it's great to be back at yale. the whiffenpoofs (the senior singing group i'm in) had our first mory's night last night. if you're not familiar with mory's, it's a restaurant/bar that is about as old yale as you can get. the whiffs sing and eat dinner at mory's every monday night--it's a great tradition.

i'm slowly starting classes, but there isn't much work yet (thankfully) and none of my classes start before 11:30 in the morning, so i have it pretty easy.

a word to the wise: don't go out drinking with football players after mory's if you're a wimpy singer.
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thursday
8.8.02
toughest schools?

This article is brought to you by The Princeton Review, a sponsor of the College and Grad pages on Encarta.com.

The prestigious schools listed here admit only top-of-the-line students, the cream of the academic crop. Here's what to expect if you're smart enough--and have enough tuition money--to gain entrance to their hallowed halls:

1. Cooper Union
2. Harvard College (sssss)
3. Princeton University (who cares?)
4. Stanford University
5. United States Air Force Academy
6. United States Military Academy
7. United States Naval Academy
8. Columbia University
9. Yale University

Yale "is truly one of America's great schools," writes one college counselor. It's an assertion that's hard to debate. As a major national research center, Yale attracts many of the world's great scholars. But unlike other research institutes, Yale also devotes a lot of attention to undergraduates. Reports one student, "There is a genuine focus on undergraduates here. The professors seem genuinely to enjoy teaching, and you really do learn a lot in classes."

RANT:

What I want to know is: where are Caltech, MIT, UC Berkeley and other "tough" schools? This list doesn't say why the schools are tough--tough to get into, tough to survive at? What a stupid sensationalist list. It's of no actual value to prospective students or parents, and of little to no interest to student's who actually go to these schools.
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monday
8.5.02
the mind/tooth duality of wisdom.

how is it that wisdom is both mental and dental? not knowing the answer, i arranged to have my wisdom teeth pulled this morning, ensuring that, for me, wisdom only resides in the mind. if i had a digital camera, i'd share my pearls of wisdom with you.

anyway, i was locally anaesthetized (yes, locally in livermore, ca), so i was postoperatively lucid enough to ride my bike home and then go to work. i can't speak worth a damn, but i can pinch my chin as much as i want and don't feel a thing.

interesting fact #4:
   wisdom does not reside in the teeth.
____________________

thursday
8.1.02
simple prank.

From: Stephen
To: Eric
Subject: So  Eric...

  How was your drive to work today?

From: Eric 

  Uh . . . heh heh . . . what do you know?

From: Stephen

  Nothin'.  Just wonderin', you know, if maybe you looked more Middle
  Eastern today than you usually do or somethin'...

From: Eric 

  The last day!  I made it everyday until the LAST day!  Did you bribe the
  guards or something?

From: Stephen

  Maybe they knew that you came in today later than you usually do...you
  know, late enough to do something suspicious before you came to work.
  But I can honestly say that we didn't bribe the guards.

From: Eric 

  How did you find out about that?

From: Stephen

  Oh, I'm really buddy buddy with this guard, and he told me he searched
  you while I was on my way to LLNL for lunch.

From: Eric 

  What?!  Are you serious or are you just making something up like I would
  do?

From: Stephen 

  No, seriously, I found out you got searched from the guard when I was
  going to lunch.

From: Stephen 

  Hehe, of course, I forgot to mention the irrelevant piece of info that I
  asked the guard to search you when we drove by the gate this morning,
  but that kind of information is a luxury, and who has time to deal with
  luxury when we're working on national security?  Answer me that!

check out singpao.com, what seems to be a chinese music news web site. it has a story on the yale spizzwinks(?) concert in the new territories of hong kong with the gay singers (yes, their real name; no, they're not from san francisco). if you look carefully, you can see me singing my solo in one picture and doing group choreo pushups in another picture.
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thursday
7.25.02
aerial yale.

at the center of this photo is my residential college at yale, branford, and to the right of center of this one is my apartment for the summer (i play ultimate in the well watered field at the center).

at mapquest, you too can get an aerial photo of practically any address you want. just try--maybe they caught you running naked with scissors in your back yard.

interesting fact #3:
   time i spend taking a bath at night: 45 min.
   time it takes me to run one-mile: 7.5 min.
   distance i could run instead of taking a bath: 6 miles
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tuesday
7.23.02
biceps.

there was this really "cool" guy in a wife-beater, driving his mustang gt, staring at his arms, and i could just here him thinking to himself: man, given my sedentary lifestyle, it seems rather odd that i spend innumerable hours at the gym sculpting my biceps, but hot damn are they beautiful.

eloquent, but an airhead.
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saturday
7.20.02
road trip.

today, i went on a road trip with two friends from work (andrew dryden, my apartment mate, and katie moore, a co-worker from last summer). we rented a bright yellow mustang convertible and drove north from san francisco on california route 1 up to fort bragg, then drove back to san francisco on route 128 and 101. such a beautiful coastline, check out the pictures.

on a separate note, i am thinking of revamping this website. i don't mind the way it looks, but i think my computer science education has more to show than this plain html. so expect nifty content this upcoming school year!

interesting fact #2:
   days until i enter the navy: 349
____________________

tuesday
7.16.02
re-introduction.

once again, i haven't updated this page for about a year. for a quick introduction for all you newcomers, my name is stephen elliott, and i am going to be a seniorat yale university double-majoring in electrical engineering & computer science (eecs) and international studies (is). i have been a spizzwink for three years, and am now also a whiffenpoof. i'm also a navy propulsion officer candidate and will be training to be and serving as a submarine officer for five years after yale.

it occurs to me that i need to update this page frequently to encourage more visits from my friends, so i need to think up a new scheme for easily updating my page. but i don't want to put too much thought into promoting myself, because that would be simply weird.

so essentially i need to have interesting facts every now and then, so here goes:

interesting fact #1:
   days until i enter the navy: 353

(phew, that was exciting, wasn't it?)
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saturday
7.21.01

imagine stephen, a sweet small town boy born in nyc and raised in tokyo...

imagine him flying up high into the sky in the plane of his dreams, looking down at the ground below and playing tic-tac-toe with the square farm fields...

imagine the look in little stephen's eyes...

as he throws himself out of that plane.

needless to say, stephen is disappointed with the sensation of being on the ground after the exhiliration of skydiving today.

    /x
>=====D          <- airplane
   /x



   \o/
    |            <- stephen
   / \




    <^><^> <^>
_____|__|___|__  <- ground

see the pictures!
____________________

monday
7.16.01

so about a year after my last pitiful update to this website, i decide to make a pitiful update to this website:

stephen's marriage!!!
____________________

tuesday
7.11.00

i am a bermese mountain dog, according to emode.com.
____________________

wednesday
7.5.00

the pen is mightier. "your sitting on a gold mine, trebek."

there's nothing like july 4th in boston.
____________________

monday
7.3.00

independence is near.
____________________

monday
6.26.00

ode to computer work

o computer science
assuring self-reliance
and cultural defiance
my summer job is great

o computer programming
list servs and email spamming
head-against-wall slamming
compile errors keep me late

o computer monitor
and myopia-induced vomit or
window glare-caused eye sore
blindness is my fate

but o computer! my computer! our fearful batch is done,
my program's weathered every bug, the path we took not fun,
but porting's near -- the code not clear -- no one is exulting,
while follow eyes the steady flow of updates now downloading;
   but o no! no! no!
      o the nasty screens of blue,
         where in that freeze my life's work lies...
            and my insanity, too.
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thursday
5.18.00

i survived finals with a minimum of sleep. i am still waiting to hear how badly i did on the physics final. i have discovered many different ways to express how much i was "schooled" by that exam. it was very unpleasant.

i have also decided that i want my gpa to approximate the value of pi as closely as possible. hence, for every seven classes i take, i want my cumulative grade points to be 22, so that my gpa will be 3.14. i don't think that this is much to ask of myself.

also, having pi as my gpa allows me to claim to future employers that my academic career is well-rounded.

(i just came back from a summer tour to ohio, so if i'm a bit out of it, i blame it on the mid-west.)
____________________

saturday
4.29.00

good news: i have several positions of importance in the spizzwinks(?) next year. i will be a winter tour manager, graphic designer, and webmaster. (i guess i'm thinking of business managing the winks(?), but even considering that possibility takes a lot of consideration and thinking and i don't have time for that now.)

also, i just spent god knows how long (about four hours) dancing. and i'm spent. i think i've made some kind of social progress (can i call it that?) by dancing without my shirt on for a while.

what was i thinking??? i'm definitely going to the gym tomorrow.

bad news: my exam schedule is awful. i just finished reading week and my exams are on the following days:
   mon. - japanese
   tue. - physics
   wed. - (none. thank god.)
   thu. - computer science
   fri. - society and war

i also have to finish a mechanical engineering take home final by the end of exam period and a physics lab report. but venting to the internet masses won't solve my problem.

[sigh.]
____________________

thursday
4.13.00

i mentioned in my last entry something about the yale spizzwinks(?). it's yale's second oldest a cappella singing group, which makes it the second oldest collegiate a cappella singing group in the universe as we know it. (unless you know the universe differently...)

the point is, the yale spizzwinks(?) have their 86th annual spring jam on this coming friday, april 21. i have asked some of you to come to this so-called "jam". failure to comply with my demands shall be met with severely with severe severity. (although if you don't come i probably won't run into you, so this threat is inherently unenforceable. damn.)
____________________

friday
4.7.00

the only time i'll ever type in caps on this page:

LINDSAY (my brother) GOT INTO YALE!!! (and brown, duke, mit, and wharton!)

congratulations for deciding to come to the best school on the planet...and thus in the known universe! (besides milton academy.)

so the new year came and went and i didn't even post a journal entry about it! in fact, i didn't even post an entry about yale!!! that's awful! but frankly, my dear, i don't give a damn.

so here's the scoop:
   1. i have a physics mid-term in 5 hours and 19 minutes.
   2. i haven't heard from the following people in ags: miji, vicky, cristina, borna, philip, david, emily, jen, katie...the list goes on. this problem must be resolved!
   3. the physics mid-term will be an awful experience and i'll exploit my expletives expressively after i'm through with it!
   4. i have just finished designing the spizzwinks(?) 1999 album, "shine your shoes." you can hear sound clips of it at www.spizzwinks.com. for the uninformed, i was tapped by the yale spizzwinks(?) and a cappella group that is 86 years old. unfortunatel y, the 1999 album is all last year's recordings, when i wasn't at yale yet, but the design is exclusively by me, and hopefully i can put up sample of my artwork up somewhere...
   5. i need to finish building and testing a robot in less than two weeks for me185. god spare me.
   6. i'm 1500 pages behind in my poli sci class. thank god for reading week!

when the time comes, i'll post more!
____________________

tuesday
7.6.99

haven't written here for a while. that's alright.

i've decided to matriculate to yale, where i hope to concentrate in computer science/engineering and asian studies. i've found out where i will be housed for the next four years, and you can see for yourself too at branford's website. branford is yale's oldest residential college (essentially a dorm) and will be yale's newest after it is renovated next year. i will be living in yale's old campus next year, which is where all the freshmen stay, so branford's renovation is perfectly timed for when i actually move there my sophomore year. next year, i will be part of branford, but housed in macclellan hall, which is one of the freshman dorms.

recently, i've decided to start my own web design studio/firm/whatever. i'm putting up a test web site here but once i get paid for my first project, i will get a better web address. you'll have to excuse the site, objektiv studios was only just created, so i haven't even finished its web site yet.

that's it for now.
____________________

thursday
4.1.99

i was greatly amused when i was using my netscape mail account, i was looking at the premium services. we all know how free email is financed, right? annoying advertisements and banners, right? well, this is classic, netscape mail has all those annoying advertisements, and offers this $30 service:

Ad Blocker: Minimize your download time by suppressing the ads that appear on most pages of Netscape WebMail. With our Ad Blocker, you can customize your Netscape WebMail account so that you never see any of our sponsor's advertisements.

a frightfully convincing exercise in effusive sentimentality

got back from botswana two days ago, after 20-some hours worth of planes. withdrawal, i will note, is not just a problem with drugs, but with culture as well. about 40 students gathered together for a debating tournament (of all things!) in gaborone, botswana, and are now back to their regular lives, most of them wishing they could go back to the maru a pula school (in gaborone) to debate, but far more importantly, to do all the things they didn't do while they were there.

that's how i feel at least. seize the day, for night decends with the certainty of death. sounds pessimistic, but it's not. just an incentive to be.

spend all your time waiting
for that second chance
for a break that would make it okay
there's always some reason
to feel not good enough
and it's hard at the end of the day
i need some distraction
oh beautiful release
memory seeps through my veins
let me be empty
and weightless and maybe
i'll find some peace tonight
-angel, sarah mclachlan

my ears still feel pressurized from the airplane, and every time i notice that, i experience a whole chain of memories, from the plane trip back to boston to the original trip to botswana, to the first drive up the street to maru a pula, to my host family, to all of the great people i met there (i was tempted to say "here", temporarily forgettings i'm no longer in gaborone, and that i'm stuck in concord, ma, without a driver's license).

there was something very pure about the people in botswana. something amazingly fresh that one never encounters in the u.s. if i put a word on it, i'd ruin the magic of it. even the expatriots there, those that have lived there for a long time (i.e. more than a year), have it. something, i fear, i lost when i left japan, and when i left my old high school in edina, and that i will lose when i leave milton academy. as tze chun said in his valedictorian speech last year, "i'm paying for this diploma with a piece of my heart."

the cost of me going to botswana was much more that $1400, it was a piece of my heart. i left something behind, and i can only hope that some miracle will allow me to go back.

i remember looking for satellites in the beautiful african night sky, walking around the maru a pula school softball field aimlessly, heads turned up, staring at the cosmic expanse with jostine (a maru a pula student) and her friends. and in looking for a satellite, we found something much more beautiful: a shooting star which lit up the sky briefly before it disappeared.

i went to botswana to debate, and i found, if only for a week, countless shooting stars who, in the spell of memory and imagination, will never disappear.
____________________

tuesday
2.2.99

i just gave a tour for a prospective milton academy student and his parents. "so, what's the milton social life like?

"well," i replied, "you can measure a boarding student's social life by taking the difference between the day student's average bed time and the boarding student's."
____________________

tuesday
11.17.98

so, does anyone still check up on my page anymore anyway? i know why, it's because it isn't dynamic, it isn't constantly changing, so that kinda makes it boring. well, suggestions are welcome...just not now. senior year in high school is hectic, as some of you may know. not that hectic, but hectic.

i promised to put a paper of mine up on the web, about pop culture. i refuse. it's too superfluous and weird. so unfortunately, my pearls of "wisdom" are not public, sorry.
____________________

wednesday
9.30.98

i suppose that my daily web journal has turned into a "whenever-the-hell-i-feel-like-it" journal. i hope that doesn't bother you die hard fans of mine out there. and if it does, that would only be at most one of you anyway, and i won't tell anyone who you are.

i will try to add a section to my page for my favorite author, terry pratchett, so if you are into him at all, give me suggestions and i will see what i can come up with.

tell me what you think about the following: the emphasis on open personalities in modern culture has reduced the possibility of constructing an accurate synthesis of subjective experiences into an objective history. i will probably finish writing this paper before you give me a response, so...actually, this is a good idea: i will post my school papers on the internet! how about that? (lindsay, no plagiarism.) i will put them under academics. or gibberish.
____________________

thursday
9.17.98

today i had a senior class activity which was one of those which promises to be somewhat not cool, but then turns out to be cool, regardless of the not cool part.

we hosted 1st, 2nd, and 4th graders (and killed the 3rd graders) from the endicott school somewhere down the road from milton, and i was buddied up (if that's a verb) with a cool little kid named kadeem, who hung out with a cool little kid named k.t., who was buddied up with ho, my buddy senior in goodwin. the two little guys wanted to steal the skating rink in the athletic convocation center and carry it away on a bus. other than that, they seemed quite sane.
____________________

wednesday
9.16.98

i spent about an hour and a half on the phone with katie artis, a brown-ie who's quite cool and fun to talk to and very cool and sometimes inaccessible by email. but unfortunately, being me, i temporarily run out of things to say on the phone and then she says, "here we go again." after four years of not seeing katie since i left japan in 94 or so, i finally talked to her on the phone last year, and got together with her in japan this year and luckily enough we get along. which is a great feeling. spend a few years away from your old classmates and clicking with them five years later is a wonderful thing.

someone convince me not to apply to caltech early.
____________________

monday
9.14.98

after a brief hiatus and the start of school, i have decided to return to updating my web page, the only constant in my life. in fact, this web page is the climax to which i vary everything else in my life. nothing my surpass this in seriousness or importance. and damn it, i shall be depressed by my web page nevermore. so i'm a senior at milton academy again. this is so much fun.

as you can see, i inserted a link to "dime-store legalese", a.k.a. ken starr's report on the clinton sex scandal. not that i feel that it's required reading, and in fact i do not agree with it pubic appearance. however, if you want to know what can not only make the lame duck, but also neuter it and tape its beak shut, this is about the best way to do it. then of course, clinton should have thought of this before he engaged in his affair.
____________________

wednesday
8.26.98

i am no longer happy with this web page. it depresses me. i want to put a completely new design, but i like the way this looks, but i don't want to keep it, and i don't want to change it so fast. this will pass. unlike art, you can't pull up a new canvas for your personal home page, and having multiple home pages is unconventional, especially if you plan on maintaining then and keeping them up to date. this all points to the conclusion that i need a life. (which is not a conclusion that i personally have made.)

maybe i should learn perl?
____________________

monday
8.24.98

i am currently in one of caltech's libraries, which is very modern and equipped with computers and electronic bookshelves that slide side to side (to save room). i was stunned by the computer engineering lab, but i have yet to compare it to m.i.t.'s media lab. the caltech tour was the second tour (of two so far) where the tour guide walked backwards the whole time. personally, i would just walk on one side and turn my head, but some people like to take risks. i have a great picture of the caltech campus, and will post it soon!

mayhew thinks i have too much time on my hands to be constantly updating this page and entering journal stuff and adding links and whatnot and so on and so forth and et cetera and yada, "to ka itte." but i actually only spend a fraction of an hour each day on this site now...hmm, but it is true: when this first went up i probably spent 5 hours a day on it for about five days. mainly improving the design and tweaking it so that it appears well on different platforms. (i dread to think how much time i will spend to make this html 4.0 compliant.)
____________________

friday
8.21.98

i just bought a pentium II 400 MHz computer...online! yes, i work for ebay, an online auctionhouse company, and i finally gave in a placed my bid. that's right, $1326.00 for a pentium II 400 MHz. if you want to see what i got myself into, check out the history of the auction in which i was the winning bidder. i am going to pick it up this weekend...woohoo!

also, as you noticed, i changed the site more. if you want a text menu, you should find a link at the bottom of the "main" page that gives you one. otherwise, that menu on the left is the new one. i like it. : P
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thursday
8.20.98

we've heard in the news about the european union (e.u.), the euro pass, euro this, euro that (almost as bad as the prefix "cyber" or "e"). we've also heard about euro currency, but what good is a currency without its own symbol? without a symbol, currency would be useless, you might pay someone 100 dollars instead of 100 yen, not a mistake one likes to make, especially with an exchange rate of 146+ yen to the dollar. traders in the pit would no longer be able to effectively arbitrage, and japanese banks might be somehow mistaken to be successful. but no fear, monotype fonts has brought us the euro symbol, free of charge. just read their license agreement, and download!
____________________

wednesday
8.19.98

i was doing some web search the other day, and moved on to souls after that, and found out what it might cost for me to have my own domain name. about $320 for the first two years, and $155 each year thereafter. which is somewhat outrageously expensive for a low key personal site owner like me...but it has its appeals. for example, unlimited usage of banners: therefore, i can advertise to the 16 or so people who visit my website every two weeks. the commission off that would be fabulous. also, some of this $150 would go to and easier url to remember, instead of www.angelfire.com/ma/stephenelliott, you would only need to remember www.sellout.com, i mean, www.selliott.com. why ".com"? well, what if my site does get popular (fat chance, you say? fat chance? i'll show you a fat [mumble... grr... arf... grumble... dribble...])? what then? definitely i'd go for the commercial profit ".com" site. if only to pay for college. (and hey, if i can get 32,000 for stanford, i'm set!)
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tuesday
8.18.98

www.netmarket.com isn't as bad as i thought it was. this updating journal stuff is quite tiring. i'll take a break until tomorrow. i will be visiting caltech this coming monday, and otherwise be working for ebay until the end of the summer, arriving back in boston on the 31st of this month. the ansoft japan web site, which i built, will be up soon. when it goes up, i will post the link. i have updated the gallery page and the links page a bit, and have fooled around with the quotes section, such that it reloads every 15 seconds on simple mode. ally mcbeal is a funny tv show. watch it!
____________________

monday
8.17.98

right now, i am at stanford junior university (founded by stanford senior and his wife jane stanford, in memory of their son, leland stanford jr., who died at quite a young age. and is still inanimate.) not only is this a test to see how well-equipped stanford is in terms of computing (and who's heard of a macintosh centris 650? it's slow), but it is also evidence of how dedicated i am to updating this site and posting daily remarks that are generally useless to people who don't know me. that's why this site won't attain yahoo! popularity. but this will soon change. as you can see, i have recently put up a pop-up window that asks you for simple, moderate or complex. these are viewing styles. while the first page layout i created for this site is nice and boastful of my html expertise, i have had complaints that it creates a small viewing space. so please tell me which you like best: simple, moderate, or complex, or if i should keep them all and use a javascript cookie to store your personal preferences. maybe i'll do that. okay, thank you for your input. (gotta go to the office of undergrad admissions now.)
____________________

friday
8.14.98

for anyone with an affinity for their biological origins, i have labored into the wrecklessness of the night to create the otherwise useless "monkeys" animated gif to show people exactly what monkeys have to do with my homepage: nothing...yet. but things have been known to change. [imagine an evil laugh here.] change. [imagine another evil laugh here.] change. [imagine coming home to figure out your dad has moved to concord, massachusetts.] this is not change i could spare.

also, ever heard of how bureaucratic folk like to use acronyms? it's true, true, true, and you can see so for yourself at the d.o.e.'s o.s.t.i.

a sample of acronym beauty (and it's not used as a joke):

The Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), within the Office of Computational and Technology Research (OCTR) in the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Energy Research (OER) is responsible for leading the Department's Technical Information Management Program (TIMP) and for providing direction and coordination for the dissemination of scientific and technical information (STI) resulting from DOE research and development (R&D) and environmental programs.

The OSTI, w/in the OCTR in the DOE of the OER leads the DOE's TIMP and disseminates the STI from DOE R&D and EP."

it's true, acronyms can save space.
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thursday
8.13.98

i replaced the navbar with a spiffier menu bar at the top of the page. now my middle section is wider, so it can hold more content. however, i'm sure there are some people who would rather my page be taller. in due time. i'm still in the process of figuring out what looks best, and let me tell you, i like that new javascript rollover image map menu bar. see how it says "menu" when your mouse isn't over it? neat-o!
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wednesday
8.12.98

i have decided that this site is too strange and sarcastic, so i have resolved to restrain myself. please be aware that this is not a common sight or site. please send your _deepest sympathies to my roommate next year, dave chang. he may be consoled. right now, he is at andover summer school, and needs all the ^support he can get.
____________________

tuesday
8.11.98

i just finished my web site today, and am hoping that it works properly. of course, i am a programming whiz kid, so everything works properly, but i, like many others, ask inquisitive do-i-look-pretty questions (or equally, i-hope-it-works-properly questions) in order put up a facade that makes me look appear "modest", "humble", "etc." (hmmm...why did i put "etc." in quotes?)

so, what's this home page about? me...why? isn't that obvious? that's why it's entitled, "s t e p h o m e p a g e". see, my name is usually "stephen", but instead of the "hen" i added "hom" and then "epage". i'm glad i could clear that up for you. i like to help people when they're in need of aid. maybe i'm made for the peace corps.

nah.
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e n d .



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copyright (c) 2001
stephen elliott