The good news is that I'm going to live. The bad news is that I'm going to have to start paying for insurance with that little flu "scare". What will it be like to have health insurance again? I haven't had health insurance for years. It was nice though, I seem to remember. Paying, and never getting sick. Never breaking anything, catching anything, gee, it's almost like the fee you pay to stay healthy. But that's not true. It's the small fee you pay now to avoid being fucked if anything bad did happen. Insurance is Reassurance for the Paranoid. My parents said if I had appendicitis they'd be ruined. That's humorous to me. Such an obvious, ridiculous scam. Health insurance is for suckers. Call me a sucker.

I may contract a few illnesses just to get my goddamn money's worth. Yeah... I think I need valium I can sell to highschool kids to recover my costs. Girls can get valium easy I hear. And as luck would have it, I'm a girl! It seems like doctors should give you anything you ask for if you have health insurance. It's that damn Hippocratic oath though... "Do no harm". What bullshit. Let me harm myself... if I do a really good job of it, more money for you! Just make me sign something that says I can't sue and you can't be held liable. That seems totally reasonable. What a bunch of assholes.

Do they not realize if they keep everyone perfectly healthy, eventually we will run out of space and resources on this planet? Surely they have some faith in evolution, why are they so opposed to exercising somewhat natural selection where it can apply? If someone wants goddamn pills all the time, give them goddamn pills. They'll die, you'll be less a patient, but you'll sell a lot of pills. And the world will be better off less one good-for-nothing pill-popping idiot. It seems so simple. With them being so loose with the healthy, they could work harder trying to cure the diseases people actually don't want, of the non-self-inflicted variety like cancer (excluding cancer related to smoking). Life is for the living! Fuck the rest of em.

Sometimes I wish I lived in Canada. Free health care is only appealing to the jobless though.

I actually looked up how to align a picture with text in html so you don't have to make a table. It's so ridiculously easy, I'm really ashamed that I had been doing it with such difficulty prior to learning this. You simply align the picture within a paragraph, like *img src="pic.jpg" align="left"*, and then it forces the text to be to the right of it. Actually really, really simple. At least I got a lot of good table practice up until now. My pill drawing was not sacraficed to laziness either. That pill might look like a pokeball smooshed, but it's not. That's an 00k original work of art.
posted by 00k at 1:22 AM

I think I have the flu. And I forgot that I had a blog. My fans... my fans...

If all things work out anyhow, I should have a summer internship of sorts coming up this summer. My unix teacher needed help around the lab, and there I was. If I can qualify for financial aid, I'll get paid for my time and it'll be called Work/Study. If I can't, I'll do it for credits. Either way, I'll get to do miscellaneous admin shit at my school, so that's pretty dope. I guess my first task is going to be to get mail working. That's funny, because I can't get mail working on my linux box, but soon I'll get to try on a server with a network people actually rely on. Being a student is pretty cool.
posted by 00k at 12:19 AM

Well, all that research was for naught. I got called, and they said my group would be the group that'd end up spending most of the day there, but then the defendant didn't show for the case. At least the drive was nice. Who wants random pictures!


posted by 00k at 3:17 PM

I have to go to jury duty tomorrow. Bright and early. Because of this I've been reading up on "voir dire", the jury selection process. Or as seen on tv... the part where they ask you neat questions to decide if you're biased or not to determine whether or not they want you on their (goddamn) jury. This page seemed pretty informative about it, a guide for lawyers on how to run the little operation.

I. Goals for Voir Dire Examination

1. Learn the prejudices or past experiences that will cause a juror to vote against you
2. Discover the panel members that are at least receptive to your side of the case
3. Show the jury that you, as an attorney, are worthy of respect and confidence
4. Begin to show that you have a good lawsuit and that your client is deserving of the jury's help (either in the form of a monetary award or, if you represent the defendant, in the form of relief from the frivolous claims of the plaintiff).

It's kind of going to be like interviewing for a job. God I hope I get it, I really hope I get it... But I'm going to do my best to not cry if I don't.
posted by 00k at 10:37 PM

Ooh 4-20, such foreboding. I added two pages today which I'll link to some day soon from the navigation bars, right now the links are just on the main page. Well and I guess I'll put them here because noone reads that. What am I talking about, noone reads this either. Iiiinteresting. A list I'm going to try to keep updated of the books I'm reading, with a dirt-n-sky sorta theme. That's genuine Front Range Community College dirt. And another page, a place to put all my scripting stuff, which is pretty pathetic. Well, no matter. Many new additions to zombeef.com/ook are on the horizon, it's an exciting time to be me.

I've stalled studying for my midterm all day, and now I've really run out of stuff to do. Guess I'll study. Hmph.
posted by 00k at 11:45 PM

Took a neat picture last night on 84th and Federal. It's been raining here for a few days now.

Click to enlarge

posted by 00k at 5:49 PM

I have to make a correction on previously printed material. The Acura Integra is a '94, not a '96. I'm such a responsible little reporter.

Jamie Lee Curtis writes childrens books. My dad asked today if we had a Windows 98 manual, because he wanted to learn about it. Seven POW in Iraq were found, alive. I learned how to walk in big heeled shoes that don't have a strap. I was offered a job. The world can be a very surprising place sometimes!

What else about today... I changed my gallery design (username: ook password: kiwi), and added a guestbook. Party on.
posted by 00k at 8:55 PM

An alien... with a parachute? (click to see larger picture)


And a Denver skyline.


posted by 00k at 6:25 PM

They took her today, they took my baby away.

Blue was a 1986 Honda Accord DX. She was named for her color, a beautiful blue, like the ocean. She was only seventeen. But that's like 51 in car years. I regret that she only got to retire for a week, but she lived a full life. She had 180,000+ miles on her, 30,000 of which she travelled with me. She was with me through some of the most important times in my life. She never failed to get me anywhere, she was a hard worker. She was my first car, the car I learned to drive a manual on.

Now they're going to take her somewhere and see if parts of her can go into other cars to help them live longer. Maybe she can live on in this way, in pieces, in places, as part of the hearts and souls of others like her. But her spirit will be in car heaven. In car heaven, cars are never sick, and they all feel like the day they were born. No dents, no scratches, no rust, no paint missing, just shiny and new, and people are excited when they see them. It makes them feel alive themselves, and reminds them of what men can do. She was a great car, and I'll miss her very much. She will never be forgotten.
posted by 00k at 2:39 PM

I'm reading The Fountainhead again. I was reading the introduction by Ayn Rand, a bit of it at least. I had never read it before. People had asked her what the purpose of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged was, whether she was trying to convince people of her philosophy or things like that. She responded that,"This is the motive and purpose of my writing; the projection of an ideal man.". All my life I have been in search of these men that she's written about. Here I come to find out that they are ideal. I understand at once why I search for them. I wonder in the next moment if I will ever meet anyone as ideal as they? I suppose I will know by the time I die. I will also know my own worthiness of the title. The one thing to look forward to about death... knowing where you stand and where you will be for your final stand. I had never thought of that before.
posted by 00k at 12:19 AM

I have a Pentax Optio 430 for the weekend. It's visiting from my mom's school. It's not a real great camera though. Nice and small... but the battery doesn't last for very long. Plus the lens makes this horrible nails-on-chalkboard kind of noise when it moves. But here's some pictures anyhow!

Pentax Optio 430

Tip of the day: DRYER SHEETS: Save the dryer sheets from you laundry after they've softened a load of wash. They make great dusting and cleaning clothes for television and computer screens. Not only will they clcean the screens, the anti-static properties will treat the screens to repel rather than attract dust.
posted by 00k at 8:49 PM

It's time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing
It's time to move on, it's time to get going

I'm going to move on soon. I think I'm some kind of nomad trapped in a girl living with her parents' body. I have to change everything all the time... I move furniture probably as often as some people vacuum. I change my hair color, I change the kind of colors I wear, my interests change, my music tastes change, my beliefs change, my passions change, as a person I'm only consistent in the fact that I change. I think this awful need I get to break routine is really my unconscious mind lashing out in the only way it can think of, trying to tell my conscious mind that it's tired of living here and doing this and being this way.

I wonder if I'll ever settle down and stop transitioning. It seems about every 6 months or so I look back on how I was 6 months ago and shake my head in disbelief. If I were software, noone would buy me because they'd have to do so many patches and updates and revisions. There'd be a new release of me out every month. Noone would want to program for me, because where a+b=c one week, the next a would be indifferent to b and the two would never agree on anything long enough to make a c. The only kind of users that would testify to me would be the ones that were with me since the beginning and have watched me grow from a newbie prog slapped together in 15 minutes into the complex infrastructure that you see before you today, the product of countless years of work and influence, with layer upon layer of poor code plastered over with better code with the infinite goal of perfection in mind.

You can appreciate my complexity, but in reality, I am simply a lot of common mixed functions and capabilities bundled together at random and packaged a little bit differently, developed over time. Some day I will be phased out and replaced by a robot that will sit up at 3 in the morning and rant incessantly and nonsensically about itself to an empty auditorium that seats four billion. They will call it 00k1, because I am 00k0. Maybe 00k1 will be able to do the more complex arithmetic and logical operations I am currently incapable of doing. I hope so. There may not be hope for me, but maybe there can be hope for my future robot children. Maybe they'll even consult me during the design phase, I could suggest a lot of revisions that'd be good. I bet a few of my ex's could too.

Haven't updated in a while, won't be doing much of an update now as I have to leave for class in ten minutes. But anyhow! I'm now the proud owner of a red '96 Acura Integra GS-R, resembling the one in the picture below but lowered and without the tint. I'll probably post sexy pictures of me sprawled across the hood in a bikini in a few days, but then again I may not. I might just post pictures of me standing next to it somewhat nonchalantly in plain clothes. That's more exciting anyhow. Off to school I go!


posted by 00k at 3:59 PM

Double-O