Heh...so now the blog is at No. 1 on Google for "DeadAIM 4.5 crack." It can't be helping that I keep adding the search terms to my posts, now can it?

Anyway, too bad for all you kids who keep coming here to find the crack—the two words you're looking for are "bit torrent." If it turns out that you got here and suddenly lost interest in finding the program after reading my witty brilliance, though, why not start a blog with Jablog? It might help you find what you're looking for.

As far as the iTunes idea from last post goes, I did find a program that allows you to pull mp3s from streamed shared songs, namely MyTunes, which was recently removed from Download.com (which has the dumbest URL ever—whose idea was it to change it from the simple download.com to download.com.com?). MyTunes works. Dan was surprised that I didn't ask him, my resident Mac guru, about the idea before posting about it—but he wasn't online. Alas!

Edit: It seems that the author removed MyTunes not just from Download.com, but also from all the other download sites it could previously have been found on. His reason? He "lost the source code." [shakes head]

It's pouring outside so hard that my window's covered in a fogging of fat droplets.

I've seen a lot of talk about LiveJournal cuts lately, with people rudely demanding that friends put cuts into their posts. A LiveJournal cut, for those unfamiliar with the strange customs of that blogging netherworld, is where you put tags on either end of a section of your post you want to hide behind a link. The link then takes you to the comments view of that particular post, where you can see the portion of the post that's been hidden behind the link. People use these "cuts" to avoid overly long posts, which I suppose is fine if you like brevity. Where this becomes a point of contention, though, is where friends pages are concerned.

A lot of LiveJournal users, you see, fanatically check their "friends" page, where all recent posts by people listed as friends of that journal show up. It's a rather convenient thing, to be sure, as then you don't have to go checking however many other journals every day—the posts are all there for you in one place. Problems arise, though, when other users demand that people they decided to add to their own friends page change the form of their posts so the other users don't have to scroll down the page a little farther; they claim that long posts like that "clutter" the page. Heaven forbid that these users have to scroll down the page to avoid reading things their own friends write. [rolls eyes]

Being a rather long-winded person myself, I'm not a fan of people who demand that others "cut" their posts. So you have to scroll—big fucking deal! So they wrote a long post! That doesn't make any fewer posts display on your friends page, nor does it do anything but take up space. The amount of space taken up on a page isn't a huge commodity or anything when colors and boxes and letters—i.e. bits of html—don't cost anything to "print." If you don't like a given friend's posts showing up on your friends page, then defriend them, goddammit! Quit pussyfooting around with your little status symbols: "Oh, look how many friends I have!" As for having to click the link to go to the next page of the friends section if indeed extra-long posts do make it so fewer posts display on a page, how does that hurt you in any way? Oh no, I have to click a link to see the rest of my friends' posts. [waves forearms limply] Whatever shall I do?

If I posted on LiveJournal and one of my supposed friends started telling me that my lengthy posts were too long, I'd do just what a friend did the other day, namely cut the entire post in protest. I'd be pissed off just like he was, considering that it shows a blatant disregard for one's ideas and emotions when someone who's purporting to be a friend demands that you change your posting style to suit them.

As for me, though, I post here on Jablog, and that's not changing anytime soon. Screw LiveJournal.

"We know we're not happy here..." "Could it be true—can life be new? Could it be all that I am is in you?"

Yes, so tomorrow morning conservative cutie-cum-demagogue Ann Coulter will finally make her appearance on campus (the Campus Republicans have been pushing for a couple of years, apparently, to get the Assembly Series committee to approve a budget to bring her to campus). Here's hoping that liberals don't do exactly what they did a year ago when Phyllis Schlafly visited campus, namely dismiss the woman a priori without even listening to her comments, then blast her, exclaiming that she shouldn't have been brought to campus in the first place. I wrote an op-ed about that phenomenon after Schlafly came to campus last year.

I heard the first hints of that attitude today, though, talking to the editor and production manager in the newspaper office—when asked if he was going to Coulter's talk tomorrow, the editor replied with something along the lines of "Hell no!" While I know he's got other things going on, like thesis writing, it doesn't bode well that liberals are already dismissing her before hearing her speak or reading any of her writing. I asked the two of them if they'd ever read anything she'd written and neither of them had, despite their skepticism and the production manager's exclamation "I hate that woman!" So it begins all over again...

Anyway, we'll see what happens tomorrow.

Edit: Not much happened tomorrow. The speech she gave focused way too much on Iraq and Kerry and not nearly enough on issues relevant to college students. The only "protest" was some guy who stood up clapping until security escorted him out, and there was the usual [ironic] mumbling about how, "See, this is why I hate conservatives, they always issue blanket statements..." [shrugs] Not exciting.

I should have assignments due more often—I'd blog more.

I may have the answer to the file-sharing problem on our post-DC campus—iTunes. You can share files through it once you enable that feature. By all accounts, it works and is apparently legal...

These are the relevant questions, though:

1. How many people on the university network are using iTunes?

2. Can a given iTunes user on the network here see all of the other users at any given time, or do the vagaries of the network and its "workgroup" system prevent this right now? Is there actually a five-user limit on how many other users you can see and if so, can that be changed?

3. If the workgroup system is preventing all iTunes users from seeing each other due to being in different workgroups, could we simply ally ourselves with a new workgroup in our respective network settings and then see all the other iTunes users?

4. If all of the aforementioned possible problems could be worked out, wouldn't this be a viable system for sharing music here at the university?

5. I've read varying accounts of iTunes sharing—some say that it's simply streaming the file, hence not actually possessing an actual copy of the file on one's computer, while other accounts say there are ways around this limitation. Could we make this work as a viable file-sharing system via a few tweaks?

In other news, apparently my blog has reached No. 5 on Google for the term "DeadAIM 4.5 crack." I wonder what anomaly of Google's algorithms allowed that to occur merely on account of my posting about finding the thing.

Anyway, I'm not giving out information on how I found said crack except to say two words: "bit torrent." I purposefully chose not to include a link in the original post. While I realize it's hard to find the thing—it took me a good few days of searching—I still don't think I need the liability of giving out links to places that distribute such items. If I can find it, you can find it. Enough said.

I must confess, I was thinking anti-blogging thoughts last night as I fell asleep. The whole endeavor—putting up a personal website, keeping a weblog, etc.—really smacks of vanity, y'know? The point—well, it's difficult to tell what the point is. One point is to be able to show off your most precious and all-important thoughts to everyone, to show them how brilliant your mind is and what exactly your precious opinion is on every last thing, neh? I wrote about a desire to do just that in high school, after stuttered stints at showing my notebooks to a couple friends—there needed to exist a way to show people my notebooks without garnering rampant disapproval. People may surely judge whatever I say, but the anonymity of the net and people's reluctance to leave comments (much like the fear many people seem to have of answering machines and voice mail) leaves me safely thinking that people have read my writing and approve.

Such vanity on my part. But at least I don't go around whining, "Go see my site...it's really neat...really," at people anymore, then being disappointed when they won't visit it. I try not to do that, anyway. The blog format does tend to keep people coming back, anyway, as it's more likely to be updated and in any way relevant than a website proper. That's a problem in itself, though—the need for reassurance that people are reading and the need to be listed and get hits may well be counterproductive to the whole endeavor of listing my authentic thoughts, as we've well seen. The problem of audience is still there.

[Is interrupted by a German woman asking which of these two forms—"March 11-12, 2003" or "March 11th-12th, 2003"—is the proper form for that range of dates in a formal letter in America. I'd suppose either would work, though the latter is more awkward, neh?]

[shrugs] I thought also about the [fairly obvious] fact that should I ever apply for something from this point on, searching for my name online will bring up this record of my weariness about a whole range of things. It made me think about finding some useful pseudonym to work under, then changing all the titles of my various sites so they don't include my full name, but rather that pseudonym. The most obvious pseudonym that comes to mind, of course, is this very username, limeonaire. I already use that for a lot of things. It's not the most eloquent name, though. My next instinct is to come up with some catchy, trend-whore name like Lotus Ninja or Andariel or something similar...but that's probably just what I should avoid.

[shudders] Unclean...must wash off the stain of imagined trendiness...

Today's's project: installing the new version of AIM. I was waiting to update it until I could find a crack for DeadAIM 4.5 that would actually work; once I finally found one, I installed DeadAIM, then changed AIM's icons with ResHacker yet again. Ah, geekery.

I'm in one of those hyperhormonal-and-caffeinated moods I get in. I started listening to Reel Big Fish, as I'm annoyed about a few things, and I have, yet again, found their music the most beautiful, catchy thing I've ever heard, which is a sure sign I'm in one of those moods. Manic, obsessive, impatient...yes. Per usual for one of these moods, I want to be able to type out this gorgeous guitar solo, immortalizing it in words so you can hear some facsimile of how gorgeous this is to me, but it's probably not as great as I think it is.

So I went to rehearsal for Cabaret today, and yet again, I feel utterly outclassed and sort of useless. I'm not outclassed, mind you, in terms of overall tone and playing ability, but outclassed so far as the quality of my instrument, quality of past instruction, and depth of my knowledge goes. I know what I've done before and what I've had to figure out. I can play alto music on clarinet and transpose flute to clarinet on the fly, for instance, but I don't have a $1,000-plus wood clarinet, nor have I ever taken private lessons—and I don't plan to ever take private lessons if I can help it. I don't have time to completely relearn how to play and "fix" my embouchure, which is what I suspect is what would be required were I to try taking lessons. I may at some point get a wood clarinet, but considering how much my education is costing at this point and the fact that I'd rather buy a car than a clarinet when I do get a real paying job, I doubt that'll happen anytime soon.

I'm a good player, but unsophisticated, I suppose. I don't use Vandoren reeds—I tried them once or twice and hated 'em, found 'em impossible to play on. I know, those are supposed to be "broken in," but I don't need that, y'know? Mitchell Luries and Rico Royals work just fine right out of the box. I generally dislike all the faux sophistication horn players pretend to have, what with obsessively adjusting their ligatures and talking about their embouchures and pulling out and pushing in, most of which usually does a whole lot of nothing.

As far as music goes, I can play pretty much anything I see, but I usually just hope that no one asks me what key something is in, as I was never officially taught how to figure that out, as far as I can recall. I never needed to be able to do that. The whole atmosphere there just annoys me, though. They all talk in very technical language, as they're fluent in that sort of idiom...whereas I just play. I've always gotten along fine with the clarinet and alto I own (which only cost $85 and about $250, respectively) and my ability to sight-read. My sight-reading is rusty right now after nine months off between the end of Pippin and now, but I can still hold my own pretty well...

I get the same kind of feeling when I'm among university music students as I did when I was at the music camp at the Webster University School of Music the summer before freshman year with these people who knew people from years of lessons there and at COCA and places like that...All-State Band...that sort of thing. While they were talking about doubling on oboe and crazy stuff like that, I was just struggling to read the 32nd-note runs the master class instructor shoved in front of me.

Again with rehearsal, though, the flute chick still annoys me—sure, she can play incredibly well, she can sight-read in six sharps or flats with no hitches and has a great tone—but she's weirdly antisocial. She acts like it's a waste of her time to show up at rehearsals and hang out with the other players and deign to listen to me stumble throught sight reading. I know she's one of the director of bands' golden girls, so to speak, so perhaps that explains it. Maybe all this jazzy music is "below" her.

As for being antisocial, I don't talk in rehearsal very much, but it's for much the same reason I don't say a lot in Christianity class—I'm not confident that I'm very fluent in the idiom at hand, so I shut my mouth and try not to make much noise. I'm not very good at being social in any sense anymore, when it comes down to it. I sit here in front of my computer too much, perhaps. Then again, I don't really like most people...but eh. This has all been said before.

"Well, first of all, I'd like to say 'fuck off'—fuck off—fuck off—FUCK OFF! If you don't get it why don't you go shove your head back up your ass? Don't waste my time, I don't need your opinion...no...'Cause you don't know what it's like to be like me...you don't know, so keep your mouth shut."

For those of you living under a rock, or just not living here, Direct Connect is gone on this campus, at least for now. [shrugs] So it goes...it had to happen sometime. The dumbass who wrote the Riverfront Times article that prompted the hub crackdown, Ben Westhoff, is the same guy who dissed the student newspaper in his article praising the conservative paper. I don't put a lot of stock in stuff he says, but apparently the administration does. It amused me when he dissed the newspaper, but it kinda pisses me off that he decided to exploit the Direct Connect phenomenon for his own gain, completely decimating it in the process. Journalistic ethics, anyone?

One last thing: this article dissing iPod owners. I like it.

This post will be in list form, as I'm too tired to provide exposition between the various thoughts. Enjoy.

1. Gills.

2. I came up with this idea on the shuttle to Target with one of my roommates the other day, namely that of the flag farm. The flag farm would be just that—a farm to grow baby flags into bigger flags. You'd plant a whole bunch of tiny little flags in the ground and tend them carefully so they become bigger ones. This was inspired by seeing a whole bunch of those little flags the telephone company sticks in the ground to mark things, with about 15 little flags all in one place.

3. My brother is, unfortunately, not as Windows-literate as I'd hoped. Sigh. He's my brother, though, so there's hope for him yet.

4. One roommate took several awesome pictures of another roommate and I dressed up like traffic cones.

5. The third roommate and I are having a "withdrawing from classes" party tomorrow at 6:15 p.m. Anyone who wants to withdraw from a class this semester can do it at that time to show their solidarity.

"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."

Slept a whole lot to recover from the headache I had on Monday and the unfortunate all-nighter I pulled Tuesday night writing my advanced fiction writing story. The story turned out incredibly badly, though considering it's only the second story I've ever written, that's not so surprising. I don't think the professor knows I've only written one story before, though, so I doubt she'll take that into account when reading it. After all, who gets into the advanced class with the only story they've ever written? For that matter, who gets through the original fiction writing class without writing more than one story? Apparently I do.

In other news, my roommate's a mermaid. Personally, I'm a duck, but I don't think there's any antipathy there. The pretty, pretty mermaids can get along with the ducks just fine. There's still the question of whether Nessie is a suitable companion for my mermaid roommate, but I suppose if that doesn't work out she can find her own freshwater lake. She's cool enough to be able to live in any body of water she wants, I think.

Also, DC has now met its demise. What to do?

Sigh. I worry about the paper. I worry that I'll get phased out next year. I worried about that last year, too, but luckily the editor made an effort to include me in the proceedings, creating a new position, copy chief, that let me have as much of a say in things as I wanted. The thing is, though, that even that didn't start out smoothly. I didn't realize I had that position until the initial staff training meeting in the fall, 'cause while I'd been asking about it for months, I never got a definite answer until Jonathan walked up to me and asked what I thought of my new job. Stuff like that led me to have my reservations at the beginning of the editor's regime, especially when I got the impression over the summer that I wasn't really getting due consideration for certain things—i.e. not receiving staff emails over break, not being told about the opportunity to help with pre-orientation until it was too late, not being included in the online staff listings, etc.

That said, even though I had my reservations about the editor over the past year, things have turned out pretty well with him in charge. He doesn't have the same warm, super-considerate personality as his predecessor does, so it's been difficult sometimes to know where things stand with him, but in general we've worked things out. He does listen—as much as I've had my complaints, he's worked to fix things I've complained about, and a pretty good rapport has developed between all of us who regularly show up on production nights (him, Liz, and me, plus various copy editors). Things aren't bad. A lot of the uncertainty surrounding his's plans, too, in the beginning most likely came from the fact that we were changing over to the three-day production schedule.

So yeah—it's unfortunate that just about when things have started going more smoothly on production nights, we're going to have this regime change that tosses everything up in the air again. The three staff members I know I can really rely upon at this point are going to be graduating this spring, and I'm not so sure there's anyone left to trust. The only "elder" left from my days as a freshman, I think, is Jon. Everyone else is about to graduate or has already scaled back their time with the paper. I worry about Jon's plans to lessen his "presence" in the office, as much as he and his buddies have tried to reassure us about it. That, at least, is something that's been there as long as I've been here—we've almost always had someone who's in the office every production night who can answer questions and serve as that "familiar face" for anyone who walks in the door.

I also worry that everyone who has faith in my abilities will leave without recommending my services to the next regent, so to speak. I'm hoping someone recognizes my existence and the time I've spent on the paper over the past two years and makes note of it—not because I'm vain, though I may be, but because I'd like to grab a position worthy of my talents and accomplishments thus far. A lot of these news editors are, frankly, silly sophomores, people no older than me whom I don't trust very much. I don't hang out with them; I don't go to their parties; I don't have much of a foothold with them in a social sense. Hence I'm hoping that what the editor noted got through, namely that the people who were actually expressing concerns about production nights and the changes thereof are the ones who were there all the time this year, who made sure that things went well every night, namely him, Liz, and me.

I worry that the people who don't like me or know me (most of the news editors right now) are going to conveniently move me out of the way, especially now that Jon's planning to give veto power, so to speak, to those who grab the senior editor positions. I moved out of the news section proper about a year ago, so right now my best bet as far as staff positions are concerned is finding an associate/managing editor-like position to inhabit, else taking a step back down the ladder into a copy-editor spot. Perhaps, though, I'll finally be able to grab a spot as opinion editor or online editor—those were the positions I tried for this spring, only to be denied in favor of those senior to me (which does make sense). In any case, I'm going to be a junior next fall, and hope I can wrest a spot of some sort out of the hands of those who would just like to see me disappear, else I'm going to end up phased out like several of my staff reporter comrades-in-arms. They all ended up quitting the paper last year after they realized that too much was being demanded of too few people, especially among staff writers for the news section, with too little regard afforded writers who really are talented.

Those are my thoughts right now, after hearing Jon's attempts to explain his vast plans for restructuring staff positions and production schedules for next year during the editor-in-chief interview process. I've definitely got reservations, and a lot of them concern whether I'll even have a place in the hierarchy next year. We'll see...

"I don't cry how you cry—there's nothing left to me. You keep changing my life...every day..."