Last night I had a few strange dreams. I haven't received enough sleep tonight, but I figured I'd better write about them before I go back to sleep, or they'd be gone forever.

here goes:

I am visiting my old apartment in the college area. I know I'm not supposed to be there. It is pretty much empty except I find some stuff I left there. I find my backpack. I wonder "haven't I used this backpack since moving out?". I find a bunch of other assorted stuff on a shelf that doesn't actually exist in that apartment. I open a shelf and find a bunch of books in the bottom.

I open the door and leave, I hope no one notices me. To my dismay there are 30 or 40 people in blue shirts lined up to do something. They must work for the apartment. I walk past everyone and no one says anything. When I get on the street I get on a motorcycle and go on my way.

The next thing I know I'm on a freeway offramp on the wrong side of the road. I thought, "this is strange, I've never had this happen before. I'd better turn around before the cops show up." Just then a motorcycle cop circles around. Now I am in a car. He comes up to my window, pulls out his handcuffs, and says "Are you gonna live?".

Now I'm in a therapy session with the cop. He's my age or younger. I don't remember any dialouge from the session. When I was over, we walk out the door. He heads down the hallway to the right, laughing and talking about smoking weed. I walk out the door in front of me, and I'm outside. Some security they have.

I wonder how I'm going to get home. I don't remember what comes next. I think I'm driving with my mother through a city and everything looks foreign to me.

In another scene, I'm at some sort of conference, and I'm leaving. There are 6 elevators, each of which goes to different floors of the parking garage. I go to the last one (I'm going to floor 101, which is actually one below ground level). I get in the elevator with some other people, the elevator starts and goes way past our floor.

In yet another scene, I am some sort of mass transit thing. There's this thing with a bunch of leaflets someone put there. They have little packets of shroom spores and other unknown seeds. Some guy is watching me. Later he comes over and sprinkles a bunch of the seeds into a paper. Next thing I know I'm holding an action figure that seems to be alive.

That's about all I remember...

I've been having a hard time sleeping. I tried for about 3 hours last night before I relented and got on the computer. Yesterday I had a dream where I was inside a video game where bubbles were growing and cutting off my air supply. I had to throw shapes at the color coresponding bubbles to pop them.

Last night as Dani used me as a pillow she was smacking her lips and talking about peppermint.

I read an acticle about PHP caching in PHP Architect and copied the source code into a file. I had to write another script to delete the line numbers from the cache script. I'll have to figure a good way to use caching on the site.

About a week ago I bought a Bionaire BAP825 HEPA air cleaner from Costco for $80. I had been suffering from allergies and have wanted an air cleaner for a while. The BAP825 is an ellipital tower about 2 feet tall. Most of the front is covered by the air outlet, the intake is in the back. The controls are on the top. It comes with a remote with all the same controls as the main unit.

To set this up, you have to open the back, where you find 2 HEPA filters in plastic bags. You take them out of the plastic bags and connect them to a mounting point using clips. Mine came with 2 extra HEPA filters as well. They are supposed to last for 3-6 months. A filter indicator light lets you know when it's time to change the filters. There is a foam pre-filter which can be cleaned in soapy water.

There is a built-in ionizer and a button to turn it on and off. I have been using the ionizer the whole time.

So far, I think I've been sneezing less. I'd like to have another filter so they can clean two rooms at once. I am curious to see how long the filters last. Bionaire sells filters for $40 for a 2 pack (the BAP825 needs 2 filters). Amazon has the same filter pack for $25.

I am a gamer geek. I bought Halo 2 the day it was released (Now 9). I got the last copy they had at Target. My copy was the 100th copy they sold. This was my first time buying something on the day of its release.

The first thing I did when I started up Halo 2 was try out the single player campaign. I like the new weapons, like the battle rifle, and that covenent sniper gun. The human sniper rifle now has a cool effect where you can see the scope while the gun is not zoomed in. Far Cry has something similar.

There were quite a few anomolies with textures switching, mostly in the cut-scenes. It's harder to notice when you're in battle.

The objectives seem more action packed than in the first Halo. There is greater sense of teamwork amongst the AI players. They say a lot more stuff, some of it's in Spanish. It's a nice touch. It would be cool if they released an expantion pack to add new sayings to the AI characters.

So far I am at the level after the 'Oracle' level.

After a few hours of single player mode, I got online. I tried to join a game and it was taking a while trying to find matches. Eventually it connected and I was playing. Halo 2 is considerably less laggy than Unreal Championship. In fact, I didn't notice it lag at all during all my gameplay. Hooray for good network code. The voice chat can now be played through the TV speakers. It's pretty cool, it should have been in all the first xbox live games. I was wearing my xbox live communicator, and Dani asked me what it was for. She has asked me several times about it. I said it's for talking to people in the game. She looks at me like I'm a total geek weirdo for using voice chat in an online game. Now that the chat can be played through the TV, she can hear that some people are actually talking on there.

You can now wield two weapons at once. When playing online, I would often pick up a second sub machine gun. Firing both at once produces a lot of recoil which makes it a lot harder to aim.

Your online character can be customized. There are primary and secondary suit colors, and you can choose an elblem for your suit. I am using a green suit with a yin yang emblem.

Dani just woke me up to tell me that it's raining and that I should make sure the windows on my car are rolled up. After I checked my car (they were rolled up), I idled in the living room for a bit, being inticed by the computer just sitting there. Naturally I turned on the computer so I could blog this.

Dani said "is there any pizza left?" in her sleep. She always says random things in her sleep. I made a mental note to write down some of that stuff, so I am following up on that.

Have I ever told you about the joys of living next door to a storage unit facility? You would think that not much would happen in a storage unit. When I rented a storage unit for a brief period of time, I hardly saw anyone when I went there. But this is El Cajon. There are always people hanging out over there, and working on construction projects. They find it nessesary to constantly cut metal pieces with a circular saw. It might be the most annoying noise you could make with a circular saw. Everyone's vehicle is a truck, with a loud engine. I'm sure they chose it for it's great storage unit acousitcal qualities.

Well before I forget completely, I had a dream last night. I was in high school, though I did not recognize the school I was at. I was outside somewhere, I think along a concrete wall. I was playing an electric guitar with some people. Next thing I know, I am walking on a road vaguely remsembling Pomerado Rd, which leads to my mother's house. I had walked for miles and I realized I left my guitar at the school. I also left my new camera and a laptop. I wondered whether to walk home and get my car and drick back (and I didn't have a car in high school), or walk back to school.

I think I walked back home. There were a bunch of chocolate cookies and brownies on the table in the dining room. My dad was there. I took a big stack of brownies and heated them up in the microwave. My dad told me I am eating too much.

Then I feel depressed because I left my stuff at school. The next thing I know, I am at a dorm or something, looking for my stuff. I go into some guy's room. A guy in a football uniform comes in and pushes me against the wall and says 'get out of my room'. He said some other things I forgot. Then I am on the floor and there are more people there. One guy has my camera and he's using it to take a picture of his friends. The camera in the dream is not the actual camera I have.

Now I am back home again, and my mom tells me my friend Sebastian's mother found my stuff somehow. I am looking at a laptop on the kitchen counter.

I am in the dining room, and my childhood friend Ben walks in the back door. He has not aged from when I last saw him like 10 years ago. He says he needs a smoke and walks out the front door. I followed him outside. Now I had a truck, and he a had a truck with a really short bed. He parked in front of me so that his truck was touching mine.

At this point I think I woke up. Dani had just come back to bed, and I told her I had a dream. She mumbled incoherently and fell asleep.

The other day I got to the communications level in Doom 3. In the room where there is a sign pointing to the monorail and the comm center, it was lagging badly. It was probably about 1 frame per second. There were maybe 2 or 3 guys in there, which would normally be no big deal, but at such a slow frame rate, they really kicked my ass. It was a struggle to aim correctly. I played a couple more rooms, and quit.

Today I skimmed through an article on Doom 3 tweaking. In mentioned all kinds of stuff you could tweak via the Doom 3 command line. It had pictures of what each option would look like. I didn't do any of tweaks mentioned there, but I went into my video card control panel later on. I turned off ansiotrpic filtering and set the image quality to performance.

Then I tried replaying the commincations level. The rooms that were laggy were actually playable. Rejoice! I finished the level with many problems.

I decided to try playing with my MSI 3D glasses. These are very cool, and you can get them for only $20 now if you look around.

At first the test 3D viewer wouldn't work. I went to NVidia's web page to see if they had something to fix it. I had assumed the installed ForceWare 61.77 drivers included the stereo 3D stuff, since the stereo 3D options were already in the control panel. Turns out I had to download the 61.77 3D stereo drivers. I guess I had the stereo controls from when I was using an older stereo driver, and they weren't compatible. The stereo drivers used to be way out of date, I am glad to see they have reached parity with the standard ForceWare.

I launched Doom 3 to give some stereo 3D action a spin. The main demo was all messed up, it had a double image, with the degree of separation much more than the drivers cause by themselves. One of the menu images was off the screen, and the cursor didn't line up with the menus horizontally. I managed to load a saved game. I was glad to see the game worked in stereo at this point, mostly. There were two crosshairs which were distanced by about 8 inches. As you could image, this makes it kinda hard to aim. You can aim by aiming between the crosshairs, but this is tricky. The HUD on the bottom of the screen was also broken. For these reasons I will probably not be playing much of Doom 3 in 3D stereo.

The visual effect of 3D stereo is very fun to experience though. Little things like the empty shells popping out of your gun have more depth and these little visual cues are easier to pick up in stereo. I walked into a hallway with glass protecting against the Mars atmosphere, and the look outside was breathtaking. As soon as the door opened, I could feel the openness of the windows that I did not really notice without the glasses.

So I really hope there will be a patch to fix the 3D stereo issues with Doom 3. I also wish to see a wireless 3D glasses accesory for console gaming systems. Stereo vision has been largely ignored in console gaming, save for the Virtual Boy.

Anyway, I am gonna write something else before I get distracted.

Today I decided to dig up my Logitech iFeel mouse and plug it in my computer. I downloaded the latest mouseware drivers and the immersion touchware program. The iFeel mouse has a rumble pack thing inside it so it vibrates when you move it over menus, icons, other stuff. My effort did not pay off, since the mouse was jittery when moving diagonally. I unplugged the iFeel and plugged in my regular Logitech optical mouse. It was still jittery. WTF? I figured the mouseware drivers were to blame, so I uninstalled them. That didn't fix it. I look at the properties for the mouse and did a driver rollback. This rolled back to the logitech drivers I had uninstalled. I eventually got the microsoft drivers back, and now the mouse is back to normal. I am wondering if I buy the latest and greatest MX1000 laser mouse, if I'm gonna have problems with the MouseWare drivers again.

I also had a 256M DIMM laying around, and I thought I might try to put it in my machine. Every time I try to add more than the 512M that's installed, it doesn't work. It either wont both or doesn't recognize all the RAM. I decided to try it again today. I opened up my computer and realized a had a 30G hard drive in there that I stopped using a while ago. I am gonna take it out and put it in another computer for the Nay Nay.

I figured I might as well reconnect my reset switch wire and the power led wire, since they had been disconnected for months. I managed to do that without too much trouble. On with the RAM upgrade. My motherboard (Asus A7M266-D) has 4 slots, which can support up to 3.5G RAM. I am using a 256M dimm in the 1st and 3rd slots. I tried putting a 256M dimm in the 2nd and 4th slots, and both did not work. I gave up and started working on some other stuff.

While I was doing something, a dialog box saying that CursorXP had crashed came up, and then the computer shut off. That's not good. I turned it back on, but it wouldn't get to the XP loading screen. I tried safe mode, and it got stuck on amdagp.dll. I opened up the case, and there was a burnt smell before. I've been through this before. Last time this happened there was a cable in the way of one of the CPU fans. I moved the cables away from the CPUs and powered it up. It booted into Windows.

Ms. Nuggles has come out and wants me to go to bed. She says she watched 2 movies. I was deleting SPAM the whole time.

Anyway, I'd better go to bed now.

Interesting that I have a computer that's hanging at the same point (amdagp.dll). Wish I knew what Windows was doing at that point.

I just spent a lot of time deleting about 12,000 spam emails in my inbox. Perhaps I should spend some time on how to write thunderbird plug-ins to save me some of the grunt work. When I sort my messages by sender, a lot of them have many, many repeat messages with the same sender. I should write a program to identify these.

My inbox is still about 99% spam :(