I've not been drinking Mt. Dew in months now, but almost as bad, I've taken to liking bottled IBC root beer. This has to end, as I grabbed the last case and the few loose bottles from the local Dollar Tree store. I also bought a second spatula there. I already have a spatula, but having only one almost guarantees that I need to do dishes every single time I cook, and since I eat far more often than I feel like doing dishes, this was unacceptable.

Strategically, between eating out of cans, and having two spatulas, I can pretty much wait until the forces of nature erode through any caked-on-grime. Well, as soon as I buy a second skillet.

Then, it was off to Walmart. It seems that my telephone company was only half at fault. My old green corded handset would not ring. Of course, this is in contrast to them taking from Dec. 27th 2005 til Feb 17th 2006 to turn it on at all. But that "it doesn't ring when people call" thing, my fault.

Anyway, I was there at the local assimilation unit Two Nine Three Alpha, where I was able to avoid the drones with ease. That thing about them only assimilating entire cultures, entire planets... that might be a bit of hyperbole, but as an individual I seemed safe.

As Walmarts go, this one is strange. It closes at 10pm. I did not know they did that, I mean, that they closed, except every 11 years on May 1st to celebrate the day Sam Walton sold his immortal soul to Astaroth.

Somehow, I managed to find the phone section. It did no good to ask, no one understands the concept of a non-cellular phone. More astounding was that there are no such things as corded phones anymore, I suspect kickbacks and payola from the battery industry. I take that back, there was -one- model, which may have been intended for senior citizens. Either that, or the incredibly obese, who need their dialpad buttons to be wider than 4 inches each else they're forced to use any makeshift stylus.

I chose Fisher Price's My First Phone. Oops, I mean it's actually made by Uniden. They make many different models of cordless phones, all of which share as a common feature the complete and total lack of any indication as to what frequency they use. After 15 or 20 minutes carefully reading each of the 6 sides of the box, I finally decided that Uniden had opted to avoid all the 900Mhz/2.4Ghz/5.2Ghz mess, and developed an entirely new wireless technology that relies on magic faeries. They no doubt flutter invisibly from handset to basestation on wings of gossamer and miracles, effortlessly imitating the voices of both parties.

In the end, I bought the cheapest phone, so who gives a flying fuck? If it is 2.4Ghz, I'll just set it to the channel the neighbor's wifi is using... let his internet connection drop in the unlikely event anyone finds reason to speak with me on the phone.

Thus ended my public adventures.

Somehow, I've ended up in a corner of Baltimore where there is only a Burger King and  Mcdonald's nearby. I chose Burger King this time. Ended up behind some old lady paying in pennies. As the first phoneme of my order has left my lips, she says "oh, I only wanted the sandwhich, does this come with a drink?". Agh. I order, wait the mandatory 39 minutes for them to slap together something that resembles neither sandwhich nor even edible food, and rush home with it.

But alas, it's nearly 70°F out. At any temperature above about 45°F, my laptop overheats. Constantly. Last night was not a night to attempt to compile a new version of Wine (0.9.9). After many reboots, many deletions of an empty object file, I had a newer Wine.

Iesetup6.exe still would not run. An infinite number of grumblings and cursings later, and perhaps a dark prayer or two to the elder gods, I stumbled upon this page. It seemed to work, and now I have IE6 running on a linux computer. I keep wanting to go to addons.mozilla.org/themes, but alas, the ugliness is permanent.

My computer feels unclean, and no matter how much I scrub it while crying to myself, it still feels dirty. Is there a crisis hotline for this?

Also, my inverse kinematics SVG demo has had a slight upgrade. So that someone doesn't accidentally mistake me for being far more clever than I really am, here is the site where I found out how to do it. Mind you, they're doing it in Flash, but it seems Flash's actionscript is pretty much valid ECMAscript/javascript. Kickass.

Still, how the hell do you do this in 3d? In 3d, any particular angle is 360°180° is it not? Do I need to do two arctangents? Is order important? These number thingys, they make no sense.