I was warned against C++, but so far I'm really happy with it. It's like Java so far, but without all the crap I hated about Java, like a 5 mile long print statement. Have I mentioned before that everything is really elaborate in Java? I hope so. I guess I'm not going to learn to do any GUI stuff, but that's alright. Being able to make .exe's is pretty sweet still. I'm a command line fan, really. I like typing. I'd like to see windows incorporate a command line environmental browser kind of thing. Right now it's pretty weak. I guess you can start up a lot of stuff from the Run menu, or you can kind of browse also, but it's not by any means command line interaction. I just like being able to fly all over the place copying and renaming and deleting and moving and navigating my merry way along without having to use a mouse. I would've loved DOS I'm sure. I wish Linux was more practical than Windows.

I wish I could type everything instead of having to write. My handwriting looks like I'm using the wrong hand, it's illegible and slow going. Taking notes by pen in a notebook is seriously oldschool in my book (or notebook as the case may be). I like pens okay... writing little notes is fun or drawing. But handwriting for important stuff is just silly. I try to write in ALL CAPS... but in programming, stuff is case sensitive so that forces me to have to use small letters sometimes. Just another quarrel I have with "the way things are". I guess I could type notes for c++... I have a computer in front of me in my class. I'd feel pretty odd though. I wanna go to that school where they give you a free laptop while you're there. Even if it was crappy that'd be pretty awesome, cuz then I could type away in class and I probably wouldn't be the only one. It'd be standard practice around there. Too bad I guess. That school probably sucked anyways.

I'm reading a wacky Dean Koontz novel... "False Memory". I've always liked Dean Koontz for the most part... he satisfies my need for morbid, twisted characters and creative, murder-soaked plotlines. In this current book, everyone is going crazy. One girl has been crazy for a while, she acquired a fear of outdoors and turned into a shut-in. Then her friend, the main character chick who is a game programmer starts coming undone as well. This chick is just afraid of herself... it starts with her shadow, then her reflection, and settles with her murderously envisioning all the ways she could hurt people with miscellaneous sharp objects found around the house. So that chick just goes nuts.

Then the same day her brother in law (I think, something like that) goes off the deep end too and does a bunch of meth, coke, and I think DMT's? Might be the wrong acronym there, a drug I hadn't really heard about. Anyways, he jumps off a roof with the crazy main girl's husband who managed to tackle him off in the direction of some mattresses laid out, so everything is cool in that he's alive, but it's not so cool in that he's crazy again and committed to a rehab clinic. Then the husband experiences some missing time and starts to worry he's next in line.

Anyways, because it's so cool I'm just going to go ahead and spoil what I know up until this point. The 2 chicks who are friends and the husband/brother are all connected by this one doctor, a psychiatrist who has apparently found a method to drug people into a complete state of hypnosis where they're totally open to suggestion. He's used this method to establish kind of a backdoor as it were to their psyches, so he can recite a haiku and they go into some kind of trance where they are receptive of any of the guy's commands. Of course that wouldn't be very interesting unless the doc was a real quack, and wouldn't you know it, he is! So at this point in the book, we're listening to the doctor's thoughts as he idly takes advantage of the agoraphobic chick and leaves her thinking her ex husband was breaking in and raping her and then leaving her and everything else just as he found it. The game programmer chick in the meantime is clearing her entire household of sharp and blunt objects in a frenzy to make it safe for her husband to come home without her jabbing something in his ear or something.

It's been made obvious when the doctor had the opportunity to program the agoraphobic chick, since she regularly visits him twice a week to talk about her agoraphobia. What is less obvious is when the doctor had the opportunity to drug the girls friend, the programmer. She sits in the waiting room reading while the other girl has her sessions because she drives her to them, so there's definitely potential, but to hear the doc describe the process it involves a lot of mixed drugs and time. Who knows how he got her. The husband is even harder to imagine, as he, as far as we know, doesn't ever come into contact with the doctor. We will see. The brother has a long history of being a nutjob, so it's easy to imagine their connection. Anyway, what's funny as hell is how nuts the doctor is. He's really smart and well educated, but apparently has slightly skewed ideas of what's acceptable in terms of normal psychiatric patient/doctor relationships. He jokes about how if he wanted to, he could make the agoraphobic chick or any of the people he has a hold over think something happened that didn't. In a case in Scottsdale Arizona, he remembers the wife he programmed to believe her husband cheated on her, who then shot their sleeping kid, the husband, and then herself as a result.

Anyway, it's a pretty cool book so far, and I gotta give props to Dean Koontz. He can really dream up great psychos.

I suppose that's enough rambling for tonight.

Want to see an awful, awful movie? Watch Bulletproof Monk. I'm a Chow Yun Fat fan, don't get me wrong. He's why I watched this movie. This movie though... words can't even describe how retarded this movie was. Luckily it was only a rental. How the guy can go from something as great as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon to Bulletproof Monk, I have no idea. I've enjoyed some pretty shitty movies in my day. Most shitty movies you can still watch, because they're so bad you can laugh the whole thing through. This movie was bad enough, it was actually hard to watch. It made me wince. The corniest kung fu shit imaginable. I'm not talking about corny like from the 80's or something. Worse. I'm talking corny like a bad guy named Mr. Funktastic who has a kung fu gang in the subway tunnels of New York. Corny like a nazi organization hiding beneath the guise of a World Health Organization, run by some stupid blonde that gives away the organization to the first white girl that asks about it, who in the style of corny movie making is a gutter snipe street rat by day and a Russian mafia princess by night. The Stiffler kid from American Pie (I have no idea what his real name is, but whatever it is, Stiffler is better) is in this movie, and his character is okay. He's the most believable character, and he's some pocket picking hoodlum that learned kung fu from living above an old movie theater that only plays that. If I could sum up this movie in one word it'd be... "Why?" So anyway, in conclusion, if you like watching bad movies, you'll love Bulletproof Monk. Chow Yun Fat if you're reading this (hehe), you've really let me down.

Started back to school today. Got a nice round 4 hours of sleep... a sweet 1 to 2 inches of snow... class was cool despite all that though. I guess I'm going to learn some C++. Something that had never occurred to me before... they call it C++ as a little programmers joke, because it's incremented from C. So clever. I dunno how practical C++ is... but I suppose I have to start this stuff somewhere so it may as well be there. Hopefully it will clear things up in my mind a little bit... my Java class just kind of left me bitter and confused. Maybe half-assing my Java class because I hate Java was a bad idea. Who knows!

Anywho, that's exciting and all that. Two more semesters to go including this one. Yeeeup.

Harold Shipman, the most prolific serial killer in UK history, killed himself in jail recently. I wrote an article about him last year which can be viewed here, he has a pretty interesting story that guy. The news story from the BBC regarding his death is quoted below.

Harold Shipman found dead in cell

Shipman is thought to have killed at least 215 people
Killer doctor Harold Shipman has died after being found hanging in his cell in Wakefield Prison.
Shipman was discovered at 0620 GMT on Tuesday by staff who tried to revive him, but he was pronounced dead at 0810 GMT. He was jailed for life in January 2000 for murdering 15 patients while working in Hyde, Greater Manchester. An official report later concluded he killed between 215 and 260 people over a 23-year period in Hyde and Todmorden, West Yorkshire. The 57-year-old GP was given 15 life sentences to run concurrently for the murders, and four years for forging a will. He was the UK's most prolific convicted serial killer, but always denied his crimes.
Jane Ashton-Hibbert, whose grandmother Hilda was unlawfully killed by Shipman, said she was angry he had been allowed to die. She told BBC News: "This seems like an easy way out for him. He never showed any remorse or any guilt and that door is now closed to us."

I just wish he had been forthcoming and admitted he had done those things - it would have put a lot of people's minds at rest

Victims' relatives 'not sorry'
And Kathleen Wood, whose 83-year-old mother Bessie Baddeley died in 1997, said: "I am not sorry he has gone, but it brings it all back and it stirs it all up for us again."
A Prison Service spokeswoman said he used bedsheets to hang himself from the window bars of his cell. "He was showing no signs whatsoever of pre-suicidal behaviour at all," she said. "He was behaving utterly normally. He was working as normal and doing education as normal. "There was absolutely no indication that this was coming and he was giving no cause for concern." Prisons Minister Paul Goggins said prisons ombudsman Stephen Shaw would carry out an investigation into Shipman's death. A separate police and coroner inquiry is also to be carried out. Shortly after 1100 GMT, an undertaker's van took Shipman's body from Wakefield prison to the Medico Legal Centre in Sheffield for a post-mortem and formal identification. The GP, who leaves a widow, Primrose, was on suicide watch at two other prisons earlier in his sentence, but not at Wakefield since his arrival on 18 June last year.

I don't think it fair or reasonable to suggest prison officers at Wakefield Prison were lax
Brian Caton
Prison Officers' Association

Fred West was found hanged in his cell in Birmingham on New Year's Day 1995 while awaiting trial for multiple murders. Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of mental health charity Sane, said: "The death of Harold Shipman exposes what we already know. "The prison psychiatric services are threadbare and unable to supervise either those with known mental illness or a history of suicide attempts."

But Brian Caton, of the Prison Officers' Association, said Shipman had given no indication of suicide in interviews or in his interaction with prison officers.

Last month it emerged that the serial killer had been stripped of his privileges at Wakefield because of poor behaviour. But the benefits - such as a television in his cell and the right to wear personal clothing - were returned last week.

A police officer read a statement to the media from outside Primrose Shipman's house in Walshford, West Yorkshire. It said there would be no comment from the Shipman family and added: "They have asked you to respect their privacy. This is a very upsetting time for them."
Within hours of his death, the word "justice" had been scrawled 12 times across his former surgery in Hyde. The vast majority of Shipman's victims were elderly women who were given lethal heroin injections.
Attempted forgery
He was brought to justice after attempting to forge the £386,000 will of one of his victims, Kathleen Grundy, 81. After the trial, a public inquiry was launched into how the GP was able to escape detection for so long. It was chaired by High Court judge Dame Janet Smith, whose first report, in 2002, found the former GP had killed at least 215 patients and possibly as many as 260.
Her final report is due out in the summer.
Of Shipman's 215 likely victims, 171 were women and 44 were men.

The oldest was a 93-year-old woman, the youngest a 41-year-old man.

Well well, well well well well well. I start too many posts with either "Well..." or "So..." Well, so anyhow. Today should be a moderately productive day. I'm going to go to my school to put flyers up for my company and get all the ISBN's for my school books. They can go screw themselves if they think I'm going to fall for buying my books there again. Then I'm going to go to the post office to mail some books. Umm... yeah I guess that's mainly it. Hmm. Well I'm sure I'll do more than that in actuality. I'm going to go on a flyer hanging up spree soon, world beware. I'm sleepy.

I'm so tired. I'm 4 in the morning tired, but I'm also just generally tired, the way I get every so often, and then I bitch about it, and I feel sad for myself for awhile, and then I forget till the next 4 in the morning when I can't sleep. I'm just tired of seeing the same stupid shit over and over. I'm tired of being pissed at the bank for having shitty hours and charging me overdraft fees because I'm poor and stupid. I'm tired of smelling like smoke when I don't smoke. I'm tired of not having money, I'm tired of not being able to buy anything when I do. I'm tired of seeing people stay in shitty relationships when all they do is fight. I'm tired of people making bad decisions... wasting money... wasting their lives doing nothing for nothing. Wasting time. I'm really tired of wasting time. To talk to most people you'd think they knew they'd live forever. Life is short though... really short. People die... all the time. Literally all the time. People are just dropping all over the world. Life is way too short for any of the bullshit people do or any of the fucking drauma.

I'm tired of people. I think I need a break from people... all people. I'd like to go on a road trip. I would if I had the money. I think I'd drive to Texas. Texas seems pretty cool. It'd be warm there... no snow... no rain... just warm. If I'm tired of anything, I'm tired of being cold. I'd love to just go somewhere to go there. To the ocean. Just to have an adventure... and have somewhere to be for a reason, even if it was just for a stupid reason. I've never swum in the ocean... I'd like to try that. I'd like to just pack my bags right now and take a trip all alone to the ocean. I'd like to not have to call home unless I felt like it, to not have to worry that someone is worrying about me. To just for once be completely free of all obligation, just free to do whatever I felt like doing, to act on any silly little whim. The people that love you can really weigh you down sometimes. I'd like to just be free for a while, just a little while. I wouldn't really want to be alone forever, or to not see the people in my life that I care about. I'd just like to call a timeout for myself. Maybe some day. Guess I'll go to bed. My head hurts.

So that's cool... I got my ticket taken care of and got my new remote set up for my car alarm. Funny story though. I go to get it set up since I messed up the last remote, and they say they can do it for $20 instead of $30 since I only have $20 to my name. So they set it up but I guess there's some satellite relay dealy missing, so the guy tells me that I need to get that bought/found and installed or the next time someone sets off my alarm, I'm not going to be able to turn it off because it will still be wanting the old remote for some reason. So I say cool whatever, go on my merry way, and what's the first thing I do? Set the fucker off. The guy had set it in the parking lot, and I watched him do it, but totally forgot when I went to leave. Just unlocked the door and set the thing right off, real retard-style. Anyways, I guess it only got off a few warning beeps before I hit the button, so I lucked out. God I'm a retard. So he told me if it ever gets to the past-the-warning phase of the alarm, it's just going to go off forever if I don't buy that thing. That's pretty gay... assuming it's true. I guess if I have any true friends that read my blog, I'm going to find out soon because they're going to come set off my car alarm for giggles.

Happy Birthday Bryan Mack... wherever you are... however old you are... and whatever day your birthday is. Why hasn't Hallmark returned my calls? Mack seconds my theory on traffic tickets (although he wrote his article first I just hadn't read it)... second paragraph yep. Keep that on the downlo though, if the cops figure out we're hip to their schemes they'll shoot us deader than a 15 year old developmentally challenged black boy. Now it's uh-off to court I go.

Well I haven't seen 8 in the morning in a while. Man... USA has really hilarious movies on at this hour. I watched the last 45 minutes or so of Fantastic Voyage, which I'd heard of but never seen. That stuff is absolutely hilarious. If you've never seen it... well I have no idea what it's about really. Some team of scientists shrink down to play doctor on some dude from the inside of his body. Nanomedicine I guess they're calling it. What's great is the scenery and sets they use. They're talking about travelling through lymph nodes to take a shortcut and you see all these ridiculous sets, big purple drapes with circles colored on them, weird dangley supposedly tissue stuff that actually looks like a lot of cotton. It's actually kind of hard to describe.

Anyways, they go through this section of the guys body and they get all caught up in these reticulum something-er-other, in reality strands of fluff that they drive their little ship through. It looks like they're going through a car wash... it's so great. It might be the corniest thing I've ever seen in my life. So they have to stop their little ship thing to clear the vents so their engine will work again because it's overheating because of all this car wash reticula-fluffy shit. So they put on these little backpack things and facemasks, and then they go out of the ship into the body. This shit is hilarious. They're out there, and they just kind of float around sort of half assed like and they keep moving their little hands around like they're trying to swim, only you know they're not in actual liquid because their hair doesn't move. So funny. So they're in the inner ear at some point, and the operating room where the actual guy is has to remain completely silent because even the slightest noise is like an earthquake to these guys. Of course some dumb nurse drops a pair of scissors, which sends all the little inner characters flying everywhere. So young Racquel Welch gets stuck in some inner ear fiber stuff and they're trying to save her before the antibiotics come for her to kill her. I was so worried, the antibiotics were totally scary. Since they couldn't make them attract to her, they ran the film in reverse and just peeled them away so it looked like they were flying towards her and sticking to her. They pulled her in the ship and the antibiotics were all over her body and she couldn't breath through them much like Queen Latifah in Sphere when she's covered with jellyfish. Anyways they save her and all that... then there's some mystery and intrigue and a plot to kill the guy whose body the doctors are in, but in the end the guy lives and the doctors barely make it out of the body in time before they expand back up to normal size. Corniest shit I've ever seen in my life, seriously. Classic.

And guess what was on next? The Day of the Dolphin. That started out with some nice old military looking dude talking about how dolphins are really smart and how they have really good senses and all of this. Pretty interesting stuff. Then he gets real serious, and starts talking about how dolphins can be trained to do stuff, and he shows this dolphin passing a little dolphin test. Then he gets REAL serious, and shows a dolphin hooked up to an EKG and all these people scanning his brain waves and patting eachothers backs. So I'm thinking "Okay what the hell is this movie about?" And wouldn't you know it, it's about using dolphins to assassinate the president. Who the hell watched this stuff? No wonder old people are all crazy... look at this wack shit they grew up watching. I hope my kids don't laugh at me like I'm laughing at that crap... man oh man. I already know they will heh.

I have to go to court tomorrow. Got a ticket for not having proof of insurance. It was actually pretty cool, because I was going 15 over the limit without really noticing, but the cop only wrote me up for the no proof thing. My theory is that cops feel like they have to give you some kind of ticket if they go through all the trouble of pulling you over. So I suspect had I had proof of insurance, I would've got the speeding ticket. I can't prove this theory or anything, but I am pretty much convinced of it regardless. Anyways I guess I just have to take my proof of insurance in to court and say "Here, see, look, read, cool. Later." Awesome. Totally. Wish they'd pay me for my time. Someone should dammit!

Well I have absolutely fan-fuh-reakin-tastic news. I found my watch. Or rather someone else in my family found it and left it on the kitchen table. That's so awesome. I'm stoked. Dude. For so long now... I've not known the day, the date, or the time. Consider me back in the reality loop, folks.

I really need a hobby. They say once you make what you love into a job, you hate it. I found that to be true with libertarian style activism. I really hated that shit by the time I was done, gads. I used to game a lot, I'd spend hours and hours on my computer just fixated on the screen, only moving when necessary for physical subsistence. That doesn't seem particularly healthy in retrospect, although I still spend a ghastly amount of time in front of my computer on an average day. I've realized that if I don't start doing more stuff now, I'm going to grow up and be really boring. I'm not going to have any stories to tell, and I'm never going to have anything cool to say about anything. With this in mind, I've decided to take up extortionism. It sounds like a real gag, I mean when you watch tv, it's one of those glamorous words that really catches your eye, or your ear rather. I'd love to see that written on a court order of mine, Sarah the Extortionist. Has a way better ring than Sarah the Webdesigner, or Sarah the 7-11 Cashier. So I figure I'll just take it up as a hobby, and see where that goes. Since blackmail is pretty closely tied to extortionism, I'm going to give that a go as well. I've got great plans, and I foresee a bright future for myself. I'll be the life of every party with my fantastic tales of weaselry and tomfoolery too. I'll be more popular than Chex Mix.

On the off chance that it doesn't work out for me however, I do have a few backup hobbies in mind. We'll see.

I start school in 15 days. My schedule will be...

Pretty wacky schedule. Boy, I sure am boring lately. I haven't written anything worth writing in ages it seems like. No rants, no good inventions, nothing good to say whatsoever. Maybe I'm not getting enough creativity time. It used to be when I had no friends and no boyfriend, I spent a lot of time sitting around thinking about stuff to write about. Now I am in a different situation, and my poor blog suffers. I'm going to sit here right now until I can think of something worth saying.

Okay I suck. I have a headache and I'm going to bed hehe. I will think of something tomorrow.

Well I've been busy. Sort of. Been making a steady number of designs to sell at jamesondesigns... up to twenty-three. Made a flashy banner too...

I added another new section to the ook.zombeef.com portfolio... check out Miscellaneous if you're looking for miscellaneous things. I'm going to keep links there for stuff I'm selling on ebay, amazon, and on craigslist. I'm also going to try to put up a lot of stuff I've done for school, because I might as well. Oh my pathetic tacky resume is up too. I mean my super awesome resume, yeah! Mainly just random stuff I don't really have any other place for, which is why it's named miscellaneous. I know, it's like the whole world just fits together so perfectly sometimes isn't it?

So that was the year 2003. Dun dun dun. I guess it was an alright year overall. Today more than any other holiday I always feel the most grateful for the people I have in my life. Guess I'll just go to bed... it's almost five. Happy New Year!