welcome to *3, my online electronic diary. first off, congratulations on finding this page. navigation ---------- if you are navigating via the front end, then clicking the links at the top and bottom of each page should take you to the appropriate diary entry. additionally, if you are using frames, there is a sidebar with diary links on the left. if you are navigating this without the front end, note that all the diary entries are in text format in the entries directory. each entry in that directory is of the form ent.yyyy.mm.dd.tttth.txt, where yyyy denotes the year, mm the month, dd the day, and tttt the time at which the entry was posted. *3 -- the name of this diary was chosen due to the fact that this is my third web page. however, please note that i do not actually wish to name my diary "*3". in actuality, it is the concept of the number 3 that i wish to name my diary with. in most cases, a name is a string, i.e., a list of characters, such as letters, numbers, and ideographs. the string refers to the person, but is not the person itself. hence, a different string used to refer to the same person may not be the person's name. however, since the name of my diary is the concept of the number 3, then i can write the name in any number of ways. in notation used in the c programming language, the '*' character is used to denote that the reference of an object is being referred to, and not the object itself. hence, "*3" is my way of stating that it is not the character '3' that i wish to refer to, but the concept of the number 3 itself. as such, there are many other ways to write the name of my diary. "*three" is a simple example, as is "*iii". those of you who have studied ml will recognize the '!' symbol as having a similar function as the '*' symbol in c, and as a result, "!iii" is also a valid option. those of you who are symbolic systems majors will probably recognize the meaning vs. reference concept. the diary's chosen name was a nod to this idea. additionally, i simply wanted to try something weird and see if it actually followed through. the occurrence of the '*' character in the name of this diary wrecked havoc on my code and file system whenever i wasn't too careful as i was programming the web site generation system. for those of you who program in c, you probably know that "*3" makes no sense in c at all. unfortunately, i know of no convenient symbolism in the english language that will allow me to express what the symbol '*' does in c, so please allow me this abuse of syntax. additionally, '*' does have other uses in c, but this is beside the point. diary vs. blog -------------- some of you may consider this a blog, or some other similar sounding term. myself, i would much rather prefer the term online electronic diary, as since the term "blog" is, i believe, too general and overused. by stating that this is my online electronic diary, instead of my blog, i would like to emphasize a few points. 1. similar to an offline hardcopy diary, i do not depend on links for content. note that you may find links here if you use the front end provided at frontend.htm. however, these links are purely for navigational purposes, and point only to other pages here. 2. i have no intention of regurgitating common thoughts on the latest cool web pages, or linking to all my friends' web pages like crazy. there are already too many web pages out there that follow this pattern, and many of them are pretty devoid of truly original content due to this behaviour. although, from a social analysis standpoint, the tangle of linkage present in such pages may be original content that may be interesting to analyze. 3. i don't plan on putting the cookie cutter elements of a blog into this web page. an emotional meter won't be prevalent in each entry. a forum will not be set up. a webcam won't be placed on the front page, with the option, if you desire, of having a popup javascript window containing my visage follow you around while you surf. so, in short, i want to keep this diary simple. i figure that since i don't have much time to keep a diary at all, i would rather focus on content than attempt to maintain a blog. as such, i would rather not call this diary a blog and have people expect it to have all the properties of a common blog. as a result, some people may consider this page a little dry. i apologize in advance. also, i will not be hurt if you leave, so feel free to leave whenever you wish. there is a bundle of content out on the web, and i have no intention of keeping you here longer than you would like to stay. accented letters and whatnot ---------------------------- to attempt to maximize compatibility, i will try to not use accented letters or any other characters that are often encoded differently in various incompatible standards. whenever possible, i will try to use a standard replacement. however, my knowledge of romanization is far from perfect, so i may err. errors ------ being human, i make errors. if you find any errors on these pages, please let me know. i welcome error notifications. i don't mind being called on a trivial spelling error, and would much rather know about it than not. for the most part, any typographical errors will be corrected in the entry in question, and any errors in my recollections will be noted in a future diary entry. i believe that in this way, i can keep the content of the entries as authentic as possible, while removing any errors that may distract the reader from processing the content. contact ------- if you wish to contact me, i trust that you are intelligent enough to determine my e-mail address from the url of this page. questions, comments, suggestions, and flames are welcome. spam is not, hence the omission of my e-mail address here.