Once upon a time, I had a really, truly enormous .plan file. This started out sort of by accident; when I started using UNIX full-time in fall 1991, the .plan file on my student account at WPI kept getting slowly longer and longer as I added quotes and other things I found interesting. When I moved to The World I brought that .plan with me, but rather than keep adding to it I froze it as a sort of historical thing, a memento of my college days, and made it a discrete item in my World .plan, which grew ever larger before peaking at 225395 bytes. (I have some other stuff kicking around which I intended to put in, but never got around to it; perhaps some or all of that will turn up here sometime.)

Well, I decided around mid-September that, amusing as the long .plan was, the times had passed it by. These days nobody fingers anybody any more, and so many people are using systems unlike UNIX that I can't predict what it'll look like to a lot of users any more. So I chucked it in my HTML directory, threw a link on my We Require Information page, and put a message in my new, very short .plan pointing people at it if they wanted to read it for some reason.

I had some spare time, so I decided to start breaking it down into smaller segments and indexing it with this HTML index. I'm not converting the individual bits to HTML, except for a couple of small specials cases; they've survived just fine as raw text all this time, so I don't see any need to go to all the trouble of marking them all up. Besides, some of them need a fixed width font to look right.

Here's a listing of what's been broken down so far.

• Song lyrics (reproduced without permission):
  • Broken Heart (13 Valleys) [Big Country]
  • Adrenaline [The Curtain Society]
  • Armageddon [Thomas Dolby}
  • Bite Me [A&W Soda Machine]
  • Body & Soul [The Sisters of Mercy]
  • If I Only Had a Brain [MC 900ft. Jesus]
  • Raymond Chandler Evening [Robyn Hitchcock]
  • Dare [Stan Bush & Battery]
  • Destination Moon [They Might Be Giants]
  • When You Don't See Me [The Sisters of Mercy]
  • Illuminati [Steve Jackson, Joe Vail, & Creede Lambard]
  • I Palindrome I [They Might Be Giants]
  • Limelight [Rush]
  • 99 Luftballons [Nena]
  • Pandemonium [Killing Joke]
  • Mystic Rhythms [Rush]
  • Stop! [Erasure]
  • Stranger than Fiction [Bad Religion]
• Poems:
  • Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night [Dylan Thomas]
  • Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening [Robert Frost]
  • And Death Shall Have No Dominion [Dylan Thomas]
  • Jammerwochen [Lewis Carroll; translated to German by Robert Scott]
  • A Traveller's Curse Upon Misdirection [Traditional; translated from Welsh by Dylan Thomas]
  • Untitled [Richard P. Feynman; from the lecture "The Value of Science"]
  • Assorted Haiku [Various]
  • More Haiku [Various]
  • The Poetic Stylings of Chaos [Seann Ives]
  • Ode to Spot [Data]
• A rant by Dylan Thomas.
• A tract by The Shadow.
• Random quotes from everywhere.
• A new element.
• Something incredibly funny.
• A book review.
• German company forms.
• Creationists with too much time on their hands.
• First Aid for non-medically-minded persons.
• A flow chart for solving problems.
• A NASA report, probably spurious.
• Something from the JIR.
• Wackmobile alert!
• Urban legend of the day.
• How does a Newton MessagePad stack up against an Etch-A-Sketch?
• The French explained.
• What engineers mean.
• My old WPI .plan.
• The whole thing in one great lump.

It's not all indexed here yet; in particular I haven't completely broken down the song lyrics section. Someday, it'll be done, and then I may get around to adding the other material I've stockpiled.

The dates at the end of the big-lump version and the old WPI .plan reflect the last time the World .plan as a whole was updated; since the WPI .plan was at the end, and it had contained that date stamp thing from the beginning, I kept updating that. It was the only part of the WPI .plan which got changed after I moved it to The World.