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The bleached streaks worked out pretty well, after I stopped being a chicken over leaving the bleach in so long. I then proceeded to color it a purplish-blue, using some dye that comes in primary colors that you get to mix (a lot of blue, a dash of red). It ended up being dryer-lint grey. I would have thought that actual semi-permanent dye would look a little better than vegetable-based dyes, but I guess I was wrong. It looked no different than the results would have been with Manic Panic, but I'm sure would have stayed in longer had I not covered it up. Blue just never seemed to set right on my hair. Currently, after applying only red, it is a slightly purple red–really not too different from the burgundy I started out with. The next time that I bleach streaks, they will just be left uncolored.
Tech
I now have an RSS feed of the Ill Will Press “Foamy the Squirrel” cartoons (technically, they are called “Neurotically Yours,” but everyone knows them as the cartoons with Foamy and The Goth Chick). The most recent one (“Foamy's Rant III”) is pretty extreme, even more so than the Yo Mama one (“I'll carve my initials on the inside of her uterus with a butter knife”). Viewer discretion is highly advised.
“RSS? Big deal,” you say. “Everyone and their mom is scraping sites and generating RSS.” Sure, lots of people are and TorgoX seems to be the undisputed master, but this was my first time scraping and generating RSS (as opposed to simply generating it from data I have direct access to). The nifty thing is that I did it all with “off the shelf” parts: wget grabs the page and pipes it to tidy, which converts it to XHTML, then it gets piped to xsltproc, which transforms it to RSS. There is no custom code in there. Well, arguably, you could say the fancy XPaths within the XSL are sort of code, but it's really more of a template (hence the “T” part of “XSLT”).
Monkey (also kitten)
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=946
Pizza
Unfortunately, I cannot order pizza from the command line as there are no Domino's around here. Besides, multiple vulnerabilities were posted to the Full-Disclosure mailing list, including: name and password on the command line (hello, “ps” listing!) and plain http (as opposed to https) ordering (hello, packet sniffer! hello, Man In The Middle attack!).
Hack
I'm off to the PDX2600 meet in a little while. It is at Backspace, so I am at least familiar with the area and the parking. They seem pretty well organized, based on some forums I have read, but do not look like they come anywhere close to being the well oiled machine that is LA2600.
School/Home/Future
So is, like, everyone going back to school, or what? At least, it seems like a huge number of people I know are already in or about to start some kind of graduate degree. Not only am I looking into real estate, I find myself looking at programs at PSU, as well. With the home buying stuff, I am learning from a book before seeking someone out, but I may just talk to an advisor at PSU about graduate options. There are two different master's programs for computer science that look interesting. One is strictly evening courses and is pretty flexible about admissions (and consequently does not look as serious). The other looks like a real master's program, with GRE requirements and competitive admission and all the kinds of things you would expect from a real master's program.
With my current job being a big question mark until certain deals happen or fall through (it could go under next week, or it could be around for years), it is hard to make these kinds of big decisions.
