Brettia

Note: this was written yesterday evening.

A new concept: weblog print editions. That’s kind of what I’m doing now by writing this entry on notebook paper first. (I’d blog, but I’m supposed to be asleep.) This is the first time I’ve handwritten anything since school ended May 23rd. There has been the occaisional note or phone number of course, but nothing this long. I have a feeling this entry will span several pages.

I had a double sleepover (no, I’m no to old for them) last night with Tyler and one of my other friends, Coleman. We had a lot of fun in the AIM chatrooms by lying about our age and appearance to get girls to talk to us. (No, we’re not that desperate, this was just for entertainment.) We ended up getting to know this one chick named Miranda in the “Christina Aguilera” chatroom (don’t ask), and she seemed to like (and believe) us. Then again, she might’ve been laughing the whole time at Coleman’s sad attempts to call her “babe” and “hun” which seemed really lame to me.

The next morning, I kicked ass in MLB SlugFest 2003, beating my younger brother (who has played it for ten hours straight before) twice. We sat around awhile and then went outside and played hide-and-go-seek. Childish, yes, but fun all the same. This ended in a short waterfight involving a hose and a waterbottle.

Once everyone had gone home I had dinner and went to Tyler’s house for a meeting about my upcoming trip to London, Paris, and Barcelona. I’ll try to blog from there, but my Internet access will be limited at best. I might be able to post some digital pictures, though.

I have decided to make Mozilla.org my site of the day. For those that are still feeding themselves alive to the Beast of Redmond (that’s Microsoft, if you hadn’t already caught on), Mozilla is a free, open source web browser, source editor, and email client build by thousands of the best developers around the world. The latest version, Mozilla 1.4, is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.
After downloading it, you might notice that it looks a lot like Netscape 6/7 (when using the “Modern” theme). Surprise! When AOL purchased Netscape in 1998, they decided to make the browser open source and free to allow everyone to work on it and make it better. So, Mozilla and Netscape are one and the same, with a few minor changes. Still, the latest Mozilla build is always more advanced than the latest Netscape version because each new edition of Netscape has to go through extra checks and marketing and all that corporate stuff before it becomes available to the public. Though the latest version of Mozilla is 1.4, Netscape 7.1 is probably built from Mozilla 1.2/3.

Mozilla has a lot of features Internet Distorter (a nickname for IE because its rendering engine doesn’t follow World Wide Web Consortium standards as well as other browsers’.) does not include, such as a popup blocker, built in Google, DMOZ, or in-page search, mail client, source editor, and smarter AutoComplete/password saving capabilities. It’s definitely worth a try.

The compressed, barebones version of Mozilla, MozillaFirebird, which lacks Composer and the mail client (also available by itself as MozillaThunderbird), will soon be the core browser since it is stabler, sleeker, and has an interface based on XUL, making it extremely customizable. You might download this if you are an advanced user.

I picked their site not only because of their products, but because it has been newly redesigned, too. Design can be a major factor in how much a user wants to use a site, and I include that factor in my reviews.

I will begin to record the 11-page Wal-Mart tale today, so be ready for some wacky, pointless tales of the Bentonville Behemoth.

I’ve rid myself of McAfee Privacy Service. For now, at least. There’s a pretty good chance my dad will reinstall it. And I had to reformat the hard drive, delete everything, and reinstall not only Windows XP, but also Windows 98 SE and all the Hewlett-Packard useless bundled programs first. The Beast of Redmond likes to taunt customers with its licensing practices, it seems, because you can’t install the WinXP “Upgrade” without having a previous version of Windows already installed. Instead, you have to fork over another $100 to get the full version, which is stupid because it is exactly the same as the upgrade, except that it doesn’t search for a previous Windows installation. Urf.

Tonight my friend Tyler may come over to play Magi-Nation, a collectible card game kind of like Pokemon, but better. I can’t judge because I had the fortitude and self-control to not participate in the Poke-your-mom madness. (I nearly had a nervous breakdown because of it, though.) I couldn’t understand the point of collecting pieces of paper. Then I realized that there was more to it, that these seemingly useless scraps of cardboard could be used to have some sort of fun, which I never grasped, either. The GameBoy game wasn’t bad, though. (I played it for nine hours on my friends GB color on the way home from Britain two years ago.)

I still struggle with what kind of PC I want to buy, when I have the money. Things got grimmer when I got an email saying that I would need $300-$500 spending money for my Europe trip…and I had estimated about half that much. Thanks for telling me nine days in advance, that really helps. I hope to come back to the U.S. (after buying minimal souvenirs, being a complete cheapskate, and tipping badly) with around $150-$200. This would require spending less than $10 a day…not likely. I’ll try. But every $20 or so I spend sets getting a new computer back another week or two, so it’s starting to look hopeless.

The one bright spot in my situation is that my dad seems to be behind the whole thing, so I can forgive him for privacy servicing me. There’s always a possibility I’ll be able to negotiate some sort of agreement with my parents on this, so I’ll have to get over it. The problem with my parents is that my dad is indifferent and my mom opposes buying a new system because the one we have is only two years, four months, and twenty-two days old. True, most computers last twice that long, but it’s not my fault they bought a crappy one in the first place. She did say once that I should save up and buy myself a Dell, so I might be able to hold her to that. Urf.

To top off this horrible technology crisis I’m having, my best friend has informed me that he’s getting a new computer AND cable internet access when he moves to another neighborhood next month. It took me half a YEAR and a lot of busy signals to convince my parents that we needed Cox, and now he gets it without doing anything! That’s really frustrating. And he gets a new computer. Sure, his parents’ll probably do the “financially aware” thing and get some discount Dell or something (that’s what mine would do), so he’ll end up in my boat eventually. It still sucks though.

Hope you enjoyed reading this piece of junk…I’m more disillusioned now than I am when I write at 1 AM. Urf.

This won’t be much of an entry…but I changed the colors a bit to get away from the default MovableType interface. Red, gray, and black seem to suit me…for now. Anyone who has followed my sites for any time period would know that I am incredibly fickle and I like to change the colors and images and GUI pretty often. I can’t ever settle with any one thing.

Nothing much has happened in the McAfee (pronounced mack-uh-fee) Affair. My dad gets annoyed when I ask him to add sites to my allow list (the ones I can visit), but I just reply that he was the one who installed it, so it’s not my fault. I actually did find a way to solve some of the problems he caused, the largest victory being that I regained my admin powers. There is no super ADMINISTRATOR password, so I booted into Safe Mode and logged in as that. I created a new administrator and then rebooted. After that all I had to do was give myself back my powers and delete the temporary admin I had created and everything was fine. Best of all, my dad doesn’t know it, so it might be weeks before he finds out…as if there was a reason to change my user to a “limited account” in the first place.

My other victory is that I found that, by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL and killing all the processes pertaining to McAfee, I can turn off the stupid parental control blocks. So everything is better now. Except that with the thing off I get some really nasty pop-ups now and then.

I have a fear of circles and all things circular. Especially perfect circles. Like those drawn with a compass. The thing is, things I hate and things I love are circular. Here’s a brief list:
Hate -
Pencils/Pens (schoolwork)
Spiral Notebooks (more schoolwork)
Stoplights (so frustrating…)
Wal-Mart (this has nothing to do with circles (except their smilie mascot), but I threw it in anyway)
Darts (I suck at it)
Sports (not all of them, just those played with balls (heh))
Blinking Lights (there are eight on my computer/cable modem/monitor)

Love -
CDs
DVDs
Floppy Disks/Hard Drives (circular disks inside)
Doughnuts
Pie (and pi)
Other Round Foods
Soda (comes in round bottle, can, glass)
Cameras (lens)
Sharpies
And there you have it. Round things. Some good, some bad, but all somewhat terrifying. AND NO CORNERS! What does one do if there is no corner to hide in/behind? No sense of dimension or space, just one long line. It hurts to think about it.

D’heelkyeh, let’s change the subject! (My friend Jim talking there.) I read Stefi’s blog pretty frequently. Her claim of being the Anne Frank of the new generation might not be entirely true (hopefully not, when you think of page 130), but she’s a good writer. Be warned, don’t read it when a parent is in the room, because the name of her blog might set off some alarms. I assure you, most of it is quite clean. Anyway, she recently posted a list of 100 things to do with chemistry goggles in praise of her former chem. teacher, Mrs. Rosenberg (sorry I misspelled that, Stefi), who sound distinctly like my horrible science teacher, Mr. Johns. Some of the uses, like jockstrap (!) and death artwork, are mildly funny.

Okay, I wrote the accursed name: Mr. Johns. I must now relate to you the story of how he came to be accursed, and how it might have something to do with circles. I first had him in seventh grade. I was still young then, untested and untried. My teachers had been relatively nice up until that point. Seventh grade was a weird year because I had Johnsie for social studies and English and another teacher for science and math.

Johnsie was…weird from the start. The difference between the beginning and now, however, is that he actually liked me then. I was a good student (and still am, most of the time), and he liked to pick me for questions and crud. It began to get very boring very fast: the repetitive lessons were hard to bear. I slacked off a bit at the end of the year, but he didn’t seem to notice. I finished social studies in December with 121% and English in May with 114%. An easy class.

Last year, in eighth grade, I got to “look forward” to having Johnsie for one of my second semester blocks. (In my school district, middle schools have six periods instead of eight: math, English, elective (changes semesterly), Science/Social Studies (one semester of each), lunch, and co-curricular (recess).) That was a bad time.

First, we (the class) did a lot of really pointless scientific methods. We learned the format and process of writing one, yes, but we knew the results before we even did our experiments because he had already demonstrated the outcome to us. There was no excitement whatsoever.

Second, he assumed we were prepared to spend great quantities of money on four science projects. (We weren’t.) The first project wasn’t so bad. A simple egg drop. About five bucks each. The second, though, could become very pricey. This was a catapult/trebuchet. Some made theirs out of PVC (not exactly cheap), some out of scrap wood, and some seemed to have had theirs fabricated in a factory or something, the quality of workmanship and parts was so great. I, on the other hand, did an alternative assignment to escape the expenses. I think the median value of the catapults had to be somewhere around $30-$50, though. Quite a lot for a school project.

The third project was a bridge designed to hold as much weight as possible while remaining within set dimensions and truss weight restrictions. Mine was balsa wood, quite inexpensive, and did pretty well, holding 25 pounds before collapsing in a heap. Some kids, though, managed to make bridges of steel or erector set and still remain under the weight limit, and they were able to do better than my wood could. I am still of the opinion that the contest should have been the highest weight held/bridge weight ratio, since I went to great lengths to make mine as light as possible and had to sacrifice strength. This was even what was said in our instructional packets. The median price for the bridges was $10-$15.

The final project was our “science fair” project. Since we only had eleven days and very limited equipment, most projects were pretty rudimentary. My group’s cost around $20. One of my friends, though, did a complex experiment with dry ice and liquid nitrogen, among other coolants, and used laboratory equipment and computer analysis software as well. His dad had had this stuff before his project, but to purchase it all at once would have run into the hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars. This was only one of the problems we had with him: the rest are numerous and some are quite funny.

During our co-curricular, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we have to do SSR (sustained silent reading), which was a program introduced schoolwide by Johnsie himself to the groans and moans of students and teachers alike. My friend Dylan was fed up with SSR by the end of the year (like the rest of us) so he decided one day to just not read. This didn’t turn out well, as you might have already inferred. He made some pretty good wisecracks to get Johnsie mad and then walked out of the classroom to the office. The funny part came when Johnsie called Dylan’s parents from the phone in the classroom and left a message. It was lengthy and full of lies and exaggerations about what had happened, and Johnsie finished as we all were leaving for our next block.

Knowing we were Dylan’s friends, Mr. Johns called Tyler, Jim and I over to his desk before we left and asked distinctly, “Does Dylan have any problems at home?”
The pure sincerity and tone of the question almost set me to laughing right then; Tyler and Jim seemed equally stunned. We told the truth, that Dylan was a good kid and didn’t have any problems that we knew of. The next day, at lunch, we told Dylan about what had happened. He said that Johnsie called the wrong number, his parents’ old cell phone rather than their new one. They never even got the message! We chuckled at that one for a long while and acted out scenes of Mr. Johns calling a Buddhist temple in the Himalayas or an AT&T never-ending voice-prompt system and trying to tell them about the “horrible hoodlum” who had refused to read.

I have one other story of Johnsie to share tonight, though there are many more. It is widely speculated among 8th graders that Mr. Johns is gay. Yeah, I know, it’s immature and probably not true, however likely, but we amuse ourselves with the idea anyway. It doesn’t help that he wears tight (I mean really TIGHT) black jeans and a pink shirt. Nor does it help that he enjoys standing right in front of your desk when you’ve laid your head down so that you look directly at his crotch when you wake up. Talk about shockingly horrifying.

It was a typical boring day in science class when this incident happened. We had a substitute, and we were working on model bridges. I went to one of his desk drawers for a pair of scissors, opened it, and found…a pair of pink plastic handcuffs with red hearts that said “Take me I’m yours!” all over them. First, you should know the slang definition of “take” in our school. I won’t write it, since it’s really wrong, but know that it has sexual implications. So I find this…atrocity and drop it quickly, not wanting to know its usage. I ended up telling (and showing) all my friends. They were shocked as well.

So now you see why there is such hatred toward Johnsie in the 8th grade at Sonoran Trails Middle School. Being the lucky duck that I am, I don’t have to go there anymore. But these stories are only the tip of the iceberg…

Finally I get to sleep in my own bed! Thank God for that! But things aren’t as rosy as I thought they would be. Tomorrow I must get down to work and finish my summer homework. I’ve neglected it off and on and now I need to crack down. I also need to call Cactus Shadows and figure out how I’m going to register, since I’ll be in Europe during the registration period. Great…school.

To top all this off, my dad got all urfie when some spyware thing started giving us all these pornographic pop-ups on our computer, so he installed some “privacy” software. Not only that, but he found out my Windows password (which is the same one I use for everything else, too.) Using that, he deleted the password protection on my Windows account, took away my Administrator status (I can’t even install regular games without his permission), and decided to make this “privacy” software block every website except those on his list of “good” sites. Yeah, that’s privacy. Who wants their parents to see everything they do? It’s not like I have anything to hide, but…eew.

I have several colorful adjectives I could use to describe the horrible McAffee Privacy thingy, but they would be terribly inappropriate for small children. Less powerful ones might be: annoying, stupid, pointless, unnecessary, angering, frustrating, dumb, a hassle, and useless. Luckily, I’ve found a way around all that.

TGFL! Thank God for Linux! Yee hee hee! Yes dad, go all power-hungry as much as you want. You can have buggy, annoying, controlling Windows all to yourself. I have my red hat to wear. With it, I am completely secluded and shielded from your restrictions…hah! Reader, this whole thing is the classic “parent wants more control but ends up screwing themselves” problem. Of course, there are some side effects to Linux, like having to figure out how to use it, and stuff. But at least I have a reason now. I won’t log in to Windows ever again.

And that’s my daily rant. Really though, this whole privacy thing for him is turning into no privacy for me. But at least I have a place to retreat to, unlike my poor friend Tyler whose semi-overprotective (anyone who places restrictions on the infinite bounds of the Internet is overprotective in my book) parents have Familink (spl?) internet access. Not only is it slow dial-up, but it blocks regular websites. That sucks.

I’m perfectly happy to have a “privacy” application on my computer to block the pop-ups and porn emails and crap, but not at the expense of my freedom. And definitely not if it means my dad is going to take away my admin status. That’s like impeaching a President. You take all the power away. He’ll soon find that even if he and my mom are technically the owners of our computer, they are but figureheads with me as the true power behind the throne. They might have blocked some of my normal activities, but I’ll win them back, slowly but surely. I have never been so mad or frustrated.

I guess this doesn’t matter much since I’m saving for a new desktop PC anyway. Then they’ll no longer have any jurisdiction…life will be good.

It seems the same person who has spammed my forum is spamming my weblog, too. That person’s IP address will be blocked if there are any more infractions. Worse, I know them in person, so they might as well quit while they’re ahead.

The comments (now deleted) that I received:
Would u be mad if I said “You’re stupid.” to you?

Then I won’t.
Then why bother commenting? Furthermore, what idiot with absolutely no life whatsoever has the time to post stuff like this? No one cares. I want CONSTRUCTIVE comments, critique, not criticism. If you don’t like me, go make your own website and flame me all you want. This is my turf.

U actually look out the window at the scenery? U said u were reading books, and c’mon, what kid cares about scenery anyway?
In thirteen hour car drive you begin to care. Only immature children without any appreciation for nature or anything else would be completely uncaring about the world around them. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. And yes, I did say I read most of the way, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t look up now and then. This one was barely worth answering.

That’s about all I have to say for today. And that nasty (and annoying) spammer better realize that life is about more than skateboarding and letting your parents spoil you. Try to be at least somewhat grateful for things that you don’t or can’t own.

This brings me to something else I should have said on day one. This is my site. Brettia is my site. I’ll do what I want, say what I want, and if you don’t like it, you can go spend a few hundred hours of your time and make your own little site so you can tell everyone how much you hate me. Until then, refrain from purely negative comments and you’ll be fine.

I am going to do my best to be truthful here. The truth can hurt. By reading this or any other entry, you are accepting that truth in advance, and I will not be held liable for what I say here. If you don’t want to know what I think of you, don’t read this weblog. If you do want to know my opinion, be prepared for it. You might not like it. I will, however, attempt to provide a reason for negative things I might say about people, so you’ll at least know what you’re doing wrong.

Don’t expect everything here to be exactly what I think. If I blog while I’m in a towering rage, there’s a good chance I might not be nice toward anyone I might mention in the entry. It’s not always my fault.

Every entry is off the record. The entries cannot be quoted, summarized, or reproduced without my written permission. If I write something incriminating, it cannot be used as evidence. (Don’t worry, I haven’t done anything illegal, this is just a precaution.) A weblog is supposed to be a retreat for a person’s mind, and that entire idea is broken if I have to censor my writing to make people happy or to keep myself out of trouble.

I’m telling you right now, you have a choice. Don’t read if you don’t want to. No one’s forcing you. If I say something here, don’t take it personally. Most people I know have many more endearing qualities than bad ones, though I may tend to pick out the negative more than the positive. I’m not Anne Frank.

So…yeah. By the way, I’m in Missouri now, on the last leg of my little vacation. My great-grandpa’s big party is tomorrow; I’m semi-excited, but there’ll be about 200 people there…not good for a kid. Especially when most of the adults will be telling me how much I’ve grown (as if I don’t know already) and trying to remember when they saw me last. I have to direct parking, too.

But I’m coming home Sunday!!! Yaaay! But then I get ten days of hard summer homework and it’s off to Europe. (Yaaay! x2) So bye for now…it’s 12 AM here but only ten in Arizona. I think I gain hours on the way back…or do I lose them…?

After six days I finally have a computer to post with. Colorado, especially the high country region where I am, seems to be technologically challenged. Or I just haven’t had time and want to put the blame on someone/something else. I’ll summarize what I’ve been doing lately.

I left Tuesday, July 1st at about 6:15 PM. We drove thirteen hours without much of anything happening, except that I finished a book (The Warriors of Alavna), continued to neglect my summer homework, and we took a wrong turn at Espanola, a town north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This added an extra hour to the drive, but it was scenic and second only to Ireland in natural beauty, so I can’t complain. It was Wednesday by this time; we had stayed the night in Albequerque (though it really wasn’t a night, since we only were there for three hours).

Tired and uncomfortable, we hobbled in our Chevy Malib (yes, it’s a Malib - the ‘u’ lost it’s adhesiveness and fell off in the heat last summer) to my grandparents’ house outside Buena Vista, Colorado. Just after we were settled in, we went camping in some undisclosed location. Now my tiredness was bordering on exhaustion, so going to bed that night was a welcome relief. I even slept through my brother’s nightmares in which he purportedly shouted: “The mules are on me, the mules are on me!”
So we camped and all were happy. Later we rode my grandpa’s mules in the forested wilderness, which freaked me out somewhat because I am not at all used to riding a mindless beast up and down a slope at an 80 degree angle. That was okay. We went home later and took long showers, and I almost fell asleep standing up in the living room.

The next day, Independence Day, was generally eventful. The adults went on a day-long rafting trip (I’m supposed to go later this week), and I stayed at the house and twiddled my thumbs. We had a Ricketts dinner (Ricketts is my mother’s maiden name), which means it’s really rich and painful afterward because of the huge amount of food you are forced to inhale. It tasted good, at least.

Saturday was a farewell/fishing day. My dad and his brother, who had also driven out here from Missouri, went fly fishing with my grandpa. I fished some too, but I don’t really have the patience for it. My parents and uncle left Sunday, leaving Zachary and I to fend for ourselves until we drive to Missouri for my great-grandpa’s 90th birthday. (Confused yet?)

With my parents gone my grandparents began spoiling us children, taking us out to a really good Mexican restaurant and letting me drive the Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo from the house to the county road to the main road, a distance of about a mile or two of which I am quite proud. (Really, how many kids get to drive at fourteen?)

Today was dominated by a petty dispute between my brother and I over who got to ride the “nice bike.” It sounds like a stupid thing to fight over, but I think previous arguments were just leading up to a big battle. I lost this one, but I’ll win the war, of course. I really don’t know why I even take the time to respond to my brother anymore because every conversation we have turns into a bitter debate. I really hate having a sibling sometimes.

Someday I’ll have the self-control to brush him off. Someday, someday…urf. And speaking of impossible futuristic dreams, I have decided to save up my money for a new computer, which I am in dire need of. I think I can easily have about $2000 by December 31st if I work hard and can strike some kind of match deal with my parents that would mean no Christmas, Easter, or birthday presents for a year or two. I don’t care that much for holidays and birthdays anymore anyway, since I always get stuff I never use from my family. My friends have the right idea by giving me cash and gift cards, since I can choose what I want then. So I’m going to try for it. If I change my mind before then I can put the money towards a car when I’m sixteen.

Hopefully these entries will become more interesting during Europe and when school starts. I promise, they’ll get better. This one could have been deeper and longer, but my fingertips are not getting blood for some reason, possible because I read a book for five hours today and had my hands above me, so the blood ran downward. It’s hard to type when you can’t feel the keys.

Until next time.

I’ve installed my own system, and then XOOPS, and now I have MovableType, the best web journaling tool since Blogger. This is much easier to set up to my needs than XOOPS, not to mention easier to use. My old site was just too hard to keep running. Speaking of my old site, Brettia.com is now the forums only, and I have purchased hosting for this weblog at BrettEpps.com for an ultra-cheap rate that is more than worth the cost. (Thanks to Celeste for providing the $35 in birthday money that ultimately paid for this whole thing.)

Eventually I’ll get around to playing with the templates and changing the layout, but I’m happy enough with it right now. I might even post stories and excerpts from Brettia, but that might be a while off. However, I will make a category for a journal I have to write while I read “Journey to the Center of the Earth” for honors English. Writing online means I won’t have to type it later, so it will be easier to do it on here. Ignore it if you wish, though I don’t mind you reading it.

Note that I will be speaking directly to “you,” who might be you or your neighbor or my imaginary friend Blocky the Goat. Just because I say “you” doesn’t mean that I mean you, but rather someone else who is probably more worth writing to. Otherwise, “you” means you, but that could be subject to change. Language is only effective to those who interpret it correctly, so I thought this clarification (or un-clarification) might be helpful.
I might not be able to post in the next few days since I will be driving with my family to Colorado where my grandparents live. We’re doing a little reunion thing there and then we’re continuing on to Missouri to celebrate my great-grandpa’s 90th birthday. Grandpa Raymond isn’t the kind of guy who’s 90 but acts 200 and lives in a nursing home sucking pureed prunes and eating pills; he is easily the “youngest” older person I’ve ever known, and he still runs his own farm alone (his wife, my grandma Zetta, passed away a few years ago). I have to admire that, since he and the Ricketts family have lived there forever. Of course, he has plenty of sons and neighbors and family friends and total strangers that come by and help him out. The birthday party is supposed to have over 150 in attendance.

So I’m doing that. Then about two weeks later I get to go to Europe with two of my best friends, Tyler and Jim. London, Paris, Provence, and Barcelona, all in nine days chaperoned by two of my favorite teachers, Mrs. McBeth and Mrs. Turner…McCloone (spl?). These events are what spurred me to swallow my pride and get something like MT. I just cannot find the time to build my own CMS anymore. Even in the summer.

I guess I’ll end this with a quote:
“You’re stupid.” - My dad to my little brother after he falls into our swimming pool fully clothed. This was almost two years ago, but the sheer bluntness of the statement and the fact that my father obviously had other, worse things he could have said in place of that short phrase make it hilarious (to me, at least) to this day.