Awake too early -6:05 am

I didn't go completely unadored yesterday. In fact, someone gave me a box of very potent chocolates that contain espresso amongst other things. The one-two punch of sugar + caffeine is extremely effective at waking me up. I should put these next to my alarm clock. One minute I was feebly thrashing around like an overturned sloth-turtle, the next I was standing in the middle of my room thinking about how what just happened looked a lot like a 3Dfx generated scene in a game. (The ceiling lights shining into my eyes coalesced into shining points surrounded by bright, yellow halos and rotated out of my field of view as I stood up without even thinking about it.)

Things that are surprising: Putting on a pair of jeans and suddenly discovering that one of your leather gloves somehow ended up inside it. Especially if you are, at that moment, thinking about frogs.

	Up too late -1:51 am

Way to go, Andrew. Sleep the whole entire day. The whole day! Now I'm going to be awake until about noon (again) and then conk out. This is very useless. At least Kris will come over today to record, and that will force me to be awake and productive. Producing, even. Day off. It's a holiday! It's president's day. This is the day on which everyone remembers that presidents have birthdays, too, and we should celebrate them by not doing any work.

I'm not so good at holidays, in general. They seem to come and go without any purpose. My natural state is to be unaware of them. I'm not totally out of it, though. I know why the decorations in the department stores change all at the same time. I just don't have much reason to do anything about them. Maybe if I were in contact with lots of people at all times, I'd be more into holidays. I'm sure that would make me a better person. Yellow! The color of generic irony!

Speaking of yellow, I was reading through the internet security book when I suddenly realized, mid-chapter about sniffers, that using POP3 mail clients is insanely insecure. Eudora, in this case. It sends your login and password, unencrypted, over the net at regular intervals. Eudora supports two alternate forms of authentication, APOP and Kerberos. Kerberos is non-trivial to set up. APOP is pretty easy, but the server needs to support it. Cucipop (what my mail person uses) does, but I think they compiled it without shadow support, so it can't read the password entries, which it needs to do. I think. Umm. It uses an MD5 hash of the timestamp and a secret passphrase. The passphrase is known to the user and the server. The only secret thing that I know that the server 'knows' is my login password, and we don't even really know the same form of it. I know the actual 'word', and the server knows the salted superencrypted block of zeros, which it can't un-encrypt. I'm pretty sure I'm missing something here. Perhaps Eudora somehow magically knows the salt and crypt()s the password before it sends it (yeah, right). Perhaps APOP needs more setup on the server end. I'll talk to the satanic folks next time I see them.

I haven't seen a living person all day. I spoke to Ed, briefly, at 2 or 3 or something. Or 4 or 5. I dunno. I was asleep. But the point is, I haven't had human contact, so I'm getting very computery. The above paragraph was edited to make it less technical, and it would still be endlessly boring to anyone who wasn't interested in computers. I'll go find a human at QFC or something.

5:45 am - I want brownies. I'm drinking COKE and reading through Valacar's source, seeing how he did stuff. It's kind of strange because I never thought of Pascal as a serious programming language. I used it for a year in college, and then I never saw it again. Tons of demoscene people use Pascal, though. It seems like they mostly use it as glue to make it easier to stick their asm stuff together. I can see why; programming in pure assembly can make you go crosseyed. That one endless column of instructions...aauuah.