:TESTO:Apologies for my sudden and total disappearance, I'll see y'all on the other side.

The students descend tomorrow.
I am Mahler, I am Batman.
I will kick their butts. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Last night I went to a Zombie Prom.

The event was a promotion/casting call for Roller Derby Zombies , an independent film being produced in Maryland. Most partygoers were quite zombiriffic, the music was a mix of tri-decade pop and classic monster-party music (Thrilller, Monster Mash, Time Warp, and Britney Spears), and the energy was high (especially, I'm sure, because a fair subset viewed the night as a movie audition).

I regret that I was not as zombified as I might have been, having learned of the event half an hour after it began. In retrospect, I should have done something with ketchup and egg whites, but in a panic I merely grabbed an eyebrow pencil for stitches and a bit of my housemate's makeup for sunken cheeks and subtle splotches. I had a fun time dancing, although it's always a bit awkward to go to a dance party solo. There was sufficient mass of Crazy People that I was able to blend in - mostly.

When I was announced as a finalist in the Zombie Shuffle competition, I was identified by the MC as "The Damn Hippy" and "The Guy Who Overdosed at a Phish Concert," at which point I realized I was the only long-haired male in the room, and wearing a bright orange shirt among somber blacks, greys, and oozy reds. So I felt a bit conspicuous, and resentful of the identification, as I can sometimes be. So I decided that no harm was meant, especially at a costume event where surface presentation is more of everything, and did not eat the MC's brains when I only earned third place. (My second-round shuffle was admittedly weak)

So I had a fun time, and felt good, as I always do when I Decide To Do Something and Then Do It, which I don't do often enough. In a few days, I suspect a googley-goo for "Zombie Prom Baltimore" will turn up pictures of this shindig, and you can see me and the other (more decomposed) zombies as we boogie down on the blood-soaked dance floor. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:The world is full of cycles. Comings and goings, leases and less-than-leases.

Yes, ladies and germs, it's time again to hit Craigslist, because yet again Circumstance makes it Inconvenient for someone I live with to stay through the end of the agreed-upon term.

Martina had said she was graduating in December and might leave then, and I was aware of that and fine with it. Our lease was to be renewed NOW, at the end of August, and her solution is to not renew it, and move out to live more cheaply with a friend until December. And yesterday is the first I've heard of it.

Talking with Martina, she's agreed to pay her due rent through September, which gives us time to find someone, but it still means we (I, and Matt, being the people who will have to live with the replacement) have to fucking find some one.

Again.

I'm only slightly frustrated, but rather bitter with the soonness of it, the bad school-starts-in-a-week timing.

Here we go again... :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I bought a new Mac Pro workstation today, and I have installed "Windows XP, 64-bit Edition" upon it.

I chose this course because XP64 is free for three months, and while I have heard several people poo-poo that OS-implementation for poor driver availability and so disimiss it as a candidate for Appley dual-boot, I hadn't found anybody who had tried it.

So I did.

It worked.

With hot-off-the-presses drivers from Intel and Nvidia for chipset, ethernet controllers, and video, a healthy dose of Windows Update and an external audio device, I find myself with a system that performs quite acceptably - although as I haven't seen XP32 run on a Mac Pro, I have little grounds for comparison.

Here's the running journal that I kept while installing Windows XP, 64-bit Edition on my Mac Pro - the only big hitches were that Windows Setup refused to copy onto an NTFS partition (FAT worked), and that I wasn't able to find drivers for the onboard audio (solved with a Griffin iMic, a lovely bit of USB hardware that Just Works).

Should you happen to own a Mac Pro, go download your free 120-day trial of Windows XP x64, harvest the latest 64-bit Windows drivers from Nvidia and Intel, run Boot Camp, and you too can feel clever when XP64 boots! :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Loopback remains a more nuanced game than Nintendo's "Boundish" pong-variations (article, pictures) but it nonetheless disappoints that my baby is not unique in the world anymore.

My evil goat Toothgrinder is now quite formidable (though he still needs short standing rest breaks), but that won't mean much to many of you. I hope I can make his head burn with subtlety, six levels from now. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Brains are the seat of memory.
Brains are soft, with a crunchy shell.
Brains are mysterious, yet personable.

Brains are the archetypal accessory for the evil genius,
no matter how they're displayed, or where, or whose.

Truly, a man can say he's made it
when he's made a brain.

---

I have made a brain for my Loopback game,
that silly little Pong thing I'm always trying to get you to play.
Now, you don't have to play with me. You can play by yourself, with my brains.

You can play against my brains on the web at http://cs.oberlin.edu/~dadamson/Loopback.html
(You can also watch my brains play with themselves, without your intervention)

Or you can play with your friends across the world by downloading and running http://cs.oberlin.edu/~dadamson/Loopback.jar *
(If you don't have many friends, don't worry - you can use my brains instead)


*notice that some Windows systems like to rename .jar files as .zip, when they download them.
 If yours does, change it back to .jar, and think nasty thoughts about Microsoft. :ENDTESTO: