gear, or the gears just won’t line up enough to shift. This is part of the reason why mountain roads have runaway truck ramps; if a trucker overheats his brakes and misses a gear while downshifting, he’s basically stuck in neutral until he can slow the wheels down.

Also, in light of LAN Champion’s cancellation, and the fact that no one ELSE is hosting a LAN party this weekend, I’m doing it myself. I hope to see plenty of people there, despite the small size of my house

Computer Update: I got final word from the drive recovery place, the other lab they sent the drive to couldn’t recover anything either. So that’s it, the end of this ordeal. I paid $450 to be told my drive was dead.

Also, I just found out that LAN Champion has been fucking CANCELLED because of someone’s fucking wedding being held in the same convention hall. Which means my weekend is now free, and this huge event that I’ve been looking forward to and preparing for since early February is now “postponed until sometime in July”. All my hard work leading up to this was for nothing, and I probably won’t be able to attend because my schedule is extremely tight all the way through to August. Just my fucking luck, I put all that work and money into building a system in a very short period of time (relative to my paycheck schedule), with LC3 as my goal for having it ready, and it doesn’t happen. Grrrr!!

It’s funny how some things are just so perfectly timed. I bitch about a lot of stuff in this journal, complain about my problems, that sort of thing. I’ve always known that there are people who are worse off than me, but it never really sank in until today.

I was checking some email before work this evening, running late as usual, and people just kept IMing me. This one guy who I’d never talked to before messaged me mere fractions of a second before I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to lock the system. He said he just wanted to chat, so I told him I’d talk to him when I got home from work.

When I came home, he wasn’t online at first, but he came on later and told me he’d just been mugged. He was leaving Office Depot and a couple guys jumped him, broke his knee, knocked him out, and stole all his stuff, including his bag with all his writings, since he’d been going to publishers today (and been turned down by all of them). He then went on to tell me about how he’d been homeless for awhile, been in knife fights, been shot several times, etc. Then he asked me how I was doing. I looked around, I live in a nice apartment in an upscale neighbourhood, with a nice car, and have more stuff than I know what to do with. I’m almost never in a dangerous situation, I have a loving parent, and a half-decent job. I may be drowning in debt, but I have basically no expenses aside from a phone bill and satellite radio bill. I guess in all my whining, I forgot to look around and see just how good I have it.