some sweet-ass sites out there. i surfed instead of getting onto the comp problem and happened upon http://fusionanomaly.net/networks.html
fusionanomaly seems like a wicked web of pages about a great variety of subjects, with many hyperlinked words, pictures, etc that refer you to pages on the subject of the hyperlinked (i hope i'm using the appropriate word here) word/pic/whatev that u clicked on that took u there. i may not be explaining it very well, so just go there and check it out for urself.
in the process of writing this wee entry i actually started working on the comp problem. my friend's HD is fooked - first i figured out that the floppy drive wasnt working b/c the ribbon cable was plugged into it with the wrong connector - i was supposed to use the one with the few wires in the middle twisted around, not the straight-thru. so the maxtor HD utility said it fixed whatev was wrong but each time i tried to start the comp i got the same prob. and every time it would find a prob and say it fixed it and every time it wouldnt boot up. so the HD is toast. now i'm checking my HD. i have 3 HD's on my comp - the maxtor one is the one that failed - whichever time in a row. the short test of the maxtor utility prog detects a problem, the full on one doesnt. plus my chip recently started overheating sometimes. right now i got my gf's fan sitting in front of the comp, i took the housing walls off, and the beeping stopped. my bro told me to just raise the warning temperature in BIOS to like 60 C. its at 56 right now i believe. he says he's got his chip running at 80 C. i donno - its not really solving the prob. when i have time i'm gonna have to give that comp a good dusting. talked to my buddy's gf yesterday and she swears by her mac. e-mac i believe. never got a virus. her comp crashed once in the last year and change. all she had to do was to turn it off and back on. never happened again. its quiet. takes up no space. looks cool. got it for a grand and they threw in the printer. it came with speakers - she just recommends maybe getting a base speaker. i rarely use my comp speakers - if anything i use the headphones. she uses firefox mozilla so she never gets popups. got some email prog that brings in emails from 5 diff email accts she's got out there. i'm gonna go over to her place soon and check it out for myslef. i think it would be worth it - save on all the hassle, AND have a cool looking comp :)
realistically, i use (or used to use) my comp to strictly check email, surf the net, do my banking, download songs, some anime, but not much, play music. i dont really have the time to play games. no patience to learn to play very involved ones. sometimes i rem with nostalgia the duke nukem, doom, warcraft II, starcraft, myst but dont even have time to play those again. so if i get a mac and have the time one day, i'm sure i can play those oldies thru a win emulator or whatever they use.
but we'll see.
man, i noticed that sometimes i can bog down a bit into chat typing mode with my abbrev's... :D

friggin' simon posford rules. his "music name" (check out the eloquence! not) is hallucinogen. i wonder if he uses psychedelics, or if its just a clever name. and if he does then what, how much, how often, when, with what intent, how. a lot of stuff is "fun", but i'm kinda shying away from simply frivolous use of "stuff". i dont know that many smot pokers who speak of pot addiction. i guess it depends what u consider an addiction. luckily the stuff doesnt kill, but for me, very frequent use has started to encroach on my life in ways i hadn't thought it would, or even could. i did hear about the adverse effect on memory. but didnt realize it could unbalance my moods. when i wasnt smoking that is. when i found what i like about it, i couldnt believe more ppl didnt smoke it. when coming up, it was relaxing as hell, a bit euphoric, my worries were put in perspective, i didnt mind doing my chores, the amazing ideas and trains of thought that occured to me while doing some mechanical, thoughtless activity like driving home in traffic or showering - really cool ideas and realisations. plus, everything seemed so much cooler - going for a walk was awesome! but shortly after, when it leveled off, i'd start feeling tired and sleepy - so that was not a good thing in the middle of the day. and my memory just wasnt as good even when i was completely down. and adversities really brought me down - thats just nasty. me and a friend both really like pot, but we both think we do it too much and it occurred to us that it would be really cool to bring it to the same level as our alcohol use. we'd drink like once in a blue moon. smoking once in a blue moon like that would mean that we'd still be able to enjoy all the good things that pot brought to our lives, without its negative effects. ppl should be more educated about the "stuff" available out there. alcohol was prohibited in north america for a while too. it came back. it has a good side and a negative one. i'd still vote for the legalisation of marijuana - but coupled with EDUCATION.
i havent yet seen any negative effects of mushrooms or acid. i wonder if its because i havent done it enough times to get the full picture. it took 3 years to come to my conclusion about pot. then there's also the factor of everyone being different. i work with a guy who has one shot of alcohol or a beer, and he turns red right away and gets buzzed. thats quite a low tolerance. cheap for him to get drunk tho - when he does drink. i'm like that with pot. a friend dubbed me a "one toke wonder". i wonder if it would have sounded better if he stuck with the original expression of "one hit wonder" :) either way - to me the song "smoke two joints" is just unreal. but i know there are ppl like that.
i'm just raaaambling... :)
so back to simon posford = hallucinogen. some really cool trax. i love his style. what he does is magic. one of his more recent trax includes a sample from what seems like an interview with some 60's acid advocate:
"There is an area of the mind which can be called unsane, beyond sanity. And yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity." i think the dude later goes on to say that acid helps to bring us close to the unsanity region. but that kinda sounds like quite dated pop-psychology talk. what is sanity?

anywho - a few hours have passed, i went to dictionary.com for a good deffinition of sanity - that window is still frozen - no sanity deffinition. but i managed to get my own comp running- for some reason my old installation of windows now works, so thats kinda cool for the moment. about the sanity circle - i guess more or less what i was trying to get at was that ppl seem to like paraphrases - i suppose its a way to try and understand something unknown. when u deal with the unknown further, u come to know it for its own unique qualities.
paraphrases and cryptic sayings. something about these being key factors in the success of Jesus, Confucius, Shakespeare, etc. but the sanity thing - i dont know - i think the word "sane" has its roots in the meaning "healthy" - its just that it now is used of mental health. we say that someone who is mentally healthy is normal. normal as in conforms to the "norm" - what seems to be thecase for most ppl. but evolution is a history of change, of taking the risk to deviate from the norm. ppl who are insane are just ppl who are different than the norm in the mental health department. for now - the norm is the way to go - works in favor of millions of ppl surviving. but as genetic mutations, different ideas and different environments keep throwing up "different" models, or variations on the "norm", one day we might see that a certain "model" of human seems to be better and is becoming the new norm. or environmental pressures change in favor of a till-then minority - the norm will get forced out of existence and the new norm will fill the void. there - what a nutshell! :D
ok - i'm going :)