Sketch's Worklog

It's too hard to see where the changes on TinyTIM are. This page holds everything mooboy is working on at the moment. This isn't anything other than a way for people to go check out what's new on TIM without searching everywhere for the changes. Maybe it'll even encourage people to explore. Either way, here you go.

June 29th, 2000

I proposed to Coal this past weekend in Kalamazoo, MI, 2 years after we had our first date. Get out of our way!
Added a new selection of images taken by the cool digital camera that Coal got me, at the FTP site.
We ended up selling the old TIM Machine for $400 to Bob Q. Funk!
Sketch is bad about updating his worklog!

March 21st, 2000

Jost and nessa hosted a really well-done 10th anniversary party for TinyTIM. 10 Years! We got lots of pictures of the wizards and people and even the old TinyTIM Machine, which showed up for the fun. We're going to sell the machine on Ebay! So watch out.
Added the @bloat command to the Nexus.
And if you thought you were ready for anything: SKETCH DANCE!

February 16th, 2000

Implemented new backup scripts on the TIM machine. The entire database is now backed up every 12 hours, with immediate access to a week of databases. Additionally, once a month, the database is backed off completely elsewhere, with over a year of databases to be kept online. Now THAT'll fix losing stuff!

February 8th, 2000

TIM finally got the vital machine upgrade that it needed for so long. How long? I can remember a conversation in 1996 about it, and about how the situation was getting dire. It's more a testament to Nimdok's ability as a System Administrator that we were able to keep going on the vastly underpowered machinery we paid many thousands for back in 1993. On January 1st, we swapped out the old and new machines, pretending there was some sort of Y2K problem (there wasn't). This machine is really fast; I remember that R'nice and I thought that something had really broken because the Database, which used to take 10-15 minutes to load, was loading in 10-15 seconds. But no, there really was that much of a difference. We've also got tons more memory, quintuple the disk space, and all the rest of what you would expect on a major upgrade. Searching the whole Database for something using my version of the @find command would take a minute or two; now I get the results back as soon as I press they return key. It's great.
Of course, I've not been spending as much time on TIM as I would like. Still working on that. Work takes a lot of my time. I'm a committed kind of cow.
Speaking of cows, I am now Chief Editor of the Moosletter. More on that in a bit.
AtlantTIM is about to happen in March. This will be 10 years of TinyTIM. Imagine, a Decade of TIM. Now THAT's heaven.

October 11th, 1999

I finally have been making an effort to clean up my oldest items in my mailbox; a lot of times, I looked at mail, said "Oh, I'll add those later." and then never touched them. Well, instead of going to the NEWEST letters, I went to the OLDEST. And as a result, a major gap in the help system was given my attention from a YEAR ago by Marcia, and so we now have Help @TOUCH, Help @ATOUCH, and Help @ATASTE.
FIxed a mistake in HELP INDEX noted by RedEVIL.

October 8th, 1999

I updated the TinyTIM History Timeline with a number of dates and times that KhaOS gave me, being sure to embellish them with my own bovine goodness. I've also sent out a general solicitation for additional TIM events.
Of course, not content to leave this situation alone, I added over a dozen changes and embellishments to the TIM History line page, so that it was more accurate. Trout, Marcia, and Emp gave me changes, as well as adding in a few details here and there. I also added a bunch of changes that R'nice mailed me ages ago. It's looking a lot better.

October 7th, 1999

If you promise not to speak of my lack of updates, I promise not to speak of you and the kitchen staff.
When the TinyTIM FTP Machine (which is different than the TinyTIM machine, and in fact you're on it right now) was replaced with a more powerful version of itself earlier this year, a few minor problems cropped up, including the inability of people to actually access a lot of the files on the FTP site. This was a problem, so I just got temporary root on the machine and fixed all the permissions. You should be able to browse it fine, again.
R'nice made a wonderful journey on motorcycle throughout this great land of ours, and took metal.ball with him. The results of this journey are now up in the Peoples' Glorious metal.ball section. We have shots of metal.ball in Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, the 4-corner junction of Colorado/New Mexico/Arizona/Utah, and various parts of the west.

February 16th, 1999

I didn't take the time to write it down yesterday, but yesterday had to be one of the greatest all-around days ever. I came back from an incredible weekend in Toronto with my girlfriend, solved a problem that had been plaguing my work for months, found out my dad had rented a penthouse apartment on the upper west side in NYC, and sabu and I went ahead and rented this insane thing for the Atlanta TIM Party. Can you imagine? We're going to turn some heads far around enough that they break.
R'nice implemented Function Locks on TIM, and we're still reeling from that. Essentially function locks let you decide if a lock is passed based on the outcome of a function. This means that you can make some insanely complicated locks, or make already insanely complicated locks much simpler. It's a good thing. Now I have to do the work on writing all the documentation on it.
Still working on the TIMster Code. Slowly adding it. It'll come out in a burst of fun, I promise.
Oh, I should mention that last week cache.cow.net, my beloved Sun 3/60 with all my user web pages and mail stuff on it, up and died and tried to take everything with it. Luckily, I'd backed everything up and now it's all on a Linux box. I had to run out and buy a 8.4gb Hard Drive to make it up to snuff, and now it really rules. I love it. I lost two good days, though.
A lot of people who really dig the timRADIO site wanted a way to know what was currently playing and a way to know the Playlist. So, I got out my PERL knowledge and wrote up some CGI scripts to do that. If you go to the timRADIO site and click on the first two questions, you can see the current status of the radio program. It was a lot of fun writing them, and they'll adapt to a growing playlist without blinking (of course). So now let's get more music on there!
New Clock trigger, Clock, WWJD?
I will be a speaker at DEFCON. Oh, yeah, NOW you'll go.

February 2nd, 1999

Well, geez. Where to begin. After much prodding by the Greatest Lady Ever(tm), it was finally brought to my attention that I've been letting the worklog slip. Foolish, foolish cow! Look at that shameful gap! Three months of darkness, unenlightened with the work I've done. Please, allow me the chance to redeem myself.
Well, my biggest accomplishment of the past couple months is probably timRADIO, TinyTIM's new online radio station! Yes, we're probably the first MUSH to have our own Internet Broadcasting going on. See, you know all about .MP3s by now, but you might not know that the big thing that happened over the beginning of 1999 was the wonder of SHOUTCAST. Essentially, Shoutcast allows you set a list of incoming .mp3 files, and send them out to a bunch of simultaneous clients. In other words, a radio station! Very exciting stuff. So, over the course of the month, I constructed the web page, got a Linux box up and running for the service, got content from sources (including RedEVIL, Bob Q. Funk, and ZenRhino, thanks guys!) and generally got this ship off the ground. For a week before February 1st, I had looping messages from me describing what we were going to do, in both high-band and low-band, and inviting people to listen in. On February 1st, right on time, timRADIO came up with a playlist of about 20 songs, ads, promos, and weirdness. It's now up to 26 and is growing as soon as I get more stuff on. The key here is NO STOLEN STUFF. We're using all TIMster content, made by and of TIMsters. So we're unlike the other stations that are out there. People are on it all the time, and reviews are positive. Next will have to be a cool web interface to tell people what our playlist is and what the currently playing song is.
Added a few new Clock triggers: Clock, what's the frequency? Clock, why does Sketch hate me? and cleaned out a few old ones that don't need to be in there anymore.
Jost gave me a great Invitation in .mp3 form for the TIM party.

October 23rd, 1998

After so much time spent on work and work-related crap, what a pleasure it is to finally get myself into a more humane schedule of doing work and then getting things done on private/personal projects. Not much of these are particularly TIM related, but they will be shortly. I'm getting so much done!
For example, I stopped off and created KhaOS' wizard baby picture! KhaOS' wizard baby is named klutter and man, is the little guy unhappy about what happened to his little rattan stick.
Towards the end of my home page on cow.net, I'm working on some photos that will become part of the stuff explaining what's going on with my life. I took pictures of my home on a whim, and they ended up becoming interesting fodder for some projects, such as my living room in its full glory. And my Asteroids machine I like so much.
But the work I'm really proud of uses the MIT Orthographic Server to give you way too much insight into how my life is. What do I mean? Well, come see the specifics of my stupidest car accident or if you're really, really insane, take a few minutes to download a graphic representation of my daily existence. (That graphic took three hours to do, but boy, was it worth it.)
And as you might expect, myself and SNUH have been spending time weeding out cruft and cleaning up directories over at the TEXTFILES.COM site. I try to spend a little time each night putting up descriptions or writing header introductions to the sections, so it's definitely growing every day. And as I make it better and better, I'm attracting donations from people who had collections on 5 1/4" floppies who had nowhere to put them. It's going to just grow and grow from all this effort. It's nice to see it coming together like this.
KhaOS is raring to fix up the TIM Web site. Let's see how that goes!

October 12th, 1998

Holy Luau, look at that time gap. Bet you thought I was just whiling away my days here, not doing much of anything, right? Well, you're wrong again, as usual. The thing was, I was so busy, I didn't take that extra half hour at 3am (like now) to update my worklog. Now, of course, I can't even remember half of the cool stuff I did, so we'll take the best shot I can.
Well, first and foremost, I have a girlfriend now. I usually don't like to go into that sort of personal stuff, because all that has happened to my girlfriends on TIM is that they get turned into combination secretaries / suggestion box / complaint department / court of appeals / general chew toys by the TinyTIM users. I have to say, that's probably the number one complete thing I absolutely hate about the whole TinyTIM population, the need of people within it to destroy my happiness as some sort of sick revenge technique. Well, I'm going to risk it and say that I have a girlfriend, I love her very very much, she's the world to me, and damnit, The Cow Guy is AMAZINGLY HAPPY. I mean, you've probably seen firsthand how absolutely angry and furious I can get; now to imagine what level of love I'm capable of in that direction, and that's what's going on here. Now who would want to destroy that? It's so precious. Well, anyway, if I see it happen on TIM, I will personally ferret out and steel-belt radial the guilty parties. Hey, I'm in love here. What do you expect? Anyway, she's a 14 on a scale of 1 to 10, trust me.
So besides the whole girlfriend thing (did I mention I'm in love?) I got VERY, VERY busy at work. Unfortunately, I can't show it to you, but I was able, all by myself, to learn how to create a CGI gateway to allow task management and saveable database entries as well as indexing and checklists. And I did it all using SHELL SCRIPTS! What a fun time I had learning that. And using all the neat knowledge I've garnered, I promise to cobble together the SNUH site VERY soon. It will allow SNUH his own self to add entries to a daily diary that automatically updates into the site and the site Does The Right Thing, just like all those cool Quake and First-Person Shooter news sites I had gotten so envious of. No more! Soon the power of SNUH will burn on the web. Oh, yes, oh yes. WE HAVE SUCH SITES TO SHOW YOU.
With some help, started using IRC. Hate it. Not so much the medium, which is somewhat OK, but the SPELLING and the ATTITUDE, oh my GOD. How do people even STAND it? The only reason I came on it in the first place was because I have a number of old, old friends who lightly use it as a CB-like medium in one of their windows. So I can talk to them. I don't talk to anyone else, for very long, because they absolutely refuse to spell or punctuate, alliterate, or even be particularly discerning in their choice of topics. It's a really big mess. If I had to choose ONE small cool thing, it's the ability to send binary files between two parties. But that's what ICQ is for!
Finally Mr. KhaOS adds his book reviews to the TinyTIM Book Review pages. Good man!
Realized a personal dream of mine: TEXTFILES.COM (I also registered TEXTFILES.ORG). Way way way back when, I ran a BBS called The Works which housed one of the largest textfile collections in the country. I absolutely loved running it, but had to stop because of college. Now, finally, I can begin bringing my special textfile collection to the web at large! Oh, the fun I'm going to have! Writing the introduction was fun, but soon I'm going to have to put in descriptions for all the textfiles, as well as continue my work on The Works Glossary. This is all preliminary work towards a novel I want to write some day, but I feel my storytelling chops need to be built up. And they will.
So, where does this leave my TIM work? Well, limited at the moment. I intend to work on Help files mostly, trying to get the thing cleaned up for the new year. But work just shifted, I just became senior UNIX guy (eep!) and who knows WHERE this is all going to lead.. Meanwhile, I have all sorts of life projects I am aiming towards getting to better states, and I intend to finish them. Wish me luck.
Oh, and damnit, this worklog is going to get updated more frequently, because who wants the entire text of Les Miserables every time they reload?

September 13th, 1998

My Birthday! SNUH repaired the hood latch of the Checker and fixed the lights that weren't working, as well as reattaching the fender I stupidly took off.

September 1st, 1998

Only 12 days to my birthday! Plan accordingly.
I FINALLY took a little extra time and integrated all the submitted pictures into the TIMSTERS directory, which includes coming up with funny, happy captions for the pictures. A small, vocal minority (Arwen) always complain that I'm too mean in these captions, but I mean COME ON, when your picture looks like THAT, what am I EXPECTED to do?
What the heck, threw in some Guidelines about what uploads should consist of to the TIM site. Nothing out of line, I think.
August 31st, 1998

Vacation is going heavenly. Thanks for asking.
Redid the directory that TIM's program resides in, listing out all the different components and what they do. With the wizards so disparate in responsibilities, this is a good thing to do.
Set up some shell scripts to do backups of the TinyTIM database in an even more efficient manner than before. Yes!
August 25th, 1998

Finally released the picture of the TIM shirt to the general populace.
One of my users pointed out that The Godlike Edge (sorry, no link!) was offering free advertising to MUSHes in the way of banners. It was pointed out that this was probably too good an opportunity for TinyTIM to pass up. And you know what? It was.
Online-wise, Jost and Khaos are settling in nicely into their new roles as wizards on TIM. They're really finding their own places and running with it. Good deal.
Went to Woodystock 6, the latest in a series of TIM parties held in North Carolina. I went courtesy of the efforts of sabu, who's al all-around great guy. At my urging, we rented a REALLY nice convertible (well, nice for a rental, anyway) which I then proceeded to load R'nice, Jost, and Marcia into and scare the living crap out of them. Mmm, driving. new TIMsters I met included Ktara, Alisha, Territan, Claudia (didn't meet her properly the first time she showed), and the ever-popular Linger's Very Hairy, Very Scary Boyfriend, who went by the name of Ed. Oh, and Isabella, when she wasn't being crushed to death by her beloved Paco.
The TinyTIM Web Site has been doing a spectacular job of not keeping up with the times. I finally seized control of the thing, and made some major directory changes, so it's theoretically MUCH easier to find the different components, and fixed some minor errors in the writing in a few places. Next, the Blurbs section needs some spiffing up, since it refers to things like the Interplace as if it's still where it is, and since most of the blurbs are just ripped-off Help files, they really don't go into the level of depth about, say, UrbanTIM, that people probably want.
Worked a bit on my Checker Home Page, which will discuss all sorts of things about my Checker Car for the world at large to read, in case people encounter the same problems that I did, like where to buy shocks and what neat little models are out there for sale.
Added a Merchandising Page to the web site, so people can see the new TIM shirt and banner. It'll be a good jumping-off point for any further crap we're looking to sell.
August 1st, 1998

It's been a busy couple of weeks, both on and off TIM. The hardest stuff to do, TIM-wise, is stuff not actually on TIM. This includes web-pages, artwork, and help file writing. It's hard to be sitting there, away from the action, slaving away on some obscure thing, while letting the game itself suffer by not being there. Well, let me clarify that. The game doesn't exactly suffer for lack of me, but in my mind it does, and that makes it harder to be away. In the case of the T-shirt, for instance, that image was so huge I couldn't be on TIM and work on it at the same time at home, which meant I felt like I was just abandoning the meat and potatoes of TIM for a bunch of flash. This is my problem; not anyone else's. I'm a big influence, but I'm not the sole and shining reason anything happens on TIM.
So, yeah, the big accomplishment for the past couple of weeks has definitely been the new TIM shirt. It is easily the most complicated thing I've drawn, and look, I'll even tell you what it is. I came up with a design idea about 3 years ago, and it sat on the back burner forever, through trying to dump off the Last Brunch shirts and the advent of the Lands' End shirts. The idea? Draw all the wizards, clinging to each other, hanging over a cliff. The slogan? "TinyTIM: Wizards JUST SLIGHTLY Over the Edge". This turned out to be a major, major challenge. Not only did I have to draw all the wizards together, I have to draw them in a state of agitation like I'd never drawn them before. Not just Nimdok, but Nimdok STRAINING to hold himself up. Not just Sketch, but Sketch HANGING by his collar (off Chuckles' foot, for those keeping score). Not only that, but this whole image is in FULL COLOR. Now, last time we had full color on a TIM shirt, it was a near-disaster, because we went for this weird photo transfer deal, where they took a printout and made it into an iron-on, and then just ironed it on a shirt. This was wildly unsuccessful, because the process, while cheap, was NOT permanent, and people doing ONE or TWO washes of their (expensive) TIM shirts found them fading away like your resistance to my wiles at 2am. It was NOT a pretty sight. Well, with these new shirts, they're going to be FOUR COLOR SEPARATED, and done using FULL AND PROFESSIONAL TRANSFER, which means they should be pretty tough little mothers, and handle several washes at least with no fading or running. By the way, to do this is going to cost us a BUTTLOAD of money, so the shirts are going to be pretty expensive. But man, are they gonna be worth it!
The first place they're going to be sold is Woodystock. In fact, I had to rush down there to get the finished art done in time for the party in Woodystock. I didn't have the spare cash for a plane ride, and said I wasn't coming, but sabu made a liar of me and floated me a ticket. And a rental car. And a hotel room. is this guy great or what? So, I AM coming, and I'm bringing shirts. Buy ten.
To comemorate my Checker fun, I scanned in a TON of pictures at my cow site, and you can check them out for yourself. Obviously a lot of these are going to make no sense, but at least you can look them over.
The metal.ball aspects are growing like wildfire in the clock, if you're keeping score at home, the aspects of metal.ball as of this writing are: MAGIC, TRAGEDY, COMEDY, POWER, END, TRUTH, ZEN, TOUR, IRONY, FACADE, ATTRACTION, CIRCUMFERENCE, DIAMETER, RADIUS, and POINT. And I guarantee they're going to grow even more soon.
With the shirts on the way, I can concentrate on TIM projects. Watch for them, this space.

July 18th-19th, 1998

Helped preside over the rarest of events, a wizzing. Of course, in this case, it was the little-cited double-wizzing, resulting in the ascention of KhaOS and the happy return of Jost. People seem to like the new choices for wizards, and I think they'll definitely add a nice positive spin to TIM. KhaOS is already distinguishing himself with new ideas and approaches, and Jost is showing tons of his old energy. Pretty kick ass, it would appear.
As always, the connection of 100 TIMsters at once on the game, and all of them coming to the Nexus, ground the machine to a halt. This just stresses the need for a machine upgrade, which will hopefully take place this year.
I made the mistake of delegating the programming of the Sword in the Spam elsewhere, and by the time Saturday had rolled around, only about 10 percent of the functionality was in its code. This caused me to spend something like 8 hours coding, testing, evaluating, and embellishing the thing. I'll probably gladly talk about the way the sword was set up at a party (maybe Woodystock, which is coming up quick) but for this space, let's just say that midnight rolled around and I was STILL coding. Meanwhile people are screaming at me in pages to get the show on the road and the code for the centerpiece object doesn't even WORK. This, my friends, is the dictionary definition of stress. It was also a classic example of the adage "If you want something done, do it yourself." This is the way I usually work; in this case, I took a chance, and the chance didn't pay off. Maybe next time.
Of course, this means that both KhaOS and Jost need to be added to the TIM Shirt I'm working on. How I'm going to fit them in, I'll never know. Luckily, the TIMshirt is a 40 meg Photoshop Image with 16 layers, so I can just draw them, scan them, and then slip them in as best I can. I'm sure it'll look fine.
July 16th, 1998

Did some work with R'nice to tooling up the TIMshirt for the Woodystock bash. We made some nice progress; I think it'll look great.
Inspired by the insanity/inanity around www.ourfirsttime.com, I created Ourfirstwizbit in honour of incoming wizards.

July 11th-13th, 1998

I travelled to a strange and mystical land and ventured upon a castle dizzying in height and horizon-filling in size, where I fell in love with a beautiful princess in a place filled with mystery and dragons.
July 4th, 1998

Ah, just another lazy saturday day, working on all those little things I let totally fly out the window while I was doing Flag Day and The Meet during the month of June. How the employers have tolerated my amazing absenteeism I'll never know, but now it's a day for CLEANING THE BATHROOM! Not just CLEANING THE BATHROOM, but MOPPING THE FLOOR, sorting my SOCKS, folding my BLANKETS, kicking through my MAIL, and all that fun stuff.
Of course, the most momentus occasion in the past few weeks was the 1998 Checker Car Club Meet in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Yes, that's right, myself and about 70 other Checker Marathons went to Kalamazoo Michigan and hung out for a weekend. To do this, I had to drive 2,100 miles in four days. I found out my car had a slight clog in the fuel line that made itself known above speeds of 70mph, and I had my hood latch break. Other than this, nothing went wrong, which is simply incredible, considering.
I stopped off at Battle Creek Michigan, where the Kellogg and Post companies started, leading to the moniker Cereal City. This is best demonstrated by the massive Cereal City Museum and Show, where I bought some of the weirdest Cereal-Related goods you could imagine.
Other things: Stopped off at a combination Karate Supply/Fireworks store, bought some nunchucks for SNUH. Visited Niagra Falls. Visited Cleveland. Drove through a WIND FUNNEL on my way to the Meet. The Checker took it! The Checker can take anything!
Click here to learn more about Checker Marathons. Or, if you want a kick-ass book about the world of Battle Creek Michigan around the beginning of the Century, read the Historical Fiction book The Road to Wellville, which was the book that inspired me to stop over in Battle Creek in the first place.

One nice offshoot of my trip was that I took metal.ball along with me and took some AMAZING pictures of it along the way. To see the nicest ones, go check out the metal.ball tour imagery pavillion. Just more metal.fun for every.one.
Finally put up the last set of curtains in the house. This is big news. Now my place doesn't look like I just moved in. of course, with the amount of crap I have now collected into it, there's not much way not to know I'm snugged in for the long haul.
Oh, look, actual TIM news. Yes, after much work and recovery from 3 different crashes, the TinyTIM Tools Project version 2.0 finally makes an appearance. This project, where I ask TIMsters to pose with an object that represents them, has been going on for a couple years, and I kept losing images. No more. Next, I should revise the descriptions, so they're less trite and more fun, and don't make references to relationships that don't exist, etc. More pictures are coming shortly. I hope KhaOS's comes out like I intended it to.
Speaking of the Checker (like I wasn't enough already), I did some preliminary body work, and discovered several extremely important facts:

I'm good at simple body work, but complicated stuff is outside my ability.
Most of what's on the Checker is complicated stuff.
The right rear door is probably a loss.
My car is made entirely out of Bondo.

On the other hand, I bought a 180 piece Craftsman Tool Set! I want to FIX THINGS!
Oh yeah, and TIM's getting a new wizard.

June 19th, 1998

When you have the flu, there's not much in life you want to accomplish. Which truly sucks, because there's so much I have to do! The past two weeks have been busy, and of course I'm going to forget half the relevant stuff. But at least some of it will be down somewhere.
Obviously, the biggest news of the past two weeks were the insane preparations for TinyTIM Flag Day, 1998, which was held at the lovely Aerin's home of ground-up-design-for-partying. Quite a place.

Redevil brought a massive collection of CDs, which was pure joy to play with, as was the many synths that enabled me to play the same 4 licks over and over.
R'nice and gang pulled together a nice music jam at his place, which was successful beyond all expectation. Redevil already MPEG-3'd the thing, and all the files are up here.

Made great strides on the next TIM Shirt. I'm shooting for Woodystock for its kick-ass debut.
I worked on the Chat room a bit with R'nice, although really it's his baby. As a rule, TIMsters don't seem to use this to build things as much as they used to, but what can you expect, these days?
When pictures start becoming available, I'd like to put them online in TinyTIM party Central so that people can see them. Here's hoping people upload them for me.
The addition of the new Chat Room finally pushed me over the edge as to how much of a mess the Hall of Parties is. It was originally created as a place to shove all the old Chat rooms as new ones came in, but as we got well past the 20 party mark, similar named places caused much confusion as to what the "real" name of a place was. So, now the Hall of Parties leads to a series of doors (so far, 8) that go by year. I've only created the barest outline, and I'd like to go through and make useful descriptions for each of the rooms, kind of going over major TIM events of that year. Well, at least I've brought the world the TinyTIM Weird Plastic Thing.
I determined how you can take an .XM format file and convert it to a .WAV, then a .WAV to a .AIFF, and then a .AIFF to a CD Track. So I can make perfect digital copies of my music. DDD, kids!
Added the Empedocles' book reviews to the TinyTIM Wizard Book Reviews Page. They're not very good, but I hammered on them to add them and that's what I get. Maybe getting some distance on them and seeing them in pink glory will inspire a revision.
June 5th, 1998

Added Inspector Gadget! as a Clock Trigger.
The triumphant return of the TinyTIM Tools Project will take place just before the TIM Party, allowing me the joy of taking MORE pictures of TIMsters with objects that represent them. This is one of those things that were lost in the Big Crash, and I promised myself I'd get them all back. Watch for the gaps being filled.
The SNUH website will make an an appearance soon. LATEX.SNUH.COM will work as well, of course.

June 1st, 1998

It's been a busy couple of weeks, with travel and general life wierdness thrown in. Can I even begin to recount all the TIMmish things I've done? I better try, lest people think me a laggard.
I don't know why, but I suddenly felt like creating a "rave-style" TinyTIM Party information page, and log and behold TinyTIM Party Central makes a hesitatingly bizzare appearance on the world wide web. I just whipped together information on Flag Day, but Woodystock's logo is done and I'll have that in place shortly. I immediately got a complaint that there were no text messages on this thing, and yeah, that's the case. It's 100 percent eye candy, just there to make us seem even more hip and cool than we are, if that's possible. I wouldn't use it as a serious information source at this point; maybe I'll fix that in the future. It could potentially hold pictures of parties, etc.
The Clock was using unnecessary cycles doing all the different triggers based around metal.ball, such as Clock, what is the power of metal.ball? and Clock, what is the tragedy of metal.ball? So, I turned it into ONE trigger, and offloaded the aspects of metal.ball onto an object under control of metal.ball. Subsequently, there is no longer any way for me to know what aspects of metal.ball are maintained at any given moment; it's all in what would be metal.ball's capable hands. However, metal.ball has no hands; it's just a ball.
Speaking of offloading stuff onto a player, I've actually programmed poor nails to respond to the question "nails, what is Sketch's X rule of love? where X is First, Second, Third, etc. It's up to nails what rules of love to add; they're mostly the result of me doing my usual free-reffing on romance and the like. If you follow them, you will most likely die. Sorry. Nails him/herself might be able to help you.
As we get closer to Flag Day, the plans and well-meaning intentions are either strengthened or whacked. At this moment, no TIMshirt will be for sale at the Flag Day party, although a design will be shown there. Based on reactions, I will either work with R'nice to finish it, or we will let it lie and try a new design. The reason for this unusual amount of user input is that I would like it o be in color, and we will take a four-figure hit on making the shirts, which we have to be sure we'll make back. This worry is based on the Last Supper shirt, which took us two year to finally dispel. That was heart-wrenching. I think I own 5 of them. Anyway, this has to be discussed with R'nice; maybe nothing will happen, period. Either way, Woodystock (August 14th) is the new deadline.
One of the concerns that was originally huge on my mind was the TinyTIM Techno Rave whereby myself and two other DJs were planning a multi-hour techno rave somewhere in Aerin's house, possibly the garage. The concern here was that R'nice and others who absolutely HATE techno were going to blow a gasket. Well, guess what! R'nice is now going to attempt a TinyTIM Music Jam for that same time as our rave! This would be great! R'nice would hold it at his apartment, people would play and go nuts there and others would dance and do the rave thing at Aerin's house! Let's home this goes as smooth as we hope. By the way, if you can play an instrument, PLEASE speak to R'nice and let him know. He's still searching for all attending music players.
SNUH may very well come work for my company this month. This rocks.

May 28th-May 30th, 1998

Heck, it's the middle of summer and I can always use a vacation. So I went to Atlanta for E3, which is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which is the largest videogame and electronics convention of the year. Kick-butt is so far from the way this went, I can't believe I'm even going to use the phrase "It was kick butt."
How about this: I'll just give you a quick rundown of all the highlights:

Going to Atlanta and meeting up with Jost and nessa, who are dating each other these days and generally being the happiest couple ever. They immediately took me to an Irish Pub and we sang Irish songs all night, into the morning. An excellent way to start.
I ran around E3 the next day in my cow suit, distrubing scads and scads of people, staff, security, and passerby. It was great. I posed for several relevant pictures: Here's Sketch posing with Duke Nuke'Em, Sketch posing with some poor lady who had to dress up like a country bumpkin to promote a game called "Rogue Trip", and my eternally beloved Sketch at his rightful dominating position in the Mortal Kombat Team. Note that she's pulling on my udder. yay
By the way, I have a ton more pictures, but they're not developed yet. They'll show up here, if they came out.
Hanging out with Chuckles and Aerin, who made walking around that much more fun. I also took a great picture of Chuckles posing near his games on display at the show, surrounded by Cheerleaders who look obviously disguested by him. Good picture.
Walking into the Mattel Booth and hearing their PA immediately shout out "ATTENTION. THERE IS A COW IN THE BARBIE BOOTH."
Freaking the living garbage out of Diogenes, a fallen-from-the-faith TIMster who I think hates my guts, even if I think he's the cutest little guys. DEAL with the pain, Chuck!
Having people I barely knew run up to me and call me by name. The suit was well worth the effort.
Almost getting trampled by Gillian Anderson. Don't ask.
Hanging out until 2:00am with Jost in US Play in Marietta, GA, where we played TONS of video games and took a very special picture.
Hanging out with Jost on Sunday, leisurely watching Who am I starring Jackie Chan, solidifying my opinion that Jost is just as cool as he was 6 years ago, and then rushing like a maniac to the airport when I realized I had forgotten when my flight was.

Now, honestly, can a weekend be MORE FULL than THAT?

May 10th, 1998

Well, the Old Man's messages still seem witty, so I guess they're staying. Some people absolutely hate the old man and have him gagged, so there you go and so be it. Most of these people don't remember when TinyTIM had some pretty odd ways of dealing with sleepers in the Nexus, and the history file doesn't mention it either, so let me quickly recount some of them:

The Death Cart would come out and drag you away
The player was sent away, a coffin object was created for them, and they were put in the coffin in a cemetery plane
For the first 6 months of TIM's existence, sleepers would simply be set DARK by the MUD program
We had the old man, but he had ONE MESSAGE

Finally went onto the TIM FTP computer (which is different and separate from the TinyTIM computer) and downloaded tar'd archives of the FTP site and WWW site (including this news, which already makes it outdated.) I'll be cutting them to CD. For another finaly layer of protection, I'm thinking of storing copies in a safe deposit box away from my house. Is this paranoia? TinyTIM has had some pretty bad stuff happen to us, and not all by dint of bad luck, either. I'd like people to be aware that even though it's "just a game", it's one of my main communication and socialization meccas, and I want it to stay safe and happy and healthy well into the next century.
With Flag Day coming up, all of my different little projects that I've been floating with other TIMsters and wizards had better get started, and Fast. So, to that end I've started the project which takes the most personal effort, and that's drawing the TinyTIM T-shirt. Of course, I chose a subject matter and technique which guarantees the most effort and challenges in such a short period of time, including full, actual color and the wizards as I've never drawn any of them before. Go Sketch. My current estimate is that these shirts will end up costing end users about $17, so save your pennies.
Egad. Better call Mom.
Removed Clock, say something typical of Shakespeare.
May 3rd, 1998

I couldn't take it anymore, so I flushed out and redid all the Old Man Messages. Let's hope they all seem witty in a week.
May 2nd, 1998

I made tbons a lot happier than she had a right to be by adding Clock, I love you man.
Finally finished the first draft of my book reviews for the the Wizard Book Reviews Page. Hope people find some sort of theme among the comic books and pornography.
Planning to blow the entire TIM drive to CD. Didn't know we did that, did you? TinyTIM insists on many layers of protection these days. Can't be too sure.
Plans, as always, abound for Lag day. Added a temporary Clock, who's coming to Lag Day? trigger (which for a while there was REALLY spamming the Nexus. You should definitely consider coming to Lag Day. Really. I'll be there.
April 23, 1998

Hi. Remember me? My name is Sketch. I do things on TinyTIM occasionally. After a couple of weeks of ineffectuality, I finally cleared enough of my plate at work (There was just SO MUCH to do) to focus my laser-beam-like attention back to TIM, and I decided to first fix up some of those extra-TIM activities that I think really add to our experience but which we sometimes neglect in favor of hitting on nessa. Well, I do, anyway.
First on the list was the final touches to the TinyTIM User Statistics Page, which gives up-to-the-five-minutes stats on how many TIMsters and Wizards are on TIM, and have been on TIM going back for the last year. The program, called MRTG, is used for router traffic, but can be used for most anything, like tracking the number of connections on a MUSH and matching that list against a list of wizards. There was a service like this being run on another server, but they became flaky and ultimately dropped out of the business, leaving me with a taste of the statistics of TIM but without the page to watch constantly. Well, hopefully I took their idea and improved it. Enjoy it.
Next, and this is my big hullabaloo of the evening, I FINALLY, I mean FINALLY automated (to a great degree) all of the INDEX.HTML files on the TinyTIM FTP site. To do this, I wrote a shell script (named Malcom) which is given a simple list in the form of FILENAME DESCRIPTION and then does ALL the hard work, taking a header, creating a MASSIVE table with filesizes and the descriptions, marking off missing files or directories, and then tacking on a footer. If I throw a file into that directory, I must merely add an entry to the bottom of the description text file, and then run the program. It even SORTS the thing so I don't even have to think about alphabetacal order!
I IMMEDIATELY sic'd this thing on the main TIMSTERS directory on the FTP site. It looks GREAT, and there's SO MANY files in there, that now I don't have to sweat ONE MOMENT before adding a new file. It'll recreate the newly accurate index.html in under 20 seconds.
Unable to stop myself, I went off and did the SKETCH and MUSIC directories as well, and I don't see any reason why I won't be doing ALL of them as time (and energy) permit.
Oh, and I'm probably buying a second checker. BWAHAHAHAAHAH!
April 8, 1998

R'nice wiped out on his bike and broke his thumb, and I had to drive to Fitchburg, MA to pick him up and take him home. Wish him well in his recovery.
April 7, 1998

I discovered the Amazon.Com Associates Program, whereby people can order Amazon Books through your web page. I bounced this off the other wizards, and we ended up agreeing that with our diverse backgrounds, a "suggested reading" list could really be an eye-opener. So, I put the wheels into motion and we got an associate ID, and when Marcia submitted the reviews first, I've put up the TinyTIM Suggested Reading List. Right now only Marcia's reviews are up (and she threatens even more) but we should start seeing more about other wizard favorites shortly. Including my own. When we get more of them up, the page will join the top level of the TIM web page.
The Empedocles and I have been working on making some really neat tools for reading the TIM DB and making analysis of disk/RAM usage. For instance, we can now know exactly how many bytes a given Player takes up in the DB. We're not looking for bad guys, we're just trying to get a grip on what on TIM is core, that is, what is part of stuff that has been built and will stay built, and what is ephemeral and may go away at any time. It's been a lot of fun. If you want to be "weighed", send me mail and I'll mail it back. If you have less than 20 objects, I mean, EXAMINE YOURSELF. (By the way, I'm roughly 4-5 percent of the DB).
April 4, 1998

Added HELP PREDATORS, which used to be on my character and I used to shout at various times, and which someone's going to complain is in bad taste, but they've never been to my apartment.
Added Clock, what is the power of metal.ball?
Popsnuh updated his Mystery Car trigger on the Clock.
There's been some talk of instituting HELP PRIVACY. Have to get to work on that.
March 30-April 2, 1998

Pretty much every year TIM has had some sort of amazing prank we've pulled on the TIM populace, and the call comes in every year to make the April Fool's Day on TIM even more excessive and hilarious as the previous year. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on R'nice, who does all these things generally by himself. (R'nice has a high sense of showmanship and likes to lob things fully formed on his intended audience.) He asked me about some ideas for what might make for an entertaining April Fool's, and I brainstormed some pretty odd notions, but he grabbed the one that I thought was entirely out of control, which was to have it that when you connected to TIM, you were actually on another MUSH! The programming involved would be way too much for such a simple event, but of course, R'nice immediately took on the challenge and in less than two days of programming had exactly that sort of program up and running the TIM DB. He brought me in so that I could help build Prehistoric TIM, the red herring that would make people think we were going to do the usual database switch and leave it at that.
Well, when we started to do the jumps from real database to prehistoric one to entire other MUSHes, well, that's when we started to see the real sparks fly. On the whole, we had a ton of fun and we weirded out a lot of places, and in only one or two cases did anyone vow to destroy us. This worklog is neither an appropriate place for debate or for an effective defense, but I will say that some of the moments that went by on the morning and evening of April 1, 1998 are some of the most gut-bustingly hilarious I've experienced in all my years of TIMming. Black_Dougal has logs up on the web, but you really had to be there to get the full effect.
Oh, and we are now the absolute EXPERTS in every channel system on every game on the entire world. Euuuf.
Plans continue for the Lag Day Party. I'm not the host, but I play one on TV. With 40 people already leaving checkmarks (and there are people who on principle don't leave checkmarks) I'm trying to do my part to guarantee that there'll always be stuff happening. For my contribution (besides an outlay of cash to bring in a SURPRISE GUEST, I'm working on hosting Live TinyTIM Trivia and The TinyTIM Rave. Egad.
> In the case of Trivia, that's simple enough. We just have to compile the hundred or so-odd questions that will make up a full game. I'll be compiling them as we speak and will then foist them on the Wizards, who will then fight over the correct answers, and then we'll bring them to Flag Day and let the USERS fight over the correct answers. Maybe I'll give away some of my art or something.
But for the Rave, well, there's the rub. Mmm, rub. TIMsters have several major age groups, mostly the over 30, the under 30, and the under 20. Well, the under 20 and under 30 tend to like the idea of a Rave, and the over 30 generally hate it. Therefore, Yours Bovine is going to have to walk a very fine line between the people who want to play some quiet guitar and the people who are going to think that techno at 1am is just nifty. I've enlisted the help of DJ Chroma (RedEVIL) and will be composing some pieces just for the event, but at the same time I'm trying to make arrangements with Aerin so that this Rave is shoved in the Basement or something so people can be up in the higher parts of the house and get away from the music. Personally, I think that feeling that there's a groundswell of activity downstairs will make being upstairs that much more special to some people. More Party Fun as we get closer.
March 29, 1998

It's spring again, and we all know what that means. Spring Cleaning! So to do my part to help, I sat for 8 hours STRAIGHT on TIM and purged over 900 characters, generating about 3000 pieces of garbage. A nice haul. I also wrote a nice piece of e-mail to the TIMsters at large to do some cleaning themselves, without forcing people to think they have to make sacrifices for the greater good. We'll see what comes of it.
Scanned in another dozen drawings. Here and there, when I get a chance. No point in burning out.
I discovered that the wiring harness on the Asteroids plugged in a little weakly. By unplugging it, spraying it with some contact cleaner, and wiping it clean, the buzzing, hissing, and flickering went away. That machine is approaching new.
At the last moment, at Scarlett's inspiration, added Clock, give me a Hug.
March 27, 1998

To give you an idea of how much of an auction hound I am, this is what I sent out checks for today: An Asteroids Deluxe PCB (which is the central "computer" for the video game), an Asteroids power supply, an Asteroids Marquee (the plastic sign that you put on the top of the video game), an Asteroids Deluxe Marquee, a 1:43 Model of a Checker Marathon Taxicab, Four Cow-Themed Liquor Glasses (with ratings along the side from Rare at 1 oz. to Well Done at 8 oz.), and a small Cow Figurine. I have no further comment.
March 26, 1998

Busy past few days on all fronts. The most important new thing for me specifically is that I finished a first draft of the first chapter of my first novel, so that's another project underway from rough idea to implementation. See? I finish the SNUHventure, and all good things rise from that.
Had dinner with many, many TIMsters, and got to see Trout.Complex, Cranberry, The Pope, Dory, Kahlua, Boi, D'arcy, Rainy, Jenn, Bigheart, Faith, R'nice (in a funny hat) and A'jax. Can't do better than THAT for a mere 5 minute trip in the Checker!
My old Humor Magazine that I founded with Trout.Complex, Esnesnon, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this fall, and among all the things I'm planning to celebrate that, I'm providing copies of the first issues to the current editors, for historical purposes. Yadda yadda, I know, but while searching through my archives for copies, I happened along two and a half reams of old drawings I've done in the last 8 years. Many are just half-wit pseudo scrawlings, but some of them are professional quality. I'm going to start scanning my favorites and put them up, some of which people might find amusing. I estimate around 100-150 will eventually be up.
Added a couple new clock triggers. They're unfortunately not that intuitive, but I like them. Popsnuh has been working on his new kit car forever and a day, and now you can keep track of his progress in Clock, is the Mystery Car ready? and I added a really dumb trigger: Clock, when you look up (anything), what do you find? and it returns a random player from the WHO list. I see whacky hijynx forever.
The Asteroids machine has its lit marquee back as well as its right coin slot light, and is almost ready to be considered in a "complete" state, barring a few minor touchups.
March 21, 1998

Busy couple of days around here. The home phone line has finally made its debut, and with it, the ability to log in from home, which is always nice and a sign that I'll be online even more than I am now, which should scare people.
Finally, after two years of on-again off-again work, the SNUHventure makes its appearance as Plane 29. People are already streaming through it. Reviews range from love to bewilderment. I'm glad that one of my first TIM projects is officially "done" in over a year. Of course, little nips and tucks will be done in the future, but that's just as I like to make small improvements in language and glory. Snuh is very pleased, and I'm seeing many people finally begin to understand what SNUH is.
Inspired by a completely inert group of individuals idling in the Nexus (and damn if we don't have too much of that on there) I went through and spiffed up/added senses to the entrances of planes 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 23, and the most recently-added 29. Now there's a whole host of neat things inspiring people to check out those planes. Hey, after I spiff up some of my other work, we'll be zippin'!
March 15, 1998

With the great help of Hoovooloo and a co-worker named Marc, I finally am reunited with my Asteroids video game, and my piano. They really make my apartment look inhabited, a look I've been shooting for for the last year with limited success.
Added senses to the Nexus entrances of planes 1, 5, and 10. In the case of 10, I went extra and made it so you die when you touch or taste it.
Did some roundabout HTML work on the Moosletter zine page I web admin, as well as fixing up the Thrill of the Farm page with some nice additional graphics.
Copernicus rode my bovine butt and got me to add in time zone information for his state into El Clocko. Clock, what time is it in Alaska?
March 10, 1998

Added a new attribute to #200: PICKUP, which is a list of pickup lines I got out of a magazine. I added a trigger in the clock to demonstrate it: Clock, you're kind of cute.
Uploaded an updated metal.song to the FTP site, to fix a complaint that R'nice had about the previous version not having a distinctive enough bassline.
March 4, 1998

At Zenrhino's behest, I greatly expanded the Clock, Shaft! trigger.
I got a box from the Checker Motors Corporation today! I have a wiring diagram, owner's manual, warranty (hah), advertising brochures, the works! Yeah!
March 3, 1998

As people probably know (or should), nothing dismays me more than when I see people say a common or at least expected phrase and the clock sits there dumbly. When Longfellow said Clock, give me a BREAK! it did nothing, so I fixed it.
March 2, 1998

As mentioned previously, I released the beginning of my revamp of the HELP COMMANDS section. Of course some of them aren't listed in the general menu yet, but if I put in my changed menu, it would be chock full of commands with no documentation at all. The current new lineup is HELP CONNECT, HELP CREATE, HELP DROP, HELP GRIPE, HELP ENTER, HELP NEWS, HELP WHO, and HELP LOGOUT. In many cases, the changes are very minor, but I've standardized some of the text formatting so that an eventual revamped Web Interface to the help system will HTMLize them properly and consistently.
Sitting with SNUH, he and I created two more rooms for the SNUHventure, one of them with his core description redone slightly by me, and the other completely out of my mind. This leaves three rooms. I went back and noticed a little room for a nip and tuck here and there, but I think we're looking at this week being the Grand Awakening of the SNUHventure, the first of many projects I'll finish this year.
February 28, 1998

Finally working full-blast on TIM Help Documentation. Took long enough! Of course, I'm currently revising HELP EXAMINE and that one's such a complete nasty thing to force down anyone's throat, it may be a while before I get through it. My original intention was to spring all of HELP COMMANDS complete redone, but maybe I'm really short-changing people by doing it that way. Whatever I finish on Sunday I'll put up and work from there.
Added two more rooms to the SNUHventure. The SNUHventure has two kinds of rooms: Failure and Conflict (like life!) and I have now officially finished all the Failure rooms! This leaves 5 Conflict rooms, and maybe I can get through them soon. I've also decided that there's no middle ground on this one: People are going to love it or hate it.
Went through my e-mail and got down to three private e-mails. Nice.
It occurs to me I never mentioned I added Clock, who's NOT here?
Converted The Ultimate Sextrack to MPEG-3. Now I just have to figure out a distribution mechanism.
February 25, 1998

Added two more rooms to the SNUHventure.
Worked a little on the Help system, including the as-yet-not-added HELP GOTO. This caused an argument between me and R'nice over if the GOTO keyword existed in the original adventure, which it did. Subsequently, I've added two important (and long) files about TinyTIM's historical roots, in HELP LINEAGE and HELP TEXT ADVENTURES. I'd love to do a complete and total history of all aspects of these things, but I really honestly think that the Interactive Fiction Archive has a much better grip on the whole genre than I could have. Hey, if just one person plays Adventure because of those files, it was more than worth it.
February 22, 1998

Was feeling all lonely in my apartment when SNUH himself showed up and hung with me for two days. Wasn't that nice?
Inspired by Snuh's visit, I bought curtains for the living room. One more room to go!
February 19, 1998

It's my brother's birthday! He's 25.
Added 5 more rooms to the SNUHventure, including the important endgame ones. It's almost done.
February 17, 1998

Gave Black_Dougal ex-wizard knight of TinyTIM, the ability to summon his own Frisbee back to himself when he wanted it. It's only fair! The frisbee has wizard powers, so it was a bit of an effort to get it right.
Added two new Clock triggers: Clock, what is the tragedy of metal.ball? and Clock, what is the comedy of metal.ball? metal.ball would have been happy about it, but its just a ball.
February 12-15, 1998

One of my best friends got married in Maine, but the bride's family was located in San Francisco. So they hosted the reception in their hometown, on Valentine's Day. Everyone who was invited to the wedding was invited to the reception, so I took this as a cool reason to go to S.F. I rented myself a nice red 1997 Ford Mustang and drove all over the place for three days, visiting my old buddies at Psygnosis and Netscape, and finally, FINALLY meeting up with some VERY old friends who I knew back in my BBS days when I called myself... "The Slipped Disk". Hey, I was 14.
If you're interested, my old friends are running some amazing projects at the following sites: Rotten, Area Systems, Leisuretown, The Internet Wiretap, and The Dark Side of the Moon. All are worthy of perusal.
Also, I had a TON of fun hanging out with all sorts of Bay Area TIMsters, including Stiletto, Marian, Kieron, Mongo, Megabrat, and of course Skeeve and his lovely friend, who put me up for the 3 nights I was there. Got to see Skeeve's new Checker Cab, got to visit Oakland, Santa Cruz, Mountain View, Foster City, and only hit something once. Oh, you bet I'm going back.
February 2, 1998

I was unusually cranky on TIM the past few weeks, and I couldn't understand why. I took a couple days off to think about it, and I figured out what it was. Essentially, TIM has always been overrun with some element of non-contributing TIMsters, who bitch and whine and moan about how TIM's changed or doesn't provide what they want, or the cynical old TIMsters who think that it's just no fun anymore. I feel very strongly that my work and the work of the other wizards can counterract this, but because of my 19-hour workdays at my job, stuff simply isn't getting done like it used to. It's merely a matter of properly allocating my time, and I intend to get better at it. But until then, I'm frustrated that all of my creative output on TIM ends up being wasted arguments with people whose conversation is irrelevant anyway. This was what was making me cranky; a good pairing of an unavoidable element that will always be here, and my new position as less-than-creating wizard. Once I start contributing TIM things with the fervor I have in the past (and I will, I promise), my bad attitude will disappear.
Speaking of bad attitude, Shakespeare drives me nuts. You want reasons why, you go find me. I'm infinitely cheered by my new trigger, Clock, say something typical of Shakespeare, which will return an actual dumb/ill-prepared statement from the last couple of years. Is it mean? Yes. Is it unwarranted? Well, you have your own opinion, I'm sure. Lather in it.
Also, there's a new clock trigger, Clock, how old is TIM? Which tells you, VERY roughly (quarters of a year) how old TIM is. I might expand this into a full TIMster age trigger, but the general consensus is that many TIMsters don't know the date that they joined TIM.
I almost forgot to mention I spent a couple days in Washington, DC. Met up with Paco and Becka, who are both cute as a button. Hung out in front of the White House.
Registered SNUH.COM. N O W I T B E G I N S
Finally, and I mean this is the last item and I also mean "Finally!" I've taken the Quantum Leap messages out of the Old Man. Talk about dating a trigger!
January 21, 1998

I went to my urologist and he determined that my stones are excesses of uric acid and he prescribed Potassium Citrate to increase the pH of my system to dissolve them. This is big news, because it means I'm not likely to die from them.
Added a clock trigger, Clock, who's here? that tells you everyone who is actually located in the nexus, regardless of if they're being held by someone, sitting on something, being held by someone being worn, etc. Credit to Farward for the idea.
Mentioning that hot new Clock trigger to R'nice, he said "What? Isn't that already in the code?" I said no, and he checked, and it WAS in the C code, but there was no MUSH function attached to it. He fixed that (in 10 minutes, I might add), rebooted TIM, and I documented it in about same. HELP ELOC is the thing to check. It's our personal record for fastest code change from Discussion to Implementation to Documentation.
January 19, 1998

Wrote another room of the SNUHventure. God, that thing's taking WAY too long to finish.
I was going to spend the weekend doing TIM stuff, but then like a complete dorko I had to go and buy a new computer desk from Microcenter. I ended up buying The Computer Desk From Hell. I found a picture here, but it's kind of sucky. The desk (hereafter known simply as "the ghoddesk") is located in the lower left corner of the picture, with the dark cherry finish of the one cut off on the bottom. This doesn't portray the pure insanity of the desk, but it's all I can find. It took me 15 hours to assemble, spread across my weekend. Jeez. Wait. I found a perfect picture.
January 12, 1998

It says something that only this past monday, after living in my new apartment for 9 months, have I actually put curtains up in the kitchen. And this still leaves two rooms with no curtains whatsoever.
With the purchase of my new color scanner, I have finally gotten around to scanning in a bunch of images from my youth/TIM's genesis. Most noticable are some fact-filling pictures on the TIM History Page.
This has also allowed some updates to the Bovine Ignition Systems Homepage.
January 6, 1998

Inspired by recent tragic events, I added The TinyTIM Ski Tree because at my heart I am a sick, ironic person. It'll probably last a week and then get stuck up in a winter-themed floor in the Hotel. The cool thing about the Grand Hotel is that you can always find a floor RELATIVELY near a theme you're seeking. Thanks, Trout.
The insanity of yesterday has calmed down a lot; perhaps I can finally get some real TIM work done. Asked the Empedocles about where they get their incredible clothing for TIM Parties; they told me. However, coming back into work at 8:30am (after going to bed at 5am) means I'm not destined for a lot of TIM today.
January 5, 1998

Came happily back to work, just to be merrily tossed like a gerbil into a blender with the amazing shitstorm of UberCrisis that arose. Imagine having a customer who MUST get access to a machine they were promised just as you recieve a trouble ticket that that machine has unrecoverable disk errors. Then, while addressing the disk errors, another machine has its tape drive die. All in all, the day really sucked. I was at work from 12:00 noon to 4:30am, with the exception of the dinner below.
Met a really old-school TIMster... snooze. Had a great dinner with R'nice and snooze. Ground Round. NY Sirloin. OK, maybe this is too much information.
December 23, 1997 - January 4, 1998

No TIM work done THIS week.... it's party time! Took a heady amount of time off from my job, drove to New York, down to Rehoboth Beach, over to Baltimore, back to New York, then back to Boston. Logged 1,200 miles on the Checker! Gah! The car didn't like THAT.... But it survived, as did I. Met a lot of the usual gang, but got to finally meet Danl, Adum/Loki, doggy_dog, and buy some kick-ass luggage.
December 21, 1997

Major revision to the Help System as regards the Clock on The Wall; It always drove me buggy to have to stick documentation about the Clock (which only works in the Nexus) in the general TIM Help. Of course, there never seemed to be enough documentation about the Clock to warrant a separate section... until now. By hunkering down and completing last night's project of documenting customized Clock attributes on Players, we now have more than enough: HELP CHAT, HELP CHICKEN, HELP FULLNAME, HELP TITLE, HELP PRONOUNCE, HELP URL and the massively revamped (and possibly historically inaccurate) HELP CLOCK INTRODUCTION, which gives a little perspective on the Clock. HELP CLOCK returns the new HELP Section. Unfortunately, a few Nexus-Only concepts are still lurking around: FINGER comes to mind. I'll think about how to put them places.
Long overdue: I gave Marcia a HELP TIMCOOKS file to accompany my HELP POPTARTS. Heck, it's a perfectly valid list!
December 20, 1997

Finally redid HELP CHAT ATTRIBUTE so we'll stop getting errors AND people will know about this Clock feature. I should group them all up together, so people can find them.
A long time ago, around the time the CHICKEN attribute was created, some people whined about there being no way to put URLs up on the Clock. Frustrated and honestly not caring, I hacked up a ripoff of the CHICKEN attribute, that looked for CLOCK, WHY DID Player CROSS THE URL and worked from there. I also never documented it. That sucked, and I admit it. Finally, months and months and months after I first slammed that Featurette into the Clock, I've added a new trigger (CLOCK, WHO PUT THE URL IN HURL?), strengthened the URL trigger (CLOCK, WHAT IS Player's URL?) and added documentation in the form of HELP URL ATTRIBUTE. This should make sure the feature spreads and is used properly.
December 19, 1997

Did some preliminary work on coming up with a "TIM Code", which would be a derivative of the world-famous "Code of the Geeks" a really neat classification system. Might be fun.
Rutabaga came to visit. Yay baga
December 18, 1997

Finally registered the COW.NU domain. It points to all the same places that cow.net does, with the little-known alternate address for TinyTIM's machine, sketch.the.cow.nu. Hey, if you've got it, flaunt it.
Set up the voice mailbox for the old cow.net number, 1-617-COW-TOWN. Good, solid, hard-to-believe-it-but-it's-true phone number to have.
December 17, 1997

Instituted this worklog. Got tired of wasting people's time by shouting out the changes I had completed. Also makes it easier to remember where I am on different projects.
Started the preliminary work for a Bovine Ignition Systems homepage. Most important is the transfer of our circa-1995 CD into MPEG 1 Layer 3 Audio files. 14 of our songs are up, maybe more if I ever find our really old demo tape. A small introduction has been written, and as more pictures are digitized, the BIS home page will expand. Maybe we'll have a second bovine renaissance.
A few minor edits to the index.html files on the FTP site.
Sent in BIS's URL to yahoo. What the heck.