Beware the clippers of doom

Hi. I tried to wait as long as possible to do this post, because I was hoping to coordinate it with a bleachfilm.com update, which obviously didn't happen. Expect another post in the next day or so (or, with my luck, an hour from now) about that. Until then...I dunno. Masturbate or something.

I'm probably not going to be at all amusing at the moment (well, less than usual anyway) because I'm tired, dammit. I learned why they assign these problem sets for chemistry a week in advance (answer: because when you start at 9 the night before, it takes you until 2:30*).

Finally bought myself a mouse for the VGA LAN tonight, using money that I owe my friend Nick. It's for a good cause, Nick, I promise. Anyway, this is the first (of probably many) computer accessories I've purchased since being at school, so it was only once I returned to my room that I realized I had entered into an ongoing battle dating back the years of yore (that's the year Yore B.C., or B.C.E. for those of you anti-Jesus baby-eating satanists). This battle is, of course, that of MAN against ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT PACKAGING. You know, that obscenely thick plastic.

Most containers with products in them have an easy way of being opened so that you, the consumer, can get at what's inside, the object you actually paid for, with relative ease. The obvious exception here is canned food, but there exists a device whose sole purpose is to open said cans, so that makes it okay (food for thought: without cans, a can opener has no purpose. Without a can opener, a can cannot realize its destiny. What we have here is a symbiotic relationship, one that deals in the very meaning of one's existence. It's a metaphor, man. A metaphor for life.)

So the nigh-impenetrable fortress of canned corn can be breached by a can opener, but there exists no such siege weapon for electronics-packaging. No matter what tool you use for the job, be it scissors, a razor blade, a machete, or a flame thrower, the matching is imperfect at best. You can usually get it open eventually, but only after some severe struggling, and sometimes after taking some fairly serious wounds from the heavy plastic's natural self-defense mechanism. It is a spiteful beast.

So, I bought my mouse and returned to my dorm. Only then did I realize the size of the task ahead of me: I had to penetrate this defense, and as a minimalist the only things I keep in my dorm room are the necessities of life (laptop, assorted personal hygiene crap, and Slim Jims). I realized after some analytical thinking that my best bet was my nail clipper, and ten minutes later I arose victorious. Hail to the king, baby.

In other news:

• I started learning PHP despite what I said last time, because I was not looking forward to rewriting the whole site twice, because this was the next logical step after CSS. I just skipped one rewrite, we'll see how that goes.



• I'm thinking about taking a minor in computer science, because as I think about becoming a physicist, the work of a theorist seems to appear to me more than that of an experimentalist. It would also make me into less of a poser, since 90% of the crap I know, I only think I know.



• The fact that I'm using an unordered list here makes me wonder just how much HTML blogspot is able to utilize. Hmm.

F	U	C	K
Y	E	S	!

*The fact that Alex regularly goes for days without sleep does not make me a pussy. Anyone who implies otherwise will receive a punch in the face in the mail. Not a fist, just the punch. Badass.