anti-thought

transition

2005-09-12T23:09:00.000-05:00

this is my last post on this blogger site, i am moving to a blog that i will be hosting here. the following is the initial post that was made on the new site:

This post will mark the transition to a new site; my "Hello World" so to speak. This site will be a replacement for the old Blogger account. Setting this site up has been a labor of love; I have worked on getting it to where it is for at least a week, if not more.

I have/will be inviting several members of the crew from which I used to roll with in San Antonio. So let me go ahead and post a little something about what this site will be.

I have setup several accounts for 2 other people thus far (you know who you are). Anonymous user registration will be restricted until I can fix the problem with PHP wanting to use sendmail instead of plain SMTP. Users of this site will be given post level 4 access. This means the average user will be allowed to post, edit, delete and moderate content. In some special cases, I will grant some people elevated access. Rainman will be marked as my backup admin until he indicates that he does not desire the duty and someone else steps up to the plate.

This site will allow for content upload by the users, which means a sandbox has been setup. All uploads will reside in this sandbox, so you can upload pics or files of any type and link them from here (use the link: /wp-content/filename). I have enabled a plugin that will prevent bad behavior from occurring such as spam and email harvesting. I have also enabled a plugin that allows for users to select a theme that works best for them. Some of the plugins require changes to be made to the installed theme, so a limited number of themes are available. There is also support for users to add and manage site polls.

I have not set up some of the content such as the sidebar links or the categories. It was my intention to allow some of the users to do this. User level 5 is required to allow for category management, so I will have to debate this more later. Lastly, the sidebar is not consistent across the themes. Most of the sections are out of order and I need to go through the themes tomorrow and recitfy this.

If you would like an account, feel free to email me and let me know. Feedback is also welcome. If you experience any problems with the website, I would also love to hear about it (email me).

Thanks again and I look forward to everyone's participation.

cms update

2005-09-07T22:21:00.000-05:00

so i've been working on getting this drupal system up and running and i've run into many snags.

first, there is an ebuild in portage, but it sucks hardcore. it installs the modules, but does not execute their database scripts. some packages for the modules that are required are not installed. it requires a mail transport agent. there has been bug after bug in getting a basic system up and ready.

after getting it so users can at least make an account, i've come to the realization that drupal is mostly likely overkill. it allows for each user to have an account, and all kinds of features. you can rearrange the menu that the user sees, change the theme, install hundreds of plugins that each require tweaking. plus, the idea of everything being a "node" seriously pisses me off. figuring out how to just have 1 front-page and content posted there was more hassle than it was worth.

user blogs are just nodes and you have to alias those. the administrative user is just a regular user and you have to do some complicated tasks to get users correctly setup.

i worked on getting this all up and running on sunday and monday, and basically have nothing to show for it. you can see what i have setup here, but i would not recommend making an account. there is still a problem with the user registration and getting that to work was proven to be more than it's worth.

so, i've revisited the idea of finding a decent content management system that fulfills my needs and i've run across 4 that _might_ do the trick (more investigation is required): geeklog, b2evolution, mambo, and e107. for now, they all seem to meet the basic need, but mambo and e107 do not appear to have spam protection. that may prove to be a problem. mambo has media uploading but none of the others seem to provide such functionality. i am going to install e107 first and see how that works, then try mambo, then b2evolution, and lastly geeklog (simplest of them all).

i'll post more when i have something that i'm satisfied with.

xlink continued

2005-09-04T20:51:00.000-05:00

ok, so for the last 2 hours or so, i've been working feverishly to get XLink to work with my psp. i've gotten a good ways into getting it to work, but i've hit one last major snag.

apparently, some of the games switch ssid's midway. this presents a problem as XLink seems to lose the psp's connection. so i tried using SSIDMGR in "auto pursuit" and it still fails. but rather than failing on some normal level, windows catches a BSOD error "BAD_POOL_CALLER". not sure exactly what this means, but i imagine it has something to do with memory pool management.

i checked the XLink forums about this and didn't find much. i have the tcp ports forwarded, i'm updating windows right now, the psp is detected by windows and XLink, and i can see other gamers in the lobby. i do not have bridging enabled so that eliminates most advice on the forum.

if anyone has had any success in connecting a PSP to a laptop in ad-hoc mode using XLink (kai), please let me know.

comment spam

2005-09-04T14:52:00.000-05:00

well, it seems i've finally been hit with comment spam. seems the spammers go off of the RSS feeds to automatically check and see who has made several recent updates to their feed. sorry for any inconvenience, but i will have to turn on word verification to prevent comment spam from now on.

xlink

2005-09-04T14:33:00.000-05:00

i've been hankering to play my psp online, but unfortunately, most games only seem to work in ad-hoc mode rather than infrastructure mode. then i came across the xlink project. it seems that they might be able to let me tunnel most of the psp games available.

the good news is it was written in java IIRC, which means they developed a linux client. while i don't believe there is an ebuild maintained in the gentoo portage tree, it still should be packages in a manner so that i can make a contained folder and maintain the installations myself.

the only thing i'll need to make sure i have setup correctly is the hardware. i will apparently need a wireless NIC installed on the server so that my setup mirrors this example.

more updates once i've set it up and tested it.

gasman

2005-09-04T14:31:00.000-05:00

when i was in high school, my first car was a '92 mazda 626. i had a job as a waiter that paid $2.13 plus tips. You can image that my income was modest at best. i filled up my 626 on $10 of gas ($1.20 per gallon) once every 2 weeks.

fast forward 7 years; gas now costs $2.99 per gallon. i filled up today at kroger's for $2.79, thanks to my $0.10 discount, which totaled at $34.34. with hurricane katrina, some places in america are really starting to feel the pinch of the oil industry's control over america. some BP pumps in georgia are paying $6 a gallon (much like the poor saps in europe who pay per litre).

energy costs have sky rocketed and there's no hope for them to come down. when gas prices hit $2.30, i said to myself that i would consider getting a much more fuel efficient car such as a prius. well, i am now considering the idea; playing with the idea of not wanting an impreza anymore.

i'm still waiting to see if there are anymore great innovations from japan that can reduce my need of oil.

update: i wrote this last night and today i saw a sign for the new Jetta. the new Jetta TDI is being advertised as having 43 mpg. that makes the Jetta sound very attractive. diesel is usually cheaper than regular gasoline, but i don't really know how it differs. i want to do some research on diesel before i decide it's a good idea.

drupal transfer

2005-09-04T14:29:00.000-05:00

as of late, i've started to get tired of using blogger. to quote someone i read on a competitor's forum, "blogger is the fisher price of blogs." i've investigated several content management systems, such as drupal, wordpress, and typo3.

wordpress seemed nice, but not much better than blogger. the only additional functionality that seemed interesting is the ability to categorize all postings.

typo3 looked ok, but it didn't seem right. typo3 seemed to be geared more towards static type of pages, rather than a slashdot type of posting system. so i basically ruled this out as a possibility.

i checked out drupal last. drupal seemed to allow for community content posting, even a book publishing feature. there are plenty of modules that provide functionality that i would find useful such as a book and movie reviewing plugin. you can make user accounts and manage the entire site from an admin page. it also has plenty of themes. drupal became my choice for a CMS system.

i would like to setup a site so some of the old CS crew from UTSA can have a place to communicate. ideally, it would be a community blog-type of system like slashdot (not for news per se). some of the crew has already shown interest in participating.

so far, i have installed and setup mysql. i had to modify my USE flags to get drupal to install as it's only available for ~x86 and my system is a x86 system. currently, it is installed but the database include file seems to be incorrectly setup. once i resolve that issue, i will configure the site and begin testing it. eventually, i may even fully migrate this blog to that site. it may take some work however; i've seen that many people experience some trouble in the migration.

ichi the killer

2005-09-04T14:28:00.000-05:00

a friend of mine (alex) recommended i see this movie. it's an indie japanese horror flick that seemed to be very different than the ad portrayed.

let me just start by saying that it was more like a gore-fest rather than a horror movie. the focus is on a deranged man who is determined to kill every "bully" with his razorsharp boot-knife. like i said, its a weird flick. the film starts when he kills a yakuza boss. a second in command guy takes over the clan. this man is even more deranged than ichi; he's a sadist and a masochist. throughout the movie, he tortures many people in and out of his clan. he even pulls the "meat locker" stunt (hangs someone by their skin from dozens of meathooks).

it was as painful watching the movie as it probably was hanging from some of those meathooks. i would not recommend this movie to anyone who is not specifically looking for a movie like this.

my rating (of 10): 3

the terminal

2005-09-04T14:25:00.000-05:00

early this week, crystal and i watched "the terminal" starring tom hanks. i have been recommended this before but never got around to actually renting it.

the general idea behind the movie is that the main character is traveling into the united states. while he was in the air, his home country started a civil war. because of this, he is denied access into the united states and cannot fly back to his home country. therefore, he is forced to stay in JFK, he has no home, and cannot speak english. basically, he lives in JFK for some 9 months. he meets some wonderful people and learns english.

overall, the movie was very enjoyable. the plot was exciting and it was generally a feel good movie with intermittent humor. the characters were well acted and the script was appropriate, considering the main character did not know english. catherine zeta jones played the supporting actress to tom hanks, and she played her usual annoying self. she is my least favorite actress and once again proves that she is only in the business for her face.

my rating (of 10): 8

spanglish

2005-09-04T14:24:00.000-05:00

last night, crystal and i watched spanglish starring adam sandler and some other people i can't remember at the moment.

no spoilers are needed. a woman and her daughter come to america in search of a better life. they find it in the hills of beverly working for a famous chef and a psychopathic stay at home mom. the woman makes a mistake by mixing personal life with her professional life.

adam sandler played a very caring and compassionate father of 2, a far cry from most characters he plays. the other characters were well acted. there was ample humor but not the usual adam sandler style. the movie was geared to be a chick flick but i still enjoyed watching it.

it also touched on the subject of diversity in places like LA. the poorest people living near the richest and how they live in disharmony. several times, race became an issue between the main character and the family that employed her.

my rating (of 10): 7

broken flowers

2005-09-04T14:23:00.000-05:00

today, crystal and i went to see "broken flowers" at the legacy theatre in plano. it cost $12.50 for both tickets and we arrived 30 minutes early. 5 other people watched the film with us.

that's right, only 5 other people saw the film with us. it's a shame that crap-ass movies like "underclassman" make more money than flicks like this. the general populous really IS that stupid.

let me first start by saying that this movie is a dark comedy. if that's not your cup of tea, then don't bother seeing this gem. if you hated lost in translation, the life aquatic, and sideways, there's no way you'd enjoy this movie. it is a quiet and slow movie.

[spoiler]

the main plot idea is that the main character, don johnston, receives a letter informing him that he has a son who is 19 years old (from an old flame). it also informs him that his supposed son has set out in search of his father. the author leaves no indications of their identity, so he sets out to catch up with 4 of his old flames. each one that he meets is worse off than when he left them. the first one is a widow and has a crazy daughter. the second one is unbelievable dull. the third one lost her damn mind and talks to animals. the last one become poor white trash (i believe she lives in the mountains as well).

[major spoiler]

in the end, he gets no where closer to knowing who the mother is, if she even exists. he meets a kid who looks like he might be his son, but ends up freaking him out. the ending is open ended and leaves the viewer to guess if don ever finds out if he actually has a son.

[/major spoiler]

[/spoiler]

all in all, this was a very good movie. there were moments that i couldn't help but laugh at the strangeness or awkwardness of the situations. don johnston seems to keep his calm even though some really weird stuff happens. the character development is fairly thin with the exception of don johnston. his neighbor is a rather hilarious character, mainly because of his complete contrast to don. what drives the movie is the main plot idea and that makes the viewer yearn to see who wrote the letter. i also love endings that leave the plot unfinished because that lets me add my interpretation or meaning to the ending.

crystal admitted that she even enjoyed the movie much better than she enjoyed lost in translation and the life aquatic. it had many more moments of comedy but thinner characters, which i believe allowed crystal to enjoy the film more. it was a quiet movie which seemed to have been slightly disturbed by a very loud movie next door. some of the scenes were interrupted by the sounds of explosions while near silence is needed to understand certain parts of the film. i would recommend waiting until it's dvd release to get this one, as neighboring movies may spoil it for you.

my rating (of 10): 8

been a while

2005-09-04T14:02:00.000-05:00

i have been putting off several posts for a while. i have been working on these posts for the last week, usually while crystal and i watch TV or a movie. there are currently 7 more posts coming down the pipe. this should catch up all the posts i've wanted to make for at least a week. they will be posted in no particular order.

enjoy.

lingo

2005-08-31T23:10:00.000-05:00

so this sunday, i was determined to get our VoIP phone up and running once more. i have been putting it off for roughly 2 months since we started using dsl.

it was a 5 hour process that required the entire evening. basically, when i got the new modem from SBC, it used an internal IP address that was only accessible to the machine that is directly connected. that IP (192.168.0.1) just so happened to be the same IP as my router's internal address. so when i installed the router, i pushed the IP of the internal network NIC down one to 192.168.0.2.

i didn't realize it at the time, but the lingo device used that IP as well. so i had to push the lingo IP address back. but to do that, i had to log into the little web admin page that the device hosts. unfortunately, i was unable to remember the admin password, so i had to flash the ROM. i was warned to perform this as few times as possible. after having done so, i also managed to forget the settings that i setup on the admin page as well.

after 4 phone calls (~3 hours worth of talking) to lingo's tech support, i finally got the information that i needed. the tech support for lingo is pretty decent, for off-shored business. they were actually able to carry a technical conversation, which aides very much in solving the problem. apparently, the only mistake i was making was that the WAN port needed to be set to use a static IP, the one you desire, and the rest should be kosher. need to know information that is not posted on their support site.

to summarize, here's what is needed to get a lingo device hooked up to you LAN behind your router:

set the port forwarding rules (both protocols):

53
69
1024-1030
5060-5065
10000-20000

set a static IP for the WAN settings on the lingo device
plug a cat5 cable from the WAN port to the hub/switch
set the dsl model to use "smart dial"
hook phone cable into PH1 on the lingo device

illinois

2005-08-31T22:51:00.000-05:00

we spent some time at my uncle-in-law's house this weekend helping them move furniture. afterwards, we enjoyed a nice steak dinner with several glasses of wine. we all decided that a good game of monopoly would be fun. as i've learned in the past, monopoly can turn into a very nasty game. there's always one person in the group that seems to spoil all the fun.

that person happened to be my uncle-in-law. several trips around the board and i ended up with a variety of properties and so does he. crystal manages to collect 2/3rds of one set of properties while the other two players do not manage to collect much in terms of property. in fact, one of them only collects the light blues (oriental, connecticut, and vermont) while the other person doesn't buy a property for half a dozen trips (boardwalk).

in a matter of a half hour, i had 2/3rd of the reds (kentucky and indiana, lacked illinois). my uncle-in-law had illinois but lacked 2 properties that i had. i actually had one of the light blues that the one player needed. i gladly traded the property for indefinite immunity to rent. this of coarse angered some of the players, of which included my uncle-in-law. he vowed to make the game very difficult on me; he delivered on this promise.

for the next 2-3 hours, i made dozens of offers to retrieve illinois, but every offer was scoffed at unless i was willing to go flat broke so i couldn't build on the properties. apparently, it was irrational for me to want to build on properties. near the end of the game, he was very low on cash and i had a large surplus. however, i wasn't able to make any dent in my opponents due to the fact that i was unable to improve my properties.

i was collecting rent, and it was getting old fast. round after round of negotiations resulted in him insisting that if i trade him, he will be unable to build and i will be able to do so. this was obviously unfair so he was only willing to trade if i was willing to fork up all of my cash and some limited immunity if i ever built up on my properties. since all of the other players now had at least 1 monopoly, i needed to improve my properties to stay alive in the game. his offer was clearly unacceptable, but he did not understand this.

he managed to trade with another player to build a monopoly on the yellows (marvin gardens, atlantic, ventor). this was eventually my downfall. he was the only player that i was really able to trade with because he had all the properties that i needed. eventually, i landed on of of his yellow properties and basically was put out of the game. i had landed on some of the other properties and survived them, but once i landed on his property, i was left with little to no money. continuing at this hope was delayed suicide. i quit and gave all of my property to crystal. shortly thereafter, everyone else quit.

one other interesting thing, crystal managed to land on boardwalk 4 times, once with 2 houses, once with 3, once with 4, and once with a hotel. somehow, she not only managed to survive, she dominated the game in the end with several monopolies and plenty of cash to spare.

i've never met a boardgame griefer and i can't say i'll ever play with someone who does that again. it was intentional and plain annoying. it may have been the wine, but i'm very leary about who i play monopoly with from now on.

dead pixels

2005-08-30T21:17:00.000-05:00

i was playing around with my psp surfing on a wifi connection in my apartment when i discovered the dreaded. i was reading an article about a new street fighter when i scrolled to the right too far. at this point, the screen was almost entirely black. i noticed some dead pixels. not some but nine.

ok so i have a "tainted psp." it's no big deal really, since i paid 20 bucks for the year long EB replacement plan. but i still have to give it up eventually. currently, the pixels do not appear visible on any colors other than solid black. i am thinking i might be able to grin and bear it but that may not last long. i just don't like the idea of giving it up. i hope this won't be a trend, or else i may have to just learn to ignore it. the one saving grace is the pixels are very tiny, much smaller than a PC monitor, which makes them harder to detect.

blah, stupid LCDs.

globals++

2005-08-28T13:54:00.000-05:00

recently at work, i stumbled across a problem that really isn't stressed much in school: globals. bear with some of my vagueness as i can't really go into details about what the application does.

an application i was working on needed to store some hardcoded globals due to the requirements. most of the constants were strings (stl) that pointed to locations of files and so forth. given the environment and the budget provided, it was the easiest (not necessarily most elegant) solution to stash them as static const globals.

eventually, i realized that some of these globals contained only part of the necessary information and that the rest is discovered at run-time (has to be done that way). this is where static became a problem. see i made the grave mistake of placing these statics in a header file, which is apparently a big no-no because of this exact reason. each time they were included in a file (typically a .cc file), that file received its own copy. thus, any modifications in other files were not reflected accordingly.

so i asked some of the senior level developers in the area what they would recommend to maintain this set of mostly constant global data. apparently, only inexperienced developers make this mistake and the fact that i have discovered the errors of my ways this early in my career is a good thing (i was told that many developers still make those mistakes, which is why they are still SWE 1).

the general consensus is that the most elegant solution is to make an entirely separate object and use it to store all the global data. in this object's constructor is where i should set the values to their defaults. this object should be made global in my main entry point file (file that contains the main) and instantiated inside of the entry point (main). everywhere that this object is needed, it should be externed.

after 6+ hours of fiddling with the codebase and trying to get it to compile and operate as necessary, i have finally achieved a finely tuned way of storing (mostly constant) global data. to make matters even better, this technique finally let me decouple the original header and those constants from each object and module that did not need it.

as a side note, with the changes made, this pushed the line count of the application to above 20K. every line was written by hand from scratch.

/me wipes brow

carbo-load

2005-08-25T20:00:00.000-05:00

so a few days ago, i posted about how i finally met my primary physical goals for the year. well, i ran into a snag that slowed me down quite a bit this week.

crystal and i have been counting calories and i found out that i currently ingest a little over half the calories i should have for the year. on average, i don't take in more than 1600 calories, when i am supposed to take in 2800-2900. that's quite a difference and this difference was heavily felt.

on monday, when i got home from work, i felt like i was run over by a truck. i had a complete lack of energy and slight feeling of nausea. since i haven't been sick in over 4 years, i knew it was unlikely that i was actually sick. that prompted the calorie counting. i am also seriously deficient in protein and carbs as well. given that i ran an amount per week that most people consider 'competition level', i needed to seriously revise my diet. since i'm not trying to lose weight, i started looking at my options.

i've been a reader of runner's world for a while, and i know their website usually contains the same content as the printed form (only slimmed down). i found several rules that runners should bear in mind when doing more than a casual jog per week. basically, my diet is completely wrong and my running schedule is a tad too much for my body. i have revised my run schedule to allow for more recovery time. also, before each big run, i will make a point to do the "carbo-loading" tip (pack on some carbs, protein would be good as well).

since monday, i have tried to include snacks in my day that are high in protein (mostly graham crackers and unsalted nuts). tonight is my first official run since then. i have been leary about jumping back into the grind as usual, so i will be taking it easy on my low intensity runs for at least a week. here is my revised schedule:

Sunday: Weight Training
Monday: Weight Training
Tuesday: Weight Training, 1 mile run (LI)
Wednesday: Weight Training
Thursday: Weight Training 1 mile speed run (HI)
Friday: Weight Training
Saturday: Weight Training, 5K run (HI)

Note: HI = high intensity, LI = low intensity

i will not be doing a speed run day for the aforementioned reason until next week. i will also not do a full 5k this saturday for the same reason. i will continue normal schedule next week.

we'll see if this works. hopefully i will have enough calories, protein, and carbs to get through these runs without exhaustion.

crocs and the felony charges

2005-08-21T22:01:00.000-05:00

couple news items worthy of mentioning.

first, it was discovered that crocs have super immune systems. this is a very major thing, possibly the biggest thing since penicillin. this sort of thing could be used to cure all viral infections, including AIDS and typical skin infections.

secondly, a couple of high school kids managed to discover the admin password that was taped to the back of their school district issued iBook. once they modified their settings to allow faster internet speeds and disabled admin monitoring, they had charges brought up against them. this is no joke, these kids are being charges with 3rd degree felonies. i would say that the punishment is not very fitting for the crime. this is what happens with the fear of being hacked becomes too great. shame on the school district for actually pressing charges.

w00t!

2005-08-21T21:08:00.000-05:00

that's right, i said w00t!

every day that i go to the gym with crystal (MWFSu), i do 1 mile on the treadmill at "1 mile pace". the days that crystal cannot go with me (TThSa), i run on the treadmill at "3 mile pace". in a given week, i run 13 miles on the treadmill.

today was a speed run. i jumped on the treadmill next to an elliptical where crystal was working out. set the machine to 6.5 speed which is a 9:35 mile. this machine was different than the one i was used to running on due to the fact that i moved down the isle to be near crystal. i wasted about 20s getting the machine to the correct speed, 7.0 which is a 8:00 mile. i was doing great and made it to 0.9 miles without experiencing the "runner's ache" (diaphragm soreness). at this point i pumped the machine up to 7.5 which is a 7:34 mile. i finished the mile at a 7:40 overall time.

i have achieved 2 out of 3 of my goals for the year. i have joined the sub-8 mile club. all that is left is to finish a 5K in less than 26:00. i don't ever remember being able to run a sub-8 minute mile. i am in the best shape of my life.

digital photos

2005-08-21T18:46:00.000-05:00

lame post title, but basically, this is about my experience finding a decent online photo album generator.

i wanted something slim, dynamic, skinnable, and required little to nothing as far as additional packages. first, i came across ids. IDS fit most of those categories. it was dynamic (managed via an admin interface), has shutterfly integration, and is skinnable. however, it is a masked package in gentoo and even when unmasked, it requires apache and mysql.

then i stumbled across JAlbum. jalbum is great. it is a contained java application requiring only a current JRE. it is very skinnable (via BeanScript) and was slim. you can download a tarball and execute the jar file without needing to truly install it. it is not very dynamic however as it generates static pages, but the developers came up with a clever way to work around this. to prevent the user from having to regenerate an entire photo album to add a few photos (which can suck if you have 1000+ photos like i do), they track which photos have been added (metadata) and only deal with the "new" photos.

the skins are very nice (even though some people's web design skills are deplorable) and can be easily modified. in the end, i ended up choosing BananAlbum. the flash is smooth and i liked the menu system. the only thing it lacks is shutterfly integration. i've looked through some of the skins that use it, and i think i should be able to hack this into the skin.

without further ado, here is the initial photo album. enjoy and let me know of any feedback. this is of coarse an initial dry run. it took me a while to get the image size correct, but the default sizes screw with how they come out on the actual page (giant black gap around the image). all in all, i'm very pleased with this program and the resultant photo album. considering how many photos we seem to collect, a digital photo album just seems like a natural progression.

gaming news

2005-08-17T19:37:00.000-05:00

gotta love that time before a major console war where all companies are scrambling to share all the details fit for the public. here's some noteworthy news items.

first, i stumbled across rouge galaxy, which looks like the first RPG to pique my interest since the days of xenogears.

next, the new gameboy micro was priced today at $99. not too shabby, but its an old system with a new look. funny, that look is awfully similar to that of a psp or a ds cut in half.

next is the news about hd-dvd. basically, it seems that hd-dvd is losing steam in its battle for the format war. this is not good if microsoft intends on integrating this technology into their systems, eventually. looks as if sony may finally rectify it's betamax problem.

next, i stumbled across this jewel and it looked interesting; very nice artistic design.

it also looks like nintendo may be setting themselves up for serious disappointment with the hype around their new controller. with all of the hoopla about the controller, i seriously hope that it is actually innovative, else nintendo will simply be written off as a hype-shop like sony. that would be very bad for nintendo's reputation (they're known for sticking to awkward technologies unlike their competition).

surfing around some more on 1up, i found this article about psp losing steam. this was actually an interesting read because if you look at the history of all systems, they all start out that way. sony seems to have an advantage with this system though. rather than sitting through a christmas with many lackluster titles, it seems that they may have worked through the "awkward" stage (6mo after a launch is when the systems usually pick up pace) by christmas time. nintendo seems to have blown that awkward stage to pieces with the ds. the most likely cause of this problem is due to the coming console war. if you check ign, you find that there are many plans to release many new games, most of them do not appear to be EA-style rehashes either.

also, zelda was pushed back. this is a shame, but from nintendo, it means the game actually will be better. few companies can actually say that.

lastly, i saw a news article about a game on the ps3 called project force. this is made by the same folks that brought us armored core. if you actually watch the videos, you'll see that the mech is VERY similar to one in armored core. i just hope that they get off their asses and add network play to this version. i've been clamoring for it for years, and the lack thereof has convinced me to stop buying these rehashes that lack innovation.

so that's it, lotta news today. better start saving for an expensive christmas :)

tooth fairy

2005-08-17T18:39:00.000-05:00

i finished reading "red dragon" by thomas harris today. the book took approximately 2 weeks (that's about 20 hours) to complete, which was much longer than it should have taken if not for the annoying talk radio that is played at obscenely high volumes in the vanpool.

no spoilers here, the plot was almost exactly as retold in the movie of the same name. i had seen the movie prior to reading this book, but was still slightly fuzzy on the details (the only thing that i could remember was the end scene).

the book however, focused a large portion of the book on 2 things: will graham's and francis dolarhyde's grip on sanity. both characters struggle with their demons and in the end, only will is able to overcome them.

a large section of the book is devoted to explaining why D (as he is referred to in the book) is the way he is. they spent several chapters on his youth and several events that led him to his current mental state (namely: his time in an orphanage after his mother deserted him in the hospital, his grandmother threatening to cut his johnson off for wetting the bed, and his step brother beating him for being the bastard child of the family). in fact, i felt this urge to even feel empathy for the character; we all have feelings of rejection. as with the movie, D changes near the end (culminating in his eating of the painting) and its almost as if i was rooting for him. once i realized he was a brutal murderer and no long doubted his intentions, it became clear that he was a monster of fair intellect.

there were two major differences from what i can remember from the movie (there may be more, my memory is lacking). first, harris seems to focus on D's strength and stature. it's almost as if D is an intimidating and intellectual man. i remember 2 scene's in particular which were cut from the movie. when Reba McClane first 'dated' with him, she bumped into him and said '[i]t was like bumping into a tree[,]" and that his arms "felt like an oak banister."

also, there was the scene with the gas attendant. this was the other major difference. upon filling up on gas, D noticed the attendant staring at Reba. he then made a threat that he could easily snap his back and catch him if he tried to run. this was crucial because in the end of the book, this gas attendant was the person who's face was blown apart by the shotgun (not D's). in the movie, i don't remember if they every actually indicated who was shot. in fact, i remember being outraged at not finding out. again, i could be wrong because it has been a while.

all in all, it was a good book. i enjoyed the part that focused on the forensics in the beginning. the book had a much lower reading level requirement than anything by clive barker, especially imajica. i feel that the details of the story were written as if they were a nonfictional listing of events rather than an emotional roller coaster of vivid descriptions. because of that, i feel the book should have focused more on the forensics rather than the psychological aspect; it would suit the author's writing style better. i enjoyed the book and look forward to reading the next part in the series.

my rating (of 10): 7

lastly, i wanted to note that one of the things i've always wanted to be was strong. i don't want to be like the guys tyler durden (of fight club) want to avoid who pack into gyms, as i am not shallow. the description of D as sturdy as a tree and as sturdy as an oak banister is what i have always wanted to be. that is my motivation for going to the gym; i want my wife to grab my arm and think "oak banister."

run forrest, run

2005-08-17T00:16:00.000-05:00

for the last 4-5 weeks, i have been running at fairly regular times. 2 weeks ago, i started training for a 5k. every other day i run 3 miles; my goal to achieve a total time of approximately 25 minutes (that's about an 8:20 per mile pace). after the two weeks, i am able to complete the three miles in 33 minutes, down from 36.

i also do not suffer from runner's cramp and the main problem i have in completely the three miles is occupying my mind and ignoring the pain in my shins (too large of steps tire me out early and treadmills are notoriously small).

to keep my mind busy, i have been listening and getting motivated to a minidisc containing Lamb Of God (As The Palaces Burn), Meshuggah (Destroy, Erase, Improve), and In Flames (Soundtrack To Your Escape). i would like to make one that has some The Haunted and Hatebreed. the minidisc player will last for many hours with a single rechargeable AA battery. today was especially difficult because half way into the run, the battery died.

anyways, the major announcement is that i finally achieved a goal i set forth for myself to achieve by the end of this year. in fact, this is a goal i had when i was running at Sendero Ridge. on monday, i ran a sub-9 minute mile (8:35 to be exact). this is a major deal for me, as it is the first time i can remember, ever, running a sub-9 minute mile. i think given more effort and will power, i could have met my sub-8 minute mile goal at the same time.

in a matter of 4 weeks, i have become significantly better at my running, and the results are visible everyday.

the first mammal to wear pants

2005-08-16T23:39:00.000-05:00

it has been a while since i posted mainly because i went out of town on thursday. technically, if i had posted then, it would have been only 2 days. instead, my wife and i went to austin for a wedding; crystal was a maid of honor. so the weekend was chockfull of weirdness that i just have to blog about.

basically, the world is a vast place, with many people inhabiting it. for all of mankind's advancements, it seems funny that there are so many morons on this planet. maybe it was just my sample size (limited to DFW and Austin), but i encountered several people who slept-in while God was handing out common sense.

first, we left the house at around 7pm and headed down 75 South. somewhere near 635, i ended up behind a white van hauling a flat trailer bed with supplies (mostly fairly large machines). apparently, one of the workers packed in the van had loaded a small flat square sheet of aluminum loosely into the trailer. this sheet of metal flipped out of the trailer, as i was following it, and headed towards my car. i was mostly worried about it either shredding a tire or cutting into the body. the scrap headed under the car, barely missing the tire but scraping the lower part of the front bumper. furious, i tried to tail the guy to get the license, but only managed 4 of the characters.

then when we pulled over in hillsboro, i met the next weirdo. while pumping gas at the diamond shamrock (for a meager $2.29), i noticed the redneck next to me reach into the outside trash. he dug in this trash can for a few seconds and pulled out a newspaper, or what was left of it, and proceeded to read as if he had just bought it off the newsstand. never seen anyone frugal enough to dig newspapers out of the trash to save 50 cents.

we went to the rehearsal, which lasted all of 20 minutes, and drove downtown to enjoy a free rehearsal dinner. they were scheduled to eat at moonshine's, which was a fairly nice restaurant. but this is where i met weirdo number 3. this one was known as the "watch-licker". we sat at the table that was U-shaped, crystal and i sat on in inner left side. since the entire meal was paid for by someone else, i decided to get a nice $9 glass of pinot grigio. across the table sat the bride's cousin (or the bride's sister's son) and next to him sat her father (her cousin's grandfather). the father of the bride put his arm on the shoulder of the boy and started talking to him. the boy turned his head and licked the band of his grandfather's watch. i starred for what seemed like minutes, trying to reassure myself that it was the wine. this however was not the case because the boy proceeded to lick the watchband 2 more times. words cannot describe my bafflement.

that brings us to the next weirdo, number 4, the father of the bride. he was a nice guy, from what i could understand. that is to say, his redneck accent was so thick, i could barely understand him. i'd say that i am pretty forgiving in my ability to understand broken English, but this accent was beyond my abilities. he talked to me at one point for 20 minutes, none of which really registered with me. i vaguely recall talking about fry's. when he led a prayer during the reception, i could have sworn he said "amen" about 10 times.

the next weirdo, number 5, was discovered at the reception. just before the food was dished out, a heavy-set fellow sat down next to me along with a few of his friends. he had some of the longest sideburns i've ever seen. jenny (ford's faux date), ford, another married couple (i forget their names, they were nice), and myself were engaged in a conversation when this fellow next to me kinda leaned his head in and make a comment / joke about what was being conversed. he did not turn his head or acknowledge that we had not included him in our discussion, but simply starred at his friends as if that's where the conversation was originating. he did this several more times throughout the night.

lastly, the biggest weirdo, number 6, of them all was the bride. the wedding was very non-traditional, but i suppose that's what to expect when the couple had lived together for 5 years, had 2 years to plan the wedding, who's proposal story entailed the bride waiting in the car while the groom bought a ring at the mall so he could propose in the car, and who were just plain weird. crystal had mentioned 2 weeks prior that we had watched (tortured ourselves is more like it) manos: hands of fate. well, she made sure to bring the movie up, not once, but three times the day before and of her wedding. that craptacular movie should be the last thing on her mind. the best part happened during the reception dinner while she was sitting next to crystal. near the end of the dinner, she leaned over and asked crystal if we wanted to go see a movie after this. i couldn't make this up if i tried. apparently the idea of having wild and crazy sex with your new husband wasn't even on her mind.

you would think that the human gene pool would've weeded these people out by now but apparently not. good to see mother nature sleeping on the job.

playstation portable

2005-08-09T19:07:00.000-05:00

so on saturday i bought a PSP. i've been saving some spending money and birthday money since i moved to dallas. i also bought a copy of lumines and the EB 1 year warrenty for $345 after taxes ($250 for the psp, $40 for lumines, and $20 for the warrenty).

i was largely afraid of the dead pixel problem. crystal and i were scheduled to meet her uncle (the one who helped get me employed), so i rushed to open the box and test the system. stupid EB clerk forgot to put the UMD disc into the lumines case. finally, unsheathed the beast and checked the entire screen, all working.

the system's user interface is far greater than that of the PS1 and the PS2 but reminds me of the E3 videos demonstrating the PSX. there is a top bar so to speak; it is a horizonally scrollable list of icons. each icon pertains to a certain system menu item such as games, movies, music, configuration, etc. from there, a drop down menu (always present on the current icon) appears with different options such as play game, view memory card game saves, play movie, play music, change the time. much clean and works much better with the limited buttons on the console.

the hardware works well. the wifi out of the box is nice, as well as the game-sharing feature (you can play a game through wifi when you don't actually own it, someone else on the wifi shares it). lumines even has a feature that by powering it down actually puts the system in a hybernate mode. the disc tray pops open with a not-so-reassuring click. the discs awkwardly fit into the tray and the tray doesn't exactly make a perfect fit (slight movement when closed and pressed on). the widescreen is very sharp and clear. the buttons press with no problems, but the analog stick moves very laterally making it's usage slightly odd. the handheld is very glossy and fingerprints do serious damage to the its sleek appearance. i'm afraid that the handheld isn't as sturdy as a gameboy; i've dropped one before and it did not break but im not very willing to try that with the psp.

all in all, the handheld is pretty spiffy system, but not sure it's worth $250. lumines however, is worth my weight in gold. its a twist on the classic tetris. im sure everyone on this planet has played tetris or a variant of it. all blocks are 2 by 2 squares, each square can have one of 2 colors. the blocks fall as far to the ground as they can, meaning they will split if you drop one half of the block on higher level than the other half. there is a timer bar that destroys block collections (like puzzle fighter, similarly colored blocks join together) as it passes by them. you can even earn different skins, so the game doesn't go stale. 2-player mode is much like puzzle fighter, the more blocks you destroy and the faster you do it, the more it moves the split screen over to shrink your opponent's side of the screen.

well worth the money. i look forward to buying wipeout pure next month.

"off the charts" suck

2005-08-04T21:23:00.000-05:00

so i read (or tried to anyways) a book this week and watched a movie. both are on a new level of suck. the book was a collection of short stories by h.p. lovecraft. the movie was "bridget jones and the edge of reason". the following are my brief reviews.

on monday, i tried to read the first of 16 stories in a book written by h.p. lovecraft called "rats in the walls." the author wrote the story in the first person about some boring guy who inherited an old home. the last book i recall reading in the first person was r.l. stine (enough said). personally, i find that writing style reminding me of the crappy stories i read when i was 12. the story revolved around a man who was remodeling a home that was willed to him. the home apparently was VERY VERY old, and apparently the home to some old pagan worshippers. the author droned on and on about the bloodlines of the main character. after having read about all the boring family members who owned the home before, the author failed to advance the plot. instead, he wasted many pages babbling about useless characters and useless dates/facts. by time he actually got around to describing the rats that actually appeared to be in the walls, i was dying of boredom. i forced myself to read this story for 2 whole hours and i knew there was no way that i would be able to do so again the next day.

there was no way this could be described as horror except for the thought of having to read it again. torment your enemies by giving them this book.

my eye gouging review (of 10): 2

now on to the latest bridget jones' movie. the first movie was kinda ..... cute for a chick-flick. the last movie didn't leave much room for a sequel, but that didn't stop those greedy assholes in hollywood.

there was no plot. in fact, if you took the worst moments from the first movie, magnified them, and that was the entire movie. i wish i could have a spoiler for this movie, but there just isn't anything to spoil. there is no story to tell, the characters are old, and they try repeating the same crap from the last movie. the characters are even thinner than before. no wait, i recall that last statement. mark darcey, the man bridget drooled over last time, is actually kind of an ass. in the first movie, he had this mystique about him. in this movie, you learn too much about him and that he's a boring ass. neither crystal or i could give this movie the time of day. shame on you hollywood.

my rating (of 10): 4

hellbound heart

2005-08-03T21:59:00.000-05:00

last week, i finished reading "hellbound heart" by clive barker, and the following is my review. in case you haven't seen the "hellraiser" movie, the spoiler below may ruin the plot for you.

[spoiler]

the story opens up by a person named frank solving a puzzle called lemarchand's configuration. upon doing so, he summons creatures from the abyss that can only be described as demons of hell. barker then introduces a married couple who moves into the house after the husband was willed the home. the husband just so happened to be the brother of the initial character. the initial character's name is frank, and his brother is named rory. rory's wife is named julia (iirc). much like adam and eve, julia is rory's downfall. apparently she has grown tired of their marrige and lusts for something new. that something new is the summoning of frank from the pits of hell.

[\spoiler]

so in the end, this is the exact book i wanted to read when i started reading imajica. the character development was pretty thin. the bit of character that was developed in each was the bare minimum to advance the plot. none of the characters developed likable traits. in fact, the more i learned about julia and frank, the more i despised them. the commit atrosities and crimes of unspeakable horror. the book was a full-frontal assault on your sense of morality and left little to the imagination. every page i read made me want to read the following page. the characters acted in a (somewhat) rational way and i wanted to read about their next despicable act. if you are looking to read a great horror story that will chill you to the bone, i highly recommend this book. i only with there was more of it.

my rating (of 10): 9

osbourne effect

2005-07-31T22:41:00.000-05:00

ok so there are a few things i have wanted to post about in the last few days that i have just been too lazy to do.

first, i wanted to mention the dvd burner. seems the dvd burner is on the fritz. before i formatted and reinstalled, it started acting wierd by making a clicking sound every time it started to read a disc. as of late, the drive has started making the same sound when it closes a dvd while burning. so it looks like the drive will have to be replaced asap. i've been shopping around, and this drive seems to be the best choice. might as well make the jump to dual layer and just wait for the $1/disc days to arrive.

secondly, i found a link to AIM Fight on slashdot a while back. so far, it seems only chris and a friend of crystal has beat my score. i think one other person beat me, but i cannot remember whom.

next, i found some rather interesting news about the XBox 360. it seems that it will not be featuring an HD-DVD drive in the initial release. wow, if history has told us anything, this will be the final nail in microsoft's attempt to break into the gaming industry. this basically means that microsoft will be repeating what is known as the Osborne effect. for some of the older gamers out there, we have seen this before. remember back when sega made gaming consoles? i do, and i remember that they made 2 mistakes that buried them. first was the SegaCD. nuff said. second was the Dreamcast, which in turn was sega's last attempt at making hardware. why did those systems flop? anticipation of better hardware.

basically what this boils down to is this. first, microsoft will most likely be locking themselves into the DVD format because by releasing 2 versions of the XBox, there will then be non-standard hardware. this means that software publishers will be either leary about making XBox360 games, or will stick to one format only. these publishers will most likely stick to the DVD format, since it was in the original release. we've seen this before in the PS2; the exact reason why online play never really took flight. secondly, this will mean that more people will be willing to wait to get the system. this means lower initial sales figures which means less game publishers. we've seen this before with the Gamecube. but this anticipation will mean that while those people wait, Sony and Nintendo have the chance to get their hardware out and then people will choose on either raw power of the system (basically, the numbers), brand loyalty (fanboys), or game library. granted microsoft will have an advantage on the library, but they will be severely lacking in terms of raw system power (aside from the myths that the ps3 and revolution are all just hyped).

surely microsoft is doing this for a good reason... then again, they've only posted profits in 1 of 8 of the last quarters in their XBox division while Nintendo has yet to post a loss.

next but not last, i wanted to mention my site. a long time ago, i developed a site i coined "anti-thought." yeah, it just happens to be the name of this blog, but it was originally the name of that site. the site had the same basic principle as this blog though less evolved. well, recently i emerged lighthttpd and set it up. there is no content set up on the machine, but it will eventually be there. i will be redoing the general layout of the site as well as updating it with some newer technology. i will be using SSI to drive a majority of the page, including the menu and the main content. i will also be using CSS to drive the general theme. i'd like to setup a couple of CSS templates so users can switch to one that is most pleasant on their eyes. i will be reorganizing the data and creating a section to warehouse most of our pictures.

without further adue, here is the link: Anti-Thought. make sure to note that there is a port number other than 80; this was to stem the tide of the script kiddies bangin down on my webserver's door (granted they never get it, but it's just plain annoying). also, i'd like to mention that i have setup a publically accessible music streamer here: Erebus Music Server (the default theme is slow to browse, i've been meaning to change it). as you may have noticed, i'm using port numbers to control service and host destinations. if the music server is too swamped that i am unable to enjoy my music, i will effectively kill it's public access and only allow restricted IP addresses. if you are not listening, tell your player to stop/pause. if i am forced to block IP addresses, i will only allow close friends who ask for access. i cannot listen to this at work so as long as my wife can surf the net when she needs to during the day, i don't care how many people listen; evenings are another thing. so enjoy!

lastly, i wanted to mention that i finished another book called "hellbound heart," written by clive barker. this book was the basis to the movie "hellraiser." i will be giving my review of the book hopefully tomorrow after the gym.

finding neverland

2005-07-31T18:51:00.000-05:00

so we recieved "finding neverland" from netflix earlier this week. friday night, crystal and i decided to sit down and watch it (after much house cleaning). so the following is my review of "finding neverland" (starring johnny depp and kate winslet).

having heard very few things about this movie, i was somewhat expecting something in the tune of "hook" (starring robbin williams). we found it couldn't have been further from that movie.

the story is about JM Barrie, a famous playwright. the movie begins with his reaction to a less than steller play, that he had written, on opening night. he then goes to the park for some inspiration for another play and meets a family who becomes just that.

[spoiler]

Barrie finds out that the woman and her three boys are living alone after her husband died of cancer. Barrie helps to foster the children's imagination and soon becomes almost a part of the family. the children become the inspiration for his latest play, peter pan. Barrie's wife and most of the public becomes sceptic of Barrie's relationship to the family and his wife actually leaves him in the end.

the boys (peter and his older brother) quickly mature once they learn that their mother has a life-threatening illness. the play becomes a huge success but the mother dies shortly after its opening. just before she passed away, she was able to see his vision of "neverland" from his childhood.

[/spoiler]

all in all, the movie was slow but well acted. johnny depp once again managed to actually become the character he was playing, never allowing himself to become type-casted. the characters had little development, but the traits that were emphasized were heavy with emotion. the plot was fairly thin, but this did not prove to be a problem with the overall effect. the director made an extra effort to make the scenes look as photograpic as possibly. this is was a pretty decent movie and it's a shame it recieved little to no press.

my rating (of 10): 7

grub issues

2005-07-29T21:51:00.000-05:00

the dvd burning machine was finished being built last weekend. since there were no X packages to emerge, the build process was relatively quick. i booted the machine without the licecd today for the first time, as i was ready to begin burning some of the dvds i have backlogged on erebus.

come to find out, when the machine booted and tried to load grub (the boot loader), i ran across a serious problem. grub was printing "GRUB GRUB GRUB..." in an infinite loop. after grepping around the forums and googling what i could, several people hinted at the fact that manually configuring grub might have been a problem. the official grub people recommend using grub-install.

i tried this to solve my problem with no luck. another such solution hinted that the geometry of my MBR (on hd0) was screwed up. the solution was to wipe the drive completely (copy zeros to the device file) and reinstall. this would mean either backing up the current / directory or bonking the entire install. neither sounded very appealing, so i kept looking for another solution.

then i found this helpful grub thread in the forums. right underneath "Grub error 18" is a mention of my problem. the solution was to switch from Auto detecting HDD types in the bios to specifying them with "User Type HDD". i loved this solution as it was a hardware issue and not a software one (that required a rebuild of the system). i switched the types and used LBA since the drive is small.

it booted perfectly fine. so word to the wise, grub-096 seems to not like Auto detection HDD types.

one last thing. i have several posts i have been itching to make this week and have written down their topics as not to forget. tonight crystal and i will be watching "Finding Neverland", so i may not get to posting them tonight. tomorrow, i have plenty of work to do on my network, so i will have time to make the appropriate posts (got 100+ packages to rebuild on citadel).

don't touch that dial :)

management, buddon, and the 2 pounds

2005-07-27T22:44:00.000-05:00

so by the title, you should've guessed that this blog has 3 subjects.

first, management. there is a saying about management (especially in the software industry) that goes as follows: management wants the developers to produce an efficient (read: well-designed), cheap, and rapidly developed product. trouble is, they can only get two of three things. i'm quickly finding out that some people i work with think it's just too easy to succumb to this type of statement. they'd rather hack out a crappy solution and spend way too many hours bug fixing and maintaining than to spend an extra 20 minutes and plan out a flexible design. they lean on that expression as if it were a crutch.

on top of that, i've noticed that people in general loathe change. i feel that sentiments like this could cripple someone's career. many of the developers in my area are from an older generation, a pre-C generation if you will. C was most likely forced upon them unwillingly, much like C++. few people utilize C++'s improvements over C and favor C library routines such as printf over iostreams. the people i'm working with haven't even heard of STL!! how can you be a C++ programmer and never use an STL string?! i believe that it is essential to adapt and learn new ways of doing old things. it is human nature to be static, but doing so will hinder advancement and growth. as with everything in nature, you must adapt or die. not advancing with technology and learning new ways of doing the same old thing very certainly mean career suicide. this might explain why so many people have been at the same company for 10+ years, which is rare in software engineering.

lets move on to the "buddon" topic. i'm not perfect about my speak and articulation, but i make it a point to enunciate as best as possible. i've started noticing words that people are commonly mispronouncing or butchering. one such word is button, usually pronounced "buddon". others have include "bidness" (business), and "dat" (that); there are more but my memory escapes me. someone that i speak to on a regular basis uses the "buddon" one and my skin crawls every time i hear it.

lastly, lets talk about "the 2 pounds." crystal and i have been going to the gym (24 Hour Fitness) for 4 weeks, 4 times a week. that has equated to roughly 24 hours of working out in 1 month (pun not intended). in those 24 hours, i have lost 2 pounds and have started to bulk up. i signed a membership agreement (contract free, just have to pay first and last month's dues up front) after my trial membership expired. $28 a month and i can use the gym any day of the week, at the one location. having seen some progress, i'm really starting to enjoy going to the gym once again. tomorrow i have my body assessment upon which i will be measured and weighed; i'm eager to find out my body fat percentage.

the last thing i wanted to mention was that i've been listening to the Xenogears soundtrack and have been wanting to play the game all over again. i'm just not sure if i can bare through another 20-30 hours of leveling up. there are several new rpg's that are coming out and i might have to look into them. if anyone has any recommendations, post a comment.

golden age of golden axe

2005-07-26T22:12:00.000-05:00

i recently read this article on how most games are not for children anymore. the article raised some decent points, but highlighted on some deeper concerns.

the author is entirely right about the gaming industry and it's maturity. i grew up playing "Spy vs. Spy" for the NES into the wee hours of the night. today's kids are growing up on the PS2 playing games like "GTA" (ignoring the fact that the game is a major rehash every iteration). when kids walk into the store, they see adult themed games that are about 10 years ahead of their maturity level.

this started to make me think about the demographics of the targeted gamers. most of the industry has matured with my group of gamers. this age group has gone from 6 to 26 in the last 2 decades of gaming greatness. with this maturity comes a new era of games. us older "old-school" gamers desire different things in games nowadays. but this will all cycle back to nintendo's favor.

nintendo has been living off the slogan that "someone in the world turns 6 all the time." this will eventually be their rise to greatness once more. all of us aging gamers are getting to the point where we're having kids. these kids will not be able to wrap their infantile minds around games like "25 to Life" and not understand their social/moral impact. we aging gamers will be choosing games for our kids soon (as many have already started to), and those games are almost entirely produced by nintendo.

in the next generation war, i will most likely be siding with nintendo. in the current generation, i felt that the gamecube was the best machine of the pack. the only thing it lacked was a decent library of third party publishers and online play. both points will be moot with the next console.

also, since i am older and wiser, my taste in games has started to change. i no longer have time for 80 hour rpgs. i no longer desire to play a game that encourages criminal activity. i have no desire whatsoever to play 200+ football games (never did, but thanks to EA, we have plenty of choices). i now prefer games that rely the core values most games are neglecting; originality and fun. games like ratchet and clank and katamari are extremely entertaining and don't rely on any serious time investment. i need games that allow me to save and load at any point because life has become too hectic to sit in front of the TV for 8 hours.

the only threat to nintendo's future is the casual gamer. the casual gamer is one that i refer to as the "haloer". this gamer is one who's favorite game of all time is Halo and their first system is the XBox. this type of gamer is usually personified by frat-boys. once nintendo can appeal to these gamers as well, sony will have it's first real competition since, well, ever.

on a side note, this i-RAM device gives me a chubby just thinking about the possibilities.

various stuff

2005-07-24T21:59:00.000-05:00

yesterday morning, a friend of mine in DC (chris) bought 6 tickets to see NIN in san antonio on 10/16. NIN is one of the bands that i've been wanting to see for years but haven't had the luck to get the tickets in time. earlier this year, i missed the ticket release by less than a week. back in 2000, i missed the ticket release by 6 hours. anyways, i'm glad i get to finally see them before i get too old and uninterested in concerts.

i wanted to hit on some stuff about my home lan. for those of you who don't know, i usually have a lan at home setup to serve many utilities such as webserver, fileserver, dvd/cd burner, desktop machine, laptop, router, testbed, and several unutilized machines. here's the current setup (bear in mind, half of the lan is currently in the closet due to space issues):

Note: all internal ip addresses are in the 192.168.0.0/24 block, with 192.168.0.200+ being dedicated to dhcp.

citadel (72): main desktop [950 mhz amd]
erebus (34): fileserver (svn, nfs, smb, ftp, mp3) [733 mhz p3]
babel (92): dvd/cd burner [733 mhz p3]
phobos (75): webserver [75 mhz sparcstation 4]
lappy (20): laptop [1.6 ghz intel]
hanger (2): router [200 mhz intel]
testbed (56): test boxes [ranging from 233 mhz intel to 666 mhz dual intel]

ok so basically, the citadel machine runs gentoo and fluxbox (gnome backup). stays pretty up to date, but in the "x86" keywords. i ran in the "~x86" field before, but that led to _many_ problems. something about running nightlies just doesn't seem quite right anymore. lappy is our dell inspiron 2650 laptop that runs winxp (that's right, the only windows machine in the house). it's starting to age and will most likely be replaced in a year. to those of you who know me well, this next statement may shock you. lappy will most likely be replaced by an apple laptop. ok, pick your jaw up off the ground.

hanger is a donated machine with 400 mbs of hdd space running ipcop. a company i interned for several years ago wanted to throw it away and they let me have it. eventually, hanger will be spruced up. i am thinking of building an mini-itx machine. all of the testbed machines are in the closet on the patio. none of them were operational and have incomplete cases. i was too lazy to complete them. eventually, i'd like to turn the testbed machines into a cluster for folding at home.

lastly, why i began talking about all of this to begin with. phobos is an old server box that a friend of mine from school (ron pedde). the only reason why i even wanted it was because it was a small and contained rack-sized machine. it even had a 16 gig scsi harddrive. the problem is i'm not wanting to use that machine much anymore. because it's a sparc machine, support in linux is iffy. i know gentoo would be a better fit than debian, but i cringe at the idea of compiling everything on a 75 mhz processor. also, babel has become so far out of date, updating it has become a serious problem. it was an original 1.4 gentoo install and has since been updated to 2004.2. it has way too many useless applications. and compounded with the updating problem, has made it too difficult to maintain in its current installation. the best idea is to bonk the portage and bins, replace with 2005.0, and rebuild the whole system with updated use flags. this should take less time since i've done the exact same thing on the fileserver and there will be no X windows applications installed. i've also contemplated making it the webserver as well, to knock out the phobos problem as well.

im not sure yet on all of that however, and the next week should prove to be an experiment. im going to look for a minimalistic webserver that at the least supports fastcgi (php would be nice). since the old kernel on babel was 2.4.2x, the new libata + 2.6.x kernels should prove to make the dvd burning and setup easier.

citadel is finished being setup and has moved into an update cycle (updates performed bimonthly). erebus still needs smb and nfs to be setup; they are installed and updated, just not setup. lappy can't be updated (pity it's winxp). hanger is updated periodically via ipcop's lovely update process.

so when i finish the experiments with babel, i'll post some updates. also, i was wondering if everyone can ping my dyndns hostname: s1n.dyndns.org. also, you can browse to my music server here. if it becomes too bogged down, i will have to restrict external access to privelaged IPs. if you are unable to access my music server, please let me know, same if you cannot. since the webserver is not setup, do not direct your browser to the hostname, hanger will forward the request into the void.

time to get to work on babel.

please comment

2005-07-23T23:33:00.000-05:00

this was something that came up as i told several of my RL friends (what a loser i am, shortening "real-life" to "RL"), i found that i was forming an audience. ever since stats.blogger.com went out of commission, i've been too lazy to develop (or utilize an existing) tracker. i've been meaning to do so for quite some time, just never got around to it.

basically, i have no idea who's been reading my blog. if you are just now reading my blog for the first time or are a regular reader, please let me know. post a comment to this blog and tell me how often you read, how i might know you, what you think of my incessant ranting, or anything you feel worthy of noting. also, if you can't post a comment, please email me.

it's tough posting into the void and not knowing if anyone reads it.

tux marches

2005-07-23T22:07:00.000-05:00

i was tempted to use a play on words and title this "march of the pigs", but it just wouldn't be a fitting title. crystal and i saw "march of the penguins" today in plano. we had trouble finding it still in theatre's but eventually found it. after having seen "super size me" for the first time and marked it the best movie i've seen in 2005, i feel i may have to recall that statement (keyword: may).

the movie was 90 minutes, and before i initially saw the movie, i thought that this would prove to be 45 minutes too long. that was clearly not the case. the movie is about the emperor penguin's pilgrimage to parenthood. every so often (i believe once a year), this penguin will march to certain areas in the antarctic where the ice is thick enough to support their weight for a period of time and shield them from the upcoming winter.

the movie documents this penguin's struggle for life. it is narrated well by morgan freeman since he always has had a narrator's voice (so does the guy in the allstate commercials). the style of photography was awe inspiring. they showed that even though they are simply birds that swim, these animals clearly must have a soul. man of these animals show emotions we only thought capable in humans. the directors were able to show how majestic and beautiful life in a desolate area can still be.

they steered clear from the "gore-fest" style of animal documentaries, and rather focused on the love and strife that is so profound, you would swear that these penguins have what humanity claims sole ownership of (souls). they show you despair and agony, love, hope, humor and playfulness. several times, there are scenes where the animals show gut-wrenching pain over lost children since the cold is an unyielding and malevolent force. they show how two strange creatures can meet and show undying love for one another, brief as it may be. the animals bear through this childbirth ritual for 8 months.

this movie was superb and well shot. the photographic element was of national geographic's quality. something as simple as childbirth (everyone does it, so it can't be that bad) became an emotional ride. if your heart is not warmed by this movie, you have a black heart that pumps oil. animal lovers beware, there are scenes that reflect how much of a struggle this ritual is for them (i.e. an older penguin dies, and they film it's last seconds as it's eyes close for the last time).

this movie's rating (of 10): 8

imajica

2005-07-22T23:58:00.000-05:00

for the last two months, i have been reading a book called "Imajica" by clive barker. since i get 2 hours per day to myself on the vanpool that i ride, i figured i'd spend that time reading a book. this was my first endeavor. when i originally picked it up, i thought it would be closer to horror. clive barker is the mind behind the hellraiser series (book titled "hellbound heart"). i picked up a reprint of this set, which was combined to form a single book of massive proportions that was divided in two sections.

[spoiler]

the story is about a man named Gentle who has a mysterious past. a close friend of his dies and his ex-girlfriend has a hit taken out on her head (by her ex-husband). he then meets the assasain who takes him to another world, which is actually another Dominion or plane of existance. he travels in these strange lands with his new friend and meets many people on his way. in his journey, he finds out that everything he is doing is all apart of a masterplan that begun over 200 years ago. Gentle is of a higher power and it is his work to make the worlds whole.

[/spoiler]

the story deals with issues such as sexual desires, destiny, religion, and the existance of a benevolent God. until the ending, the story has a gloomy forshadowing that things will come to a screeching halt. clive barker does a fantastic job of describing the unreal. many things in the book cannot be seen and can only be described in ways in which he did so. for example, one of the characters let out a shriek and it was describe as "being loud enough to shake color from the air". then there was a massive riot in the middle of a barbaric public execution (it was a raid that turned out to be where the soldiers shot at many of the victims even as they fled into the audience). his description of how the crowd instantly escalated into a riot was so well, that i read it as fast as i would've seen it in a movie. it was almost like i could hear the crappy hard rock in the background while he describe thousands of citizensunleashing hell and destruction.

at many points in the book, the story dragged on. several things were described that had little to no effect on the story. the second (of 2) main characters (Jude) seemed to always act irrationally. every decision she made almost came out of left field. barker did a very good job at describing Gentle's thought process and every route his character took made sense. Jude on the otherhand seemed to constantly be winging it and always without logic. her character rather annoyed me and i think it hurt the overall plot.

all in all, i would say that the story was mediocre, but the writing was supurb. never would i have thought that reading about the boring things in life could come to life on the pages of a book. next time, i will make sure that the book i start is indeed the style (horror, not dark fantasy) that i want.

book rating (out of 10): 8

the readdir incident

2005-07-22T21:43:00.000-05:00

there were some developments with the readdir incident that i found worthy of blogging. this should be brief, but amusing none the less.

so this person continued to debug their program for a majority of the day. around 2, i saw that they had enlisted the aid of another team member to fix the problems with this program. the thought that 2 people were working on this crap-ass code and logging those ever precious contract dollars to solving something as simple as getting a directory listing irked me to no end.

i sat down and told myself, "you get 5 minutes jason, churn it out and how them how easy something like this is". in the span of one (yes, 1) minute, i had written a program from scratch that took in a directory and, without memory problems, filled a vector with the file names. in case you're wondering what the function looked like. the solution was a total of 13 lines, including lines with open/close braces only.

i did have it here, but decided it was probably best to remove it. to summarize, that function (C version, this is a C++ version using STL) is freely available in the stevens book. however, both people that were working on this fought me tooth and nail on this. i printed it and told them to use it if they wanted to save each other and the project some time. it wasn't being used and i basically refused to help this person any further (not so much refused, more like i acted as if i was unable to help them).

i dropped the issue and moved on. i gave a working solution, they can use it if they didn't want to continue to flush tax payers' money down the drain.

super size me!

2005-07-21T23:30:00.000-05:00

the other day, we received the 'super-size me' dvd in the mail from netflix. today we watched it and it changed our perceptions on food forever. this is the best movie i've seen in 2005. granted the year is only half over and it technically was released last year, it's still the best flick i've seen in 2005. the following may contain some spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie, do so immediately.

so to give anyone a rundown of what the movie is about who hasn't heard of it, morgan spurlock wanted to see what would happen if he tried to live entirely on a mcdonald's diet for 30 days. 30 days isn't for very long and initially, i wouldn't have thought it would've had a major impact. boy was i wrong.

he setup regular visits with 3 doctors to monitor his health for the month. they checked his health and he appeared to be a very fit and healthy man. that all changed.

on his third day of this new diet, morgan was puking in the parking lot. 3 days, lord knows how he felt in the end. he traveled the country and ate at many different restaurants. he covered issues mainly concerning america's morbid obsession to be as fat as possible. some of the statistics that were thrown out were appauling (nutritional content, garbage generation, etc). he even tried his best to debunk the cheeseburger bill by going to many restaurants and seeing if they were able to provide nutritional facts to their customers (you guessed it, most are incapable).

by the end, he wrecked his body. he gained 14% body fat (or 25 pounds) in 1 month. his liver was in poor shape, his mental health had degraded in such a way that he was only happy when he ate, and he rendered his penis "worthless".

the 2 most disturbing things in the movie are the following. first, he sat man children down and asked them to identify some people (in pictures). he was on a rant about how the targeting of children is similar to the "fake cigarrettes" in that they are trying to breed customers for life. he showed several famous people: george washington, jesus, wendy of Wendy's (TM) fame, and Ronald McDonald. none of the children recognized jesus yet every single one recognized ronald mcdonald instantly.

the other thing in the movie was a bonus feature on the dvd and was not included in the actual full-length film. morgan wanted to show how the food aged to give you an idea how it aged in your body. he put many mcdonald's meals in seperate clear jars as well as a "normal" restaurant's burger and fries and left them for weeks. by the end of 2 weeks, the normal restaurant's food was rotten beyond recognition (it was actually removed after 5 weeks due to putrid stench). the mcdonald's sandwiches decayed at roughly half the rate as the normal food. the big mac did not show signs of decay until something like 5 weeks. the utterly harrowing discovery was with the mcdonald's fries. after 10 weeks, they looked as fresh as the day they were placed in the jar. there were no signs of decay and looked almost exactly the same. after 10 weeks, the odor was so horrid, the food was thrown out, so the french fry ("smoking fry") experiment was never completed.

i think i would like to complete this experiment, documenting it along the way. i need to find a way to make sure that my experiment cannot be tainted or scewed. i will also have to have control and test groups. i will post more on this as i work out the details. if anyone has any additional ideas, please forward them to me.

static variables

2005-07-21T17:04:00.000-05:00

this is something i meant to blog about the other day, and since i took the day off (dentist and optometrist appointments), i figured i'd use some of my time to post it now.

i dont usually discuss my work with people given its need for security. it's a cleared job, so i do my best to not say anything that can be interpreted as detail. i also don't do this as a way of keeping business and pleasure separated. but something at work irritated me enough that i feel required to mention it here. all names and details will be stripped that do not need to be present.

i won't say who did this as to aide in my vagueness. a function was written that pulls a listing of filenames contained within a directory. not anything that challenging, especially in POSIX/ANSI. lil readdir and dirent usage and you're done; quick and painless. the author of this function originally wanted to make a system() call to 'ls' and parse the output into a data structure. .... enough said.

once i convinced them that using readdir was as simple as reading a file (DIR pointers rock), i then discovered my work was far from over. inspecting the code that was then checked into the repository, i found it to be much worse than originally expected. they placed the filenames into a single char pointer, colon delimited (strcat()'ing them along the way). ....

what's wrong with this method you might ask? well i'll tell you. first, the function returns statically allocated data. the char* that was returned was malloced within the function and thus returned. second, bjarne stroustrup himself (in his official c++ standard book) stated that char* is an outdated way of dealing with strings and the 'string' class defined in the STL is the preferred method. it's no wonder, STL strings are unbelievably easy to deal with. as much of a kludge the idea of STL is, it's nice to see that they 'just work'. lastly, why were they colon delimited in a single string?! why not use an array? are they allergic to arrays? to force the person to know what to have to strtok the returned string against (delimiter could be anything) is just plain absurd.

i will not make any comments about this person's education or their work experience. i will however state what they are and let you infer meaning. after a 4 year degree at University of Texas at Arlington and 2 years at the current position, this is the amateur mistake that is being made by this one person. if the guilty party is reading this, you know who you are and should feel ashamed. laziness is no excuse for creating more work for yourself and others.

on a lighter note, someone pointed out that the term 'static variables' is actutally an oxymoron. it's either one or the other, not both. i guess that's why i've always just referred to them as 'statics'. also, now that i think about it, why did they come up with the term 'static storage'? why not use something other than 'static'; it can get confusing. then again, what jargon in development isn't this way?

tick, bush, tick

2005-07-19T22:34:00.000-05:00

today i watched bush's speech about his pick for the replacement supreme court judge. in doing so i noticed he shifted his lower jaw 24 times, mostly at the end of a sentance. crystal tried defending him by saying that he must be under enourmous pressure from the public. to that, i question why he's even a president if his PR skills are lacking. clinton may have been a rotten person, but at least he was able to talk straight, even if it was lying through his teeth.

moving along. i found an article on slashdot about fold 'n drop. i must admit, this idea looks horrific. if anyone since the dawn of the desktop (not the PC kind, the physical kind) has had paper on their desk, they will attest that this will only make matters worse. imagine a "pile" of windows on your monitor that mirrors that collage of paperwork on your desk that has yet to be organized in the 3 months it's been there. no thanks, that's a UI feature i will pass on.

i'd like to make a final note that the spell checker in blogger's editor appears to not be working (for me), so i apologize in advance for any typos. i'm too lazy to correct them in open office.

the twisted factory

2005-07-18T18:46:00.000-05:00

on sunday, crystal and i decided to go see the charlie and the chocolate factory remake by tim burton. having been a tim burton fan for a while (mars attacks!, nightmare before christmas, batman returns, edward scissorhands, batman, beetlejuice, pee-wee's big adventure), i knew what to expect. we found a theatre where matine tickets ran for $2.50 a pop.

i'd to preclude my review with a bit of advice. go to a later showing, preferably as late as possible. i'll get into why shortly.

we arrived 30 minutes early with our pre-sale tickets and had to wait for 15 minutes in a line outside. come to find out, most parents had never seen (or didn't recognize the name) a tim burton film. why an 8 year old should want to see this film is beyond me. being a burton film, most parents should realize that it may (most likely) not make sense to children under 13. in fact, the only people to ever laugh during the film were adults.

that being said, it wasn't the same cheery film originally produced. it was more like a dr. suess book on acid. thankfully mr. burton took many liberties with the film. the oompah loompahs were far weirder than their original incarnations, but i rather missed the lime-green hair. every song they sang was in a different style of music (pop, disco, 60s-ish, rock). the characters were updated and their flaws were magnified. burton decided to spend more time on showing how warped and rotten the 4 children were and painted a scene where charlie was a saint.

also, he took certain liberties with the storyline as well. im not sure if any of this is actually in the original book, so if it is, forgive me in advance. he spent a good deal of time trying to show that mr. wonka had a depressing and lonely childhood. he even changed the ending quite a deal.

the imagery that the movie portrays crosses into the absurd. one second they are in a giant pink dragon boat floating in a river of chocolate; the next, they are in a room of spiraled blue and white with little stations where squirrels crack open nuts. the change from the golden egg to the squirrel incident was a nice change.

also, the comedy was what made the film work so well. short and subtle comments/actions that were funny only if you were paying close attention. they were usually dialog comments made by mr. wonka to aid in his dislike for the rotten children and their rotten parents. since i waited to post this blog a whole day, i am unable to draw any decent quotes from memory, but rest assured that it (the humor) is there.

in the end, i was thoroughly impressed with his take on a demented children's story. having looked back, this movie was perfect for a burton remake. the casting couldn't have been better either. johnny depp did a superb job at being a creepy cross between mr. wonka and michael jackson. when this movie comes out on dvd, i am almost compelled to actually buy it.

barnes isn't noble

2005-07-18T18:00:00.000-05:00

so quick update on some things crystal and i did this weekend. most notably was the sheer amount of books we bought this weekend.

first, there was an annual book sale in plano held by the public library. paperback books ran for 75 cents each and hardcover books ran for $1.50.

we spent 2 hours looking through a field of used books. they had about 7 or 8 rows of tables linked to be of about 50-75 yards in length. some sections were emptier than others, such as the horror section (pretty bleak, only had a handful of stephen king books). i looked through all of the sections minus the children's. there was also a "collector's corner" which had older and rarer books, tapes, and records. i waited until 2 people were done rummaging though the records and thumbed through them for myself. i suspect the two previous shoppers had claimed anything of value already. we did however find a 100 year old "Henry V" book for $5 which we dutifully claimed.

given the fact that they were mostly donated by outside sources, i was expecting the lot to be of better selection. but after the 2 hours, here's what we managed to amass:

Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy (paperback)
Pandora by Anne Rice (hardcover)
Henry V (hardcover)
The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Time Clancy (hardcover)
X Window System Programming and Applications with Xt (OSF/Motif Edition) by Douglas A. Young (paperback)
Business Law by J.R. Allison and R. A. Prentice (hardcover)
Peter and the Wolf by Walt Disney (hardcover)
Bambi Gets Lost by Walt Disney (hardcover)
The Jungle Book by Walt Disney (hardcover)

the total value came out to be about $16.25. not too shabby considering what we walked away with.

then on sunday, we were waiting for a movie to start so we stopped by half priced books to find an office book for crystal. come to find out they were putting several books on clearance. many paperbacks were $1 and most hardcovers were $2. we decided to get several more books while the getting was good. so here's what we bought sunday:

Violin by Anne Rice (hardcover)
Hannibal by Thomas Harris (hardcover)
Lasher by Anne Rice (paperback)
Power Plays Bio-Strike by Tom Clancy (paperback)
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (paperback)
The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice (paperback)
The Runnaway Jury by John Grisham (paperback)
Sacrament by Clive Barker (paperback)
Silence of the Lambs (paperback)

this total came to about $11. not bad for the weekend. i don't think i'll be reading the clive barker book, as i bought it just to have it for possible reading (in case i'm out of everything else to read and can't find anything else worth reading). in all likelihood, i'll read the other barker book i have, then the hannibal series.

2 hours a day in a moving vehicle with nothing to do leaves plenty of time to either lament to oneself or read. i'd rather be industrious.

Fedora Core is not Linux

2005-07-14T18:04:00.000-05:00

scanning slashdot, i came across this article. it's someone's blog rant about how they think linux is not ready for the desktop. well, here's my retort.

first i'd like to point this statement:

I've tried KDE and Gnome desktops but my latest is FC4 so my criticism is focused on that (and Gnome) but I think KDE distros suffer just as bad if not worse.

gee, where to start. from the sounds of it, they are referring Gnome, KDE, and Fedora Core 4 as "Linux". anyone who uses the OS on a regular basis should be cringing at this person's inability to separate desktop from distribution from the Linux kernel. let me bold this next statement as to shed like on the these dim folks. Linux is defined only as a kernel. Gnome and KDE are desktop managers. Redhat (Fedora Core), SUSE, Slackware, Mandrake, etc are distributions. These are all independent projects, and only the Linux kernel is actually Linux. it really irks me when people are unable to see the distinction. a distribution is nothing more than an installer and a collection of packages. GET IT RIGHT!

ok, next on the list of faults in this person's statements: migration. let me drop a quote so the rest will make sense.

When Regular People fire up the Linux desktop for the first time, the browser, office suite, email client, IM client, file manager, etc, each need to carry over as much as possible of the Windows application settings and all or very nearly all of the user data.

so basically, linux should port all the data and settings a user has set in windows into an installation? ha! when was the last time windows ported any data not only from an old windows install, but from a install from a 3rd party OS? never. as a matter of fact, your only hope is to manually back your data up in windows (to a portable format) and then import on the new system. that's the way you have to do it even if you're porting to a new install of windows.

in fact, when was the last time a windows environment worked with other platforms in a homogeneous manner? when was the last time you remember booting windows and having it recognize a reiserfs drive? how about never! in fact, linux has made gigantic strides to work along side as many platforms as possible, including windows.

next on the agenda: stability.

A user should be able to install Fedora Core 4 and go grab the latest Firefox release from Download.com and have it work without the need for finding and installing compat-libstdc++ or whatever. Developers may think it's cool to reuse as much code as possible but the user doesn't care whether it was Linux that failed to include the necessary compatibility components or Mozilla that failed to make the build work for that particular dot release of libstdc++.

when was the last time you could do this in windows? dll-hell is a direct result of such desires. again, i'd like to reiterate, this is not a Linux problem, but a Redhat problem. besides, if you rpm the build, then it will automatically resolve the dependencies for you (one of the reasons i stopped using RH). so this complaint is based on ignorance of use.

Regular People expect to be able to download software, install it, and have it just work.

which is why i do 'emerge -uDp firefox'. could it get any easier; hell, it even downloads it and all the dependencies that i wish to install automatically. again, ignorance of use.

lastly, they covered the issue of stability.

I don't want to start a desktop war but I really have to say to the distros, pick a desktop and be happy. Regular People shouldn't have to (guess or learn enough to) choose between Gnome and KDE when they're installing your product.

again, FC4 is not Linux. i will continue to debate the matter, however baseless it may seem. these products are not developed by Redhat. instead, they are pet projects someone started that catapulted into stardom. they were included into the distro by Redhat who thought most users like the choice of the two desktops. the mentality of "pick a desktop and be happy" is the exact reason why this person, and people like them, will always be windows users. that line of thought basically trashes the idea of flexibility that has made linux more powerful than windows. if i did not have the choice of the various programs, i'd probably not be using linux right now.

the major problem i have with all of these ignorant rants is that they are ALWAYS looking through the eyes of a seasoned windows user. because they are using something that is different, they want it to be similar to what they've used for years. this mentality should be left at the door when using an OS developed by a different vendor. if they had used Unix for years, they'd feel that linux is a welcome change. in fact, i work with people who have been using HPUX for over a decade and are elated to use linux as it is a vast improvement. personally, i've used linux for 5 years, 4 years exclusively. when i use one of the windows machines at work (have to for the unclassified network), i feel as though it stifles my abilities, similar to having only half a finger between both my hands. the perspective that linux is not windows has been beaten to death and im tired of reading it. adapt or die.

why should linux become a cheap knock-off of windows just because you're either too ignorant or busy to learn to use a different environment. if you wish to drive a manual transmission car for the first time, you must learn the way the manual transmission works. why should linux sacrifice its power and flexibility to satisfy the whimpers of someone unwilling to learn how to actually use a machine more complex than the first spaceship?

besides, every iteration of windows is about 2-3 years behind what linux has been capable of. ie the screenshots of longhorn show transparencies, much like what xorg has been capable of for the last 1 year at the very least (keith packard has been working on that for a long time, im not sure of the duration). windows also touted a networked filesystem called SMB, which was a rehash and slight improvement over NFS. windows just seems to rehash technologies that other vendors, including open source, have been using for years. not only that, but a basic install of windows requires several gigs and provides NO functionality. 1st and 3rd party applications must be purchased an installed seperatly to provide functionality that is availible out of the box in linux (prime example: gimp vs. adobe). perhaps if windows actually came bundled with something other than solitare and notepad, then maybe it might be able to compete with modern OS's.

come on microsoft, catch up.

b minor

2005-07-13T23:15:00.000-05:00

minor updates today; just a couple things i wanted to hit on.

i finally finished updating citadel, then the bastards in charge of the XOrg ebuild decided to release an update. so i am currently updating xorg, but basically done.

i started thinking about what it would take to make this new large sata drive a permanent fixture in my network. i am torn between using it on my file server, dvd burner (dvds are large), or my desktop machine. i need to decide and get to building me a new kernel so i can return the netflix movies.

i cooked a romantic dinner for crystal tonight. bought her flowers, a card, a bottle of Estancia Pinot Grigio wine (apparently 3rd best in dallas morning news ratings), and cooked a candle-lit surprise dinner. gotta love those random acts of love.

got the Go club meeting tomorrow and a few events for this weekend. there's a book sale in plano of books that have been donated to their library and are selling for about a buck each. then there's a photography exhibit i'd like to attend while its still on.

lastly, i've been trying to come up with a story to write about (to maybe write a novella) and i think i finally got one today. i should write it down before i forget it. it would be pretty cool to get some creative work publish. if anyone knows how to go about getting published, please drop me a line.

oh, i forgot to mention. i was reading this article on slashdot and found my jaw dropping to the floor. the fact that someone can consider hacking to be punishable by death and not what the crooks at enron/worldcom to be the same is mind boggling. hackers do it for the challenge; execs do it to walk away with billions. who seems more harmful to society? this post seems to sum up my sediments exactly.

invite this!

2005-07-11T16:11:00.000-05:00

so the bride that crystal is a maid of honor for apparently lacks all common sense and tact.

few weeks back, we received their official letters of invitations. the invitation itself looked remarkably similar to one i've seen before..... OURS! with it were no less than 5 small scraps of paper. each one had minimal knowledge and could've been merged onto a single sheet if not the back of the invitation.

one of the scraps contained, what can only be described as a display of a complete lack of tactfulness, instructions about registries. it is generally considered respectful not to inform your guests where you are registered as it implies they are required to buy you one of the crummy items you actually registered for. after being warned by crystal, this woman included one anyways.

it gets better. the only way to explain to you exactly how ..... (words escape me now) humorous this tiny scrap of paper is, i feel it's best to show you. bear in mind, this is not altered in any way.

They are Registered at: www.urbanoutfitters.com ,
www.thinkgeek.com , www.crateandbarrel.com ,
www.dwr.com , www.amazon.com
Williams and Sonoma
We are also accepting: Cash toward our Honeymoon
And Gift Cards from Target or Home Depot

that's right, they are actually registered at those sites. ok, so you're wondering what they might have possibly registered for. well, i'll do ya one better; i found their registries.

ThinkGeek
Amazon
Crate And Barrel
Urban Outfitters

i couldn't make this up if i tried. on top of that, the DWR site can't seem to locate their registry. perhaps i should get liquored up before the wedding.

day of catch up

2005-07-11T15:51:00.000-05:00

this past weekend crystal and i went to austin. crystal had some bridal stuff to do for her friend's wedding. while she did that i went to schlitterbaun and found out just how old i really am.

i took off today (monday) so that we could drive back from austin this morning and not have to worry about driving late. as it turns out, crystal had to work today, so we left at 8pm last night. surprisingly, the trip back was easier than the trip there.

so today, i am at home doing work around the house that i've put off for quite a while. some of the more notable things are cleaning, getting the router to be as lean as it used to be (before a needless reinstall), finishing the latest netflix release, getting the new SATA harddrive ready for permanent use, finish the rebuild of citadel (main desktop system), and getting some damn rest.

so far, i've cleaned the apartment with the exception of the bathroom. oh how i loathe cleaning the bathroom. i didn't mind it as much when i was living alone, but after having a second tenant share the same bathroom, things quickly get out of control. i will put that off until i can force crystal to assist me in it's cleansing.

im still rebuilding citadel, and haven't gotten to babel (the dvd burning machine that is getting the SATA drive). the router was up and working perfectly once the outage in our area ceased.

all that's left is getting some rest, which i will have to postpone until we get back from the gym tonight.

lastly, i read this article about a modified game of life. i've been conjuring up my own modifications ever since i took machine learning and learned about cellular automata. after reading that, i came up with a rough draft set of rules that incorporates whether and unique (modifiable) life-forms. once i hash out the rules a little more, perhaps i'll post them here. then i'd like to get to writing a perl script to carry out existence according to the rules.

lights out

2005-07-07T22:26:00.000-05:00

kicking off the day with a bang, i missed my vanpool by 90 seconds, give or take a few.

at work, i spent over an hour trying to explain to the group i'm currently working with that the design that i had come up with was more flexible than our original design. my explanations fell on deaf ears and most of my suggestions were disregarded. either this is because im still "the new guy" or because they like clicking onto the first design idea. it wasn't the first time it's happened and i doubt it'll be the last.

i get back to my cube (to refill on a "brown cup of love") to find a message from crystal. apparently our electricity was shut off. the company we have had to do business with up here is much more ruthless and less forgiving than CPS. basically, CPS dropped the ball on getting a letter of credit to CoServ on time, not once but twice. this time their indolence caused our electricity to be cut and fees assessed.

i made a few phone calls and harassed a few customer service reps and the problem was resolved. crystal had to stuff most of our food into the freezer in hopes of it not going sour. instead, it all froze solid. i hope the milk has thawed come tomorrow morning.

the good news is that crystal received a call-back from bank of america. she's wanted for a second interview (2 actually) and she is apparently their top choice. this will be great for her. it's a part time job that pays (by the hour) as much as mine almost. on top of that, she'll have the time to attend UTD and get an advanced degree.

this week has been crazy. this weekend, we're going down to austin to visit with family. crystal has a bachelorette party to throw (i'll talk more about that later). while she does that, i'll be going to schlitterbaun with some of her family (which will be a blast). i haven't been in over 8 years. i'm looking forward to eating breakfast at kerby lane and shopping at cheapo's for some used cd's. hope this weekend goes without a hitch.

slim jim

2005-07-07T21:23:00.000-05:00

wow, yesterday was a whopper of a day. i would have blogged about it last night but i didn't get back until late and today was just no good (more on that in the next post).

so my day is rollin along like normal until 1400 (or 2pm for you civilians). i realized that my keys were not in my pocket. i hadn't remembered taking them out, so i searched the lab and my cube. they didn't turn up. thinking back to what i last did with them, i realized i had left them in my car while i was waiting for the vanpool. having arrived early, i sat and listened to some jazz music on a college radio station at UNT. then it hit me like a ton of bricks; i had left my keys in my car the whole day, and at that, in the ignition!

if this is where i had really left them, the car was surely stolen. this would leave us in quite a predicament as we haven't been able to save much for a down payment yet (moving woes usually leave you scraping by for the first 2 months). on top of that, i couldn't recall locking my doors. so there my car sat in the albertson's parking lot for 9 hours with the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked.

i was already mentally preparing myself for the eventual; the car was gone and we would have to either make do with a single car or buy a new one with basically nothing down. the anxiety that built on the ride home weighed on my shoulders so much that i was unable to focus on my reading. once we had finally reached our destination, i deboarded and found much to my dismay that matters were worse than i had anticipated.

my car was still in the parking lot, keys in the ignition and the doors locked. i looked back and the vanpool had left as well as everyone else who rode it. i went into the albertson's to call the mckinney police for assistance. apparently, they aren't equipped for that anymore.

so my choices were to a) smash in a window, b) call a locksmith, c) wait by my car in hopes that crystal will eventually come and get me, or d) walk home and wait for crystal. options a and b seemed too expensive. option c seemed a little helpless and i wasn't sure i had the patience to sit and read in that heat. so i figured d was the best option, my only hope was that crystal would be coming home early and pick me up before i walk too far.

the heat was bad enough on it's own, but i was also wearing 2 shirts (an undershirt and a thick polo), khaki pants, and very unforgiving shoes. an hour and 4 miles later, i had walked to within 1/5 of a mile from the apartment when crystal appeared. she hadn't gone her usual route that day in hopes of avoiding traffic. what luck.

after we dressed (for the gym) and ate, we were off to get the car home. armed with 3 ragged coat hangers, i was determined to break into my car. thankfully that determination lasted long enough; 3 hours had passed and it was starting to wear thin. we were prepared to call a locksmith and forfeit the $50 when, lo and behold, i managed to pop the lock. this was no easy feat; crystal's dad said that the kind of locks that were built into my Olds were next to impossible to jimmy without a SlimJim.

i went to bed late that because of this fiasco, which led directly to today's problems.

one at a time

2005-07-05T21:23:00.000-05:00

so the re-emerge of my main desktop system went fairly poorly.

half-way into the 300 packages that need updating, DirectFB failed. apparently, it is now required to define a VIDEO_CARDS variable (typically in your make.conf). so here i am stuck with 128 packages left to build. since i don't want to redo the first half (i did a 'emerge -eD world'), i piped the packages after DirectFB to a file. i'm now stuck with either doing them one by one or writing a script to do what emerge lacks the functionality to do.

perhaps i should implement pause/resume functionality in the emerge util, at least between the packages. it would be nice to do the same in the middle of a single package. that's always been one thing that annoyed the crap out of me about gentoo.

arcade stick

2005-07-04T11:13:00.000-05:00

last week, crystal finally bought my birthday gift. i saw it at the new EB games down the street and nearly crapped myself. the anniversary edition street fighter arcade stick. it runs for about $60, but i had heard that it was dicontinued. at the very least, the salesman said that they sell like hotcakes at their other locations.

it immediately renewed my interest for street fighter. i've played many a games with it and i must say that it is without a doubt the best on the market, ever. it feels like actual arcade controls. in a matter of a few games, my ability to play on arcade controls has greatly improved.

it even has me wanting to compete at EVO, maybe not this year but next. if any knows about any tournaments in the DFW area, email me.

back in black

2005-07-04T10:36:00.000-05:00

last week we finally received our dsl modem and our service was turned on. as much as i hate sbc, we need an outside connection to the world so we caved. last night, i finished setting up our router and everything works as it did before. believe it or not, there is no phone outlet in the dining area of our apartment (long story short, that's where my desk ended up). i had to run a cable from in the masterbed to get it out to the router that's on my desk. it’s not my preferred setup, but we'll have to make do until we buy a house.

lil update on a few things. L3 paid me twice 2 paychecks ago, as i mentioned, and they were not able to take it back out because they direct deposited it into the compass account, which was still slightly under. we took the money out and closed the compass with great pleasure.

two weeks ago, crystal and i went to see a play at collin county community college, twelfth night or what you will by shakespeare. it was a lot of fun and the acting was between decent and good. i can tell that my vocabulary has improved because i was able to follow the story. we were going to go to a symphony last night but were just too tired to leave the house.

we had a party yesterday at crystal's grandmother’s house for her 70th birthday. it was supposed to be a surprise, but because crystal's sister isn't the sharpest crayon in the box, there wasn't much surprise to it. her gran was supposed to be out of the house by time we got there so we could decorate. we showed up late and she was still there! on top of that, after rachael (crystal's sister) finally got her in a car, we started to unload when rachael decided to drive BACK to the house and get her wallet! quoting crystal, it was a "confederacy of dunces."

i can't say my family is any brighter. my brother was recently given an overpriced $1000 laptop for college that he a) doesn't deserve and b) won't use for college. he kept whining that because i got one for college, he deserved one too. i guess he neglected to acknowledge that he wasn't actually attending a university but a community college. anyways, he called me yesterday about troubles he was having with his dvd burner. apparently, he was inserting a legally purchased dvd into the burner and trying to burn it when it was reporting the dvd was copy-protected. it gets better. he made several calls to dell about his desire to bootleg this dvd, trying to get them to help him!!! crystal is still laughing about that one.

lastly, i'll mention the whole sata incident of this last week. on sunday of last week, fry's was selling a 160GB western digital hdd for $50 after rebates. my parents hadn't gotten me a birthday gift so i decided to capitalize on this. i bought the harddrive and sent them the stuff for the rebates so they could claim them and they sent us the difference from the rebates. i got an sata card because none of my motherboards are up-to-date enough to include sata ports. i picked one of the cheaper no-name brands and figured it would have a common chipset and thus linux support. i was half right; it used a silicon image 3112 chipset which is an open chipset. i managed to buy an sata raid card that was supposed to have raid _and_ nonraid support, meaning the drives could act independently. was i ever wrong. i had the HARDEST time getting my machine to even boot. after i changed any one setting in either the bios or the hardware setup, i would get a different and strange result. after 3 frustrating nights, i decided that it wasn't me. i couldn't boot my machine (not get to loading an OS), so i took the card back yesterday. i traded up for an adaptec card, figuring they'd have better support. come to find out, they use the same damn chipset. i must say, avoid any silicon image chipsets as they are more trouble then they are worth. with enough tweaking, i finally got my machine to boot with the drive plugged in, and it was detected under /dev/sda. the performance is still less than desired for sata, barely above regular ata. i hear that newer versions of the kernels have patches to fix this, so that might fix it because i've been booting off the livecd.

anyhoo, its nice to be back online. i plan to bring a few of my gentoo machines up to date. i need to find some room for a few machines, namely my webserver (phobos) and my fileserver (erebus). i might be able to drag some power and network cable to the closet on our porch, if it doesn't get too hot out there (it's where they're currently being stored).

birdie

2005-06-12T15:32:00.000-05:00

ok so to those of you who don't know, crystal and i own a lutino cockatiel named birdie. birdie likes to fly and is very attached to her mother, crystal. since we moved into the new apartment, she has gained a new level of confidence in her flying ability, learning to maneuver much more gracefully and swiftly. he has learned to fly around the apartment and distinguish what room she is in and how to get to the one she wants to be in. for example, she could be in the bedroom on top of the tv, and if crystal started calling her name from the couch in the living room, she knows what door to fly to and how to get to where crystal is.

sometimes she feels like exploring on her own, which we usually find ok because that usually means she wants to perch on something high like the fridge. around tuesday this week, she fly out and was playing on our entertainment center (she likes to stare at the pictures of crystal). we were in the bedroom watching tv and she let out a shriek. crystal went out and got her and everything seemed fine. the next day, birdie started showing signs of having a limp. concerned, crystal called an avian vet in town and took her on friday.

come to find out, they think she pulled a tendon or nerve in her knee because there is no physical scaring or bruising. also, she is apparently malnutritioned from the seed diet. she hasn't been on an all seed diet since we weaned her onto millet, but she's still not eating the right foods. also, her excessive egg laying has become a health concern. in the last month, she has laid 9 eggs, 6 of them were about 4 times the size of the rest. the egg laying has taken its toll on her body, depleting her blood stream and bones of the necessary calcium. because of the diet as well, she is slightly underweight, weighing in at 84 grams, about 90% of the weight she should be at.

the vet took xrays, blood and fecal tests and standard physical exams. all of this cost us a hefty $230. this bird is as expensive as a child (well, not really, but still expensive).

they recommended she get plenty of R&R for the next 4-6 weeks. they clipped her wings so that she cannot continue to injure the knee. she hasn't had her wings clipped but once in her life, and this is not exactly a change she's used to. she has unsuccessfully tried several times to fly to her high perches, only to smack into a wall or land crudely on the carpet.

they also recommended keeping her in a 10-gallon fish tank for the rehab period. this will keep her from trying to fly away or climb out. we lined the tank with a towel to keep the floor as soft as possible for her. we also added her toys and food so she can have easy access without having to leave the tank. lastly, we found out that toys that are not stainless steel (i.e. galvanized metals) can be toxic for birds. this meant we had to remove her hanging wood chip/bell toy.

so far she has spent plenty of time sleeping (grinding her beak, which is good). we're also trying to wean her to a diet that is more rich with calcium. the next 4-6 weeks are going to be tough, especially on crystal (treats birdie like a child, and injured child). hope she gets better soon.

been a while, pt. 4

2005-06-12T15:20:00.000-05:00

if you haven't read parts 1..3 of this posting, do so now. this is the last of the catch up bloggings in this series, titled "been a while".

first, lets get the horrible bank story out of the way.

i almost forgot what a regular paycheck was like. in the months of unemployment, i spent every ounce of self control to ensure that we did not over spend. i had saved up a good chunk of change in the 6 months prior to the layoff (to pay off credit cards) and we needed to make sure not to spend it too quickly. needless to say, we burned through all but $600. i promise, this has a point.

right before we left san antonio, crystal and i wanted to open a banking account together; we wanted to share our finances like most all married couples do. one of our concerns was national availability of the bank/credit union. we thought compass bank sounded like a decent start. we spent 2 hours in compass opening an account in san antonio. since we had not found a residence in dallas yet, we had to use our current address.

after we had moved to our new apartment in mckinney, we went to the nearest compass bank in allen. after changing our address, we chose some checks (UT checks). after waiting for 2 weeks and still not receiving them in the mail, crystal called compass and inquired about the missing checks. apparently we had ordered checks that had been discontinued. thanks for the notice, compass.

now the good stuff. first, we started noticing that their online banking was rather lacking in design. pending debits made with the debit card were only made visible on the website after an hour and for only 24 hours, at which point they vanish until being completely processed.

this only made the real problem even worse. there were a few debit transactions that apparently had caused our funds to become insufficient. after the first transaction caused us our account to be $0.56 in the hole (on may 26th), all subsequent transactions were STILL approved. after 4 transactions, we were assessed $36 per transaction. also, there were about $6 per diem fees for a week. lastly, i took my paycheck to compass on friday the 27th. the teller informed me that it would be over a week for the money to post to my account and that i should take the check elsewhere (i do not recall if the suggested i cash it and bring it back, i was so appalled).

all of this was going on without compass notifying us about the problem with our account. the teller did not mention the account showed a negative balance on the 27th and we received no phone call or letter. it wasn't until crystal called compass for a balance inquiry that we found out. initially, crystal called the national customer service number and they were unable to help or explain the problem.

i consider myself to be a pretty relaxed guy; doctors have noted that my body shows no signs of stress. but when you screw with my money or credit, i become a very irritated guy with patience as long as a 4 year old's attention span. i first contacted the national customer service line on my lunch break. the woman i spoke to informed me that the account was $180 in the negative!! she offer some slight insight as to what went wrong, but offered no help in resolving the problem.

frustrated, i called crystal and told her to be ready to go to the bank when i got home. we arrived and waited for 20 minutes until we were able to speak to a representative. they claimed that they weren't able to help but the customer service manager might. we waited for another 20 minutes and told her what the problem was. she agreed that we should've been notified but never were. after a heated argument, she finally agreed to refund us one insufficient funds fee. apart from that, she wasn't able to assist us any further and recommended we speak to the branch manager to fix the rest of our problems. the branch manager wouldn't be in to work until the following morning.

first thing in the morning, we were at the bank to speak with the manager. after an hour wait, we were finally able to speak to the manager. the manager wasn't very responsive. after explaining that the entire problem existed because they neglected to contact us, she continued to insist there was no bank error made. she gave us the number of the regional manager. the regional manager contacted me at work on monday and refunded all but 1 remaining $36 fee.

on friday, i went to bank of america to deposit the printed check that L3 gave me. we went in on saturday to close the account for good and take out any money that remained. come to find out, L3 also paid me that paycheck via direct deposit to the compass banking account!! paid twice, now that's a problem most people would love to have.

whew, what a long story.

ok so the job has been good thus far. it took a meager 12 days to receive my clearance. i've actually started coding, which has been long awaited. i also started riding in a vanpool that meets 2 miles from our house because the hour-long drive to work is too much to bear.

i'll post later about birdie and why she's like a feathered child.

been a while, pt. 3

2005-06-09T21:36:00.000-05:00

if you haven't read parts 1 and 2 of this posting, do so now.

so at that point, i had to decide where to take not only my career, but also my life. i wasn't just taking myself somewhere anymore, i had a wife to think of at this point.

so crystal and i debated back and forth, forth and back, about this decision. this was the cause of approximately 2 weeks of sleepless nights for us. we spent many a days in coffee houses making pros and cons lists. we asked everyone we knew for insight as to the decision they might make, hoping that their decision might shed light on a different aspect of the dilemma we had yet to consider.

it was no use; every time it was debated and talked about, the matter came down to one thing: proximity to businesses (so crystal can get a job) and proximity to a good university. we were afraid that crystal wouldn't be able to find a job in boise as the market was pretty thin. boise state university was also fairly unimpressive; their CS department seemed to be the most under funded department.

on the positive side, HP was offering a research position. since i am extremely interested in doing commercial research and this is what made HP's offer most interesting. the huge pay increase also made it all the more appetizing.

boise was a definite change from texas. it was roughly 20-30 degrees cooler in march. the mountains were snowcapped but that was about it. there were views of the foothills which looked very scenic (rolling and all). the downtown has maybe 3 or 4 towers but that's about it. it looked like a cleaner and more empty austin. there was one highway which took you from one end of the town to the other in 5 minutes. the town in general had the feeling of kansas with some small mountains.

i have to hand it to HP; they know how to take of applicants. we received $250 in traveler's checks the next day. we had flight and hotel arrangements made immediately (which is more than i can say for L-3). they set us up in a hilton on the banks of the city's river (boise river, clever name). we tried to have an authentic boise dinner so we ate at a place (can't remember the name) that was near the hotel.

HP was a big plant, spread across 7 or 8 buildings. most rooms in the buildings were cubical farms. part of the site used to apparently be a manufacturing plant for their printer division, but most of that had been moved to china. the first guy that i talked to was supposed to grill me over algorithms and general computing questions. i know this because i saw the cheat sheet the hiring manager had on his clipboard. the guy took me to get some coffee while we talked in the cafe. it became clear to him in no time that i was not lying on my resume. in a few minutes, he said that he could tell that i was clearly competent in my field and didn't need to ask any more algorithms questions. at this point, he wanted to hear more about my school/personal projects.

the rest of the interviews were fairly plain. i handled them all very well and all of the interviewers appeared impressed. the only difficult interview came from the hiring manager. it was a very pressing interview, including many open ended and behavioral questions. the day ended well and i was invited to stick my nametag on a massive ball of previous interviewees' nametags.

overall, i was very impressed with HP, more so than L-3. On the other hand, L-3 had the location card on its side. after much deliberation, we decided that L-3 would be best for our careers and lives. i decided that a master's and phd from UTD is more important than one job. ten years from now, i won't regret passing up my first choice job. the same goes for crystal; she will be earning her mba.

we spent the next 2 weeks making very frequent trips to dallas to look for a place to live. we were originally going to buy a cheaper home with no up-front financing. after seeing too many homes we were less than pleased with, we decided to find an apartment while we paid off our consumer debt and saved to cover closing and maybe some down payment.

as a side note, we decided against continuing our past dealings with the coldwell banker real-estate agent that we were using. he whined constantly, on everything from his imminent divorce to him not making a sale. get this: after we drove around rockwall with him for 2 hours and listened to him talk about his several properties that he owns here and there, he had the gall to claim that he would not be eating that night because we did not sign for a home that day!!

so we packed up and the usual crew helped up fill a u-haul. we rented a 24" truck this time because the 17" truck barely held my belongings when i moved out of sendero ridge. we are now living in a much nicer, cheaper and smaller apartment in mckinney texas. it's a small town (pop 90k) 30 minutes north of dallas. the reason we chose to live there was because of the access to highway 380. that road is one of 2 routes to greenville (the sticks), where i work.

so here we are now, we've been here for 2 months and i just received my second paycheck, so things have started rolling smoothly and life is great. in my next posting, i'll talk about some of our experiences since we've moved here. stay tuned.

been a while, pt. 2

2005-06-04T20:40:00.000-05:00

read the previous part before reading this one, things will make more sense.

so i got to work looking for work. i had my newly fashioned resume and was ready to find a better life. my search was very systematic and efficient. i started by making a list of things that i would like to work on, followed by a list of companies who specialize in those things. i started initially with distributed development. i then moved on to companies i had heard of before. i continued until my list was roughly 50 companies large (give or take).

at that point, i started going down the list and visited every companies employment section. i applied to the positions that i felt i was capable of and that HR would find similarities in my skills with those of the job descriptions. i also used dice.com and the business section in the newspaper to build an even larger list of companies. dice.com proved to be quite a fruitless effort as most postings are made by headhunters.

i went through a few headhunters with no success. most of those positions were for contract work and i wasn't that willing to be in a similar situation 6 months from now.

by march, i had applied to over 100 positions/companies. my success rate ended up being about 2%. lets just assume the market is very dry for new grads. i had my first interview with General Dynamics for a position in phoenix. i landed that interview through the school's career counseling. the interview was awful. i ended up blaming one of my professors for my bad grades in this out of body experience where my mind was telling my body to shut up. needless to say, i received no call-back.

later, i landed a phone interview, with HP! it was more of an HR interview but things went VERY well. the next week, i had a technical interview scheduled. after much anticipation, the interview went very well. in fact, i ended up in a conversation with the manager about technology for over half an hour! unfortunately, i did not hear back from the company for a week.

at this point, crystal's uncle had managed to land me an on-site interview at his company, L-3 Communications. the interview was scheduled for less than a week away. i bought a very nice kenneth cole pin-stripped suit for a very good price ($180). we drove up to dallas to meet with the company. the interview was a grueling 8 hour process, meeting with 3 different functional groups and 9 total people. everything went very well though.

one of the groups i met with did sat-com applications in a windows environment. another did general tools development. the last group that i met with did special systems and was called the "Human-Computer Interface" group. i was the most impressed with the managers i met with in the last group and was excited about doing this development in a linux environment. by time we had gotten back to san antonio, HR had called and wanted to extend me an offer!

here's were it got tricky. i contacted HP to see if they were still interested in me. they were and wanted to schedule an on-site interview. i had to stall L-3 without looking bad, so i asked if they were able to run my background check before i received the official offer. i was worried about a few things i had done in my past so i didnt want to accept their offer if i was going to be unemployed in a few weeks anyways. they obliged and i told HP that i would love to meet with them.

L-3 stalled for 2 more weeks, and i made sure to abuse the time that i had. i was flown to biose idaho to meet with HP. my main concern about accepting their position was the location. lets just say that boise isn't a business capital. we flew up there, crystal and i, and enjoyed several days worth of vacation on the $200+ of traveler's checks that HP gave us. boise was nice, but had a small town feel. there were only 180,000 people living there and it was no more than a 5 minute drive anywhere. the cold was refreshing, but the allergies were not. the mountains were also not as impressive as i had originally expected.

the HP interview went even better than the L-3 interview. half way into the first interview, the guy told me that i clearly didnt need to answer any of his technical questions, so we chatted about some projects i worked on in school. there were fewer interviews here, each lasting longer. i interviewed with a single group, each person being twice my age. the group was fairly small (about 30 people total) and shared work with the systems engineers in CO. i was VERY impressed with the company and the work would be great (distributed development research).

in a matter of 3 days i had my second offer on the table. L-3 was offering me 20% what Secorp was paying me and HP was offering me 40% more than Secorp. Now I had a VERY difficult life decision to make, not only for myself, but for my family as well....

been a while

2005-06-04T20:23:00.000-05:00

wow, it's been a long time since i last posted, and a lot of things have happened since. let me try to recap what's happened since before i do a real posting.

i was reading my last posting and i noticed that my last post was about moving to a new apartment, escalante. that move took place in december of 2004. i signed a six month lease. crystal quit her job in jan. this year and moved down slowly to san antonio in the new apartment. the new apartment was a 2 bedroom apartment. one room was used as my office. we had plenty of room for our stuff and it was a nice apartment. quiet even, considering that it was directly in the flight path (stupid s.a. city planners).

we didn't go to australia like originally planned. as i went to book the trip, there were adjustments made to the price (due to riding gas prices) which doubled the cost of the trip. that made it basically unaffordable. we changed our destination to waikiki beach, hawaii. hawaii was gorgeous, and i don't regret a thing. well, i actually wish i had rented a car for a few more days. i have about 800 pictures from the trip alone. we have about 800mb of wedding and honeymoon photos that i will eventually make publicly available later (more on that later).

then the shit really hit the fan, so to speak. i had asked trey, my boss at secorp, if things were stable at the company and he confirmed that everything was smooth sailing. in late jan, we learned otherwise. secorp had a major contract with a company called Pratt & Whitney. we lost this contract and were forced to evacuate the premises. at this point, we moved shop to an old apartment of trey's to continue work on another ongoing contract bid. things were not looking good. i started polishing my resume and basically made it look like one lean, sexy beast.

i couldn't have finished it at a better time. on valentines day, i arrive at work with trey already there (which was unusual). he basically stated that then was a good time to begin searching for a new job. there were 3 of us who looked as if we had heard the worst news this year. trey closed up shop and we went home.

i was now unemployed in less than a month of our marriage....

tis the season to shut yourself in

2004-11-16T11:07:00.000-06:00

im supposed to be packing. i cant however due to an addiction to ratchet and clank.

yesterday was one of those days. late for work, no gas in the tank, post office wouldnt take photos, and it was a downright nasty day.

i took off early to get my passport taken care of. had to rush home and pick up my birth certificate, barely made it there on time. guy at the counter informs me that very few places in town actually take the pictures. bastards neglected to tell me that the first time i went there.

i brought down a load of crystal's things so we'll have an easier time moving. gonna rent a U-Haul and move everything in one fell swoop. gotta call SBC and tell em to piss off cause im switchin to TW. im gonna love doin that. we'll be getting cable. it'll be the first time in over 1.5 years since i've been able to watch TV at night. not too excited, but i am looking forward to watching more of the educational type of programming. i dont think i'll be watching much prime time reality TV since those shows make my skin crawl. oh, and the simpsons will be nice to watch again.

i've been experiencing problems with my main gentoo system. apparently when you upgrade gcc to a new branch, you will encounter problems. i'll post more details about it later as i work through it. i have some articles open at home about the matter that i'll post to help anyone else who might be having the same problems.

got a handful of new DVDs so i will be updating the list tonight. i should start making a list of all my CDs as well.

dumbfounded

2004-11-12T01:14:00.000-06:00

i dont know what to say, it seems game companies these days are staffed by idiot designers.

capcom is the worst of em all. they've released 3 street fighter games in the last year and all of them will be Live compatible, but will do not have online components for the PS2. the most recent abomination is yet ANOTHER rehash of the same old characters, in a stripped down game without any decent gameplay modes, specifically an online mode. up yours capcom.

polophony digital / seca recently decided to screw americans once again. they have decided to strip the online mode from the game in favor of this "B-Spec" mode. apparently some genius at seca decided that people would rather watch cars drive without doing much than to actually race friends online. way to go numbnuts, brilliant design choice.

i will be opting against these games this season however and am now contemplating getting several other games. i'll continue to follow all of them loyally through EGM (13 years subscribing and counting). i'm still contemplating Killzone.

-Up yours

2004-11-11T22:26:00.000-06:00

i should never have used -U on my updates.

apparently xfce4.2 beta2 was released about 2 weeks ago. all but xfce-panel seemed to be masked, so that means i cant seem to finish updating my system!! i haven't gotten back to that damn eterm problem yet.

be very careful when you do updates in gentoo. -U can seriously impair the health of your system, so always stick to -u if you have to do updates.

nothing like sitting and waiting for a newer ebuild.

quotes

2004-11-11T17:59:00.000-06:00

i was reading these comments about how Microsoft is not afraid of Firefox, and someone used a Ghandi quote in reference to linux:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

that's very appropriate and has thus far been the cycle of linux's life. we are currently at the "fight" stage of that statement, as they used to laugh at linux's inability as a desktop OS.

searching more, i found some very good quotes:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-Aristotle

Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, and it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash! Be water, my friend.
-Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Become the change you seek in the world.
-Ghandi

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
-Goathe

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
-Henry David Thoreau

Obstacles are those frightful things we see when we take our eyes off our goal.
-Henry Ford

Don't do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.
-Henry Rollins

For every problem, there exists a simple and elegant solution which is absolutely wrong.
-J. Wagoner, U.C.B. Mathematics

What lies between us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not go where the path may lead instead go where there is no path and leave a trail.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't want to die without scars.
-Tyler Durden

ok that's enough for now. every one of those quotes is worth remembering. here's a quote of my own:

Do not become satisfied with mediocrity; its the downfall of man.
-Jason Switzer

frustrations

2004-11-11T16:28:00.000-06:00

ok, gotta get a couple things off my chest. at work, i developed an ASP.NET application. it was developed in Windows, and was supposed to be ported over to Linux (Mono Project) for the client. the transition was fairly simple, most of the problems came from not getting the classpath correct. Mono worked as it was designed to, and we had no problems with both WebForms and using Windows compiled DLLs directly.

that being said, this system was developed on a Windows server running IIS. the clients' webserver: apache. i can imagine the pure frustration you can forsee with configuring apache. apache's config files are the worst in the OSS community. they could almost be considered a language and enviornment in their own right! needless to say, i spent countless hours attempting to get Apache to handle ASP requests. wanna know the secret:

1) set up config files (specifically, use '-D MONO', set MonoUnixSocket to /tmp/mod_mono_server)

2) exec: % /usr/bin/mod-mono-server.exe --nonstop&

3) exec: % chmod 777 /tmp/mod-mono-server

4) start apache2

the important idea is that mod-mono-server.exe handles requests that are passed over the socket /tmp/mod-mono-server. you then need to have apache hand the request over to that socket. if you want, you can also have it bind to a port and have apache send the request there as well.

secondly, we've started porting an important website that was previously written in ASP.Net to JSP and Servlets. its an interesting conversion because it doesnt exactly do callbacks and doPostBack like ASP does, but i need to look into Struts more to see if that can bridge the gap. i started porting the connection broker library to Java and this could prove to be a valuable business asset. i am currently using NetBeans to do all my development, and i must add that i LOVE it way more than Visual Studio. its way more developer friendly. built in CVS support, built in javadoc automatic creation tool, and built in intellisense/javadoc browser. i hope we can do more work in the JSP enviornment, because i much prefer Java over C#.

gotta go, time to go home and eat dinner.

best buy

2004-11-09T01:42:00.000-06:00

forgot to blog another this article about best buy.

up yours, best buy. you created this system to attract business, and when someone finds a way to legally exploit it, you spurn them away for outsmarting you. how dare you think you're smarter than the people who obviously outsmarted your system to begin with. you made your bed, now you have to lie in it. if you dont like the idea of people actually getting their rebates, then perhaps you shouldn't offer them. if you think you can prevent me from selling my goods on ebay, whether i bought them on a "mega-sale" or not, you must be delusional.

always shop newegg. dont be profiled into buying some piece of junk you didn't want to begin with.

this article makes me so made, i almost want to go and do exactly what it says pisses best buy off.

first home

2004-11-09T01:28:00.000-06:00

crystal and i signed a lease on sunday to move into Escalante apartments on Dec. 1. i put in my 30 day notice at my current complex to be officially out on the 6th of next month. that'll give me 5 days for moving.

the apartment had some big special, $799 with $199 total move-in. first month is free, no matter how long the lease. cause crystal is currently a student, we also get to knock another 5% off. total came down to $759 a month. signed a 6 month lease, so i only pay (on average) $666 a month. its a first floor apartment, ~1000 sq/ft. 2 bed/2 bath. the living room is angled so it feels more open and roomier than it probably is. i get to keep my desk and dining table!

speaking of which, i bought 4 folding chairs from world market. 2 for $25. i bought 2 (and 2 cushions) on saturday to replace the 2 that are currently broken. i wanted to make sure they'd work (height and all) before i bought the other 2. turns out there was a crack in one chair and a tear in one cushion. we took em back to exchange em and buy the other 2. however, the lady behind the counter rang it up wrong and i ended up getting the other half of the set for like 20 bucks!! i snatched my receipt ASAP and got out as soon as i could. i saved something like 20 dollars. never overestimate the power of the uneducated.

anyhoo, i read this today and it made my toes curl. it should not be read as a bush bashing article, more of a diebold bashing article. how could you possibly fuck up a voting machine?! i mean, what is there to it?! here's the main function of the voting machine:

vote vote(Candidate whacko){
whacko.votes++;
}

how can you possibly fuck up something as simple as a voting machine?!!? just add one for pete's sake!! i fail to understand how this could possibly go wrong. i suppose its another example of pushy administration ruining another project.

backup

2004-11-04T20:30:00.000-06:00

ok so i got past the baselayout issue. apparently the new baselayout was a switch to the new udev system. i think the ebuild wasnt properly executing the MAKEDEV script that is provided with the package. my current problem is eterm. i cant seem to connect to the enlightenment cvs server so i can download libAST and continue updating my system.

arggggg! this is what happens when you dont update your system in like a month.

couple of side notes: canada's officially a bilingual country, all of it. and it is feasible for a third party to do notably well. in fact, the REP was a third party initially. also check out 1968, a third party candidate won 46 EV. that's we huge chunk. it just takes a new generation to get tired of the same mediocre crap.

2 more things and im done.

i bought rachet and clank: up your arsenal instead of killzone. i couldnt find anything really negative being said about the game, and i went to my trusted source, EGM, and they raved about it (note: i've been an EGM subscriber for well over a decade). also picked up the network device to go along with the game, since it supports online play. played the game for like 4 hours straight last night. its a VERY VERY impressive game, to say the least. i would highly recommend this game.

lastly, i watched Adaptation. its a movie by charlie kauffman about charlie kauffman writing a screen play that ends up being a movie about charlie kauffman writing a screen play about..... ahh you get the idea. its VERY recursive in nature. its another one of those movies that requires alot of patience but in the end, i was mostly pleased with the movie. i feel there were some parts that were.... kinda cheesy, but all in all it was a decent flick. rack another one up there for mr. kauffman and his total wierdness.

i should update my dvd listing, theres a handful of dvds that aren't included on the list yet.

missed

2004-11-03T01:31:00.000-06:00

forgot to note a couple things.

im prolly gonna get Killzone tomorrow as im really looking for a new FPS that i can play online and not have to worry about spending 2grand to upgrade all my hardware. kudos Guerilla!

secondly, forgot to mention the ballot measures. there are several of note:

Alaska Measure 2:
Legalizing Marijuana

California Proposition 71:
Stem Cell Research Funding

Colorado Amendment 36:
Allocating Electoral Votes

Oregon Measure 33:
Medical Marijuana

ok so if you're gay, it looks like there are several states that will be outlawing your marrige. it also looks like 3 more states will be legalizing weed for "medicinal purposes". who knows, maybe it'll reduce the demand if its not considered "bad" anymore. i dont understand the reasoning for this, but i do support the idea of repealing laws. have at it OR, MT, and AK!!! im also very much in favor of CO's electoral vote amendment. it doesnt look like it'll pass, but i think it's a much fairer way of electing our executive chief.

i steal forks

2004-11-03T01:10:00.000-06:00

ok, 2 part blog. first, the light hearted part, then the more serious stuff.

i borrowed curb your enthusiasm season 2 from ford on sunday, and watched all 10 epidoes that day. season 2 delivers. i laughed harder for season 2 than i did for season 1. my favorite episodes are 'Shaq' and 'The Doll'. the title of this blog entry is from the season finale 'The Massage'. basically, larry is caught taking a fork out to his limo driver and is turned over to the police. he was sentanced to what's referred to as 'scarlet letter punishment'. if you haven't seen this show, i HIGHLY recommend it.

ok, more serious stuff. watchin the live election results is depressing. none of the major networks can agree on a vote, but they all do seem to agree on one thing: 4 more years of the 'Tard from Texas'. i cant believe how stupid and hypocritical the american public is. people have spent the last 4 years bashing Baby Bush, yet they're re-electing him. the man is a disgrace to all texans and im appauled (sp) that people think he has not only done anything decent for this country, but will continue to do better for another 4 years! record level debt is not something to want more of. (i dont even want to go into the n. korea thing).

im not dissappointed that i voted LIB, and i will probably vote 3rd party again in 2006. wanna know what party you REALLY should be voting for? take this poll and see where you lie (as it turns out i am STRONGLY lib). i also have come to loathe mainstream media as i feel they are a large contributor to the duopoly problem. its hard to get people to want to cast a vote on a third party if none of the polls show any results because they dont even ask about LIB! he's on 48 state's ballots and i cant seem to find a decent poll that has mr. badnarik as an option!

by the way, if you feel voting for a third party or a party that does not typically win in your area is wasting your vote, you should be stripped of your voting privaledges. the only wasted vote is one that is not cast. im tired of people saying im wasting a vote, how dare you tell me i shouldnt vote for whomever i want. that is the most undemocratic thing i've ever heard and its that kind of mentality that will change nothing about this nation!

misc

2004-10-31T17:04:00.000-06:00

'nother interesting day. stopped by dillard's to buy crystal's mom's dress. she went to pay with a check and they declined it. declined a check! its cash! so i figured i'd write a check and cover her for it. i wrote my check, they called it in, and declined it as well! i was paid on friday so i know i have the funds. at this point, i was fairly pissed off, so i demanded to know why. the best they said they could do was give me this card that referenced the company that dealt with their banking (i assume), equifax. what a bunch of idiots. they wont take checks under 1000. apparently no one clued them into the fact that most banks and/or check companies allow you to order from any number. so high check numbers mean nothing, but these tards seem to think they do.

i want to test a link real fast. hover over it and check your status bar. then click on it and see if it takes you to the same place. UPDATE: ok so the link wouldnt work here since blogger (apparently) strictly checks the HTML you paste. there is an article about the flaw on slashdot.

lastly, check out this article. see if their description is remotely close. since im primarily a gentoo user, i'd say their description of me is fairly close ("if it moves, compile it").

"gt-s stands for Garaunteed Tremendous Safety"

halloween

2004-10-31T10:42:00.000-06:00

halloween, often referred to as the celebration of the dead. wierd holiday and strangly similar to Dios De Los Muertos (forgive my terrible spanish, im white). this year, on All Hallow's Eve, we get to set the clocks back an hour. everyone loves the fall back part but hates the spring forward part.

we met yesterday with Christine of Amex. we mostly discussed where crystal and i are in our lives. we talked (very little) about some rough numbers to give her an idea where we are. she seems like a very nice and knowledgable woman. she asked us to bring in some credit statements, 401k and student loan paperwork. she said its actually good to leave the student loans around, they're good debt. you don't HAVE to pay them off immediatly because they have such a low interest rate and the longer you're paying them, typically 10 years, the more it can build credit. student loans rank up there with car and house payments. apparently everyone has them and they're considered good. im just lookin forward to cleaning up all of our debt.

we went and looked at some apartments, hidden lake and estates at northwoods. i wasnt too impressed at the northwoods. the apartment they showed us needed some serious repairs. the hidden lake place is very nice, but fairly expensive (about as much as my rent at my current complex).

crystal saw eternal sunshine of the spotless mind yesterday and i dont think she was as impressed as i was. she seemed to have a hard time following it (as did i until it was 3/4 of the way over) so that's usually a sign that she wont like it. oh well, what can you expect from a bush voter!

heh yeah that reminds me, i voted on friday. we went to whitmore elem. at 5pm but they were packed. so we went home to eat and went back at 7pm. it was even worse then. it took us an hour to get to sign in. once we signed in, it took only a few minutes to actually get to a booth. it was an electronic ballot, touchscreen monitor. i voted straight ticket LIB, and split the remaining votes between the REP and the DEM. since crystal (and her staunchly REP friend rebekah) both voted REP (shutter), i had to lean more towards DEM on the remaining votes, just to cancel theirs out.

im off to see the wizard.

eternal sunshine

2004-10-26T20:36:00.000-05:00

so i watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind today. i dont know where to begin. the film was so brilliant, i would be as bold as to put that on the top of my top 5 best movies of all time.

its a story about love and how it can overpower anything. i never knew how to describe my love for crystal but i believe this film can embody that emotion. near the end of the film there is one simple line that sums it all up:

Joel: Ok.

i know it doesnt make sense, but it will when you see the movie. its the hallway scene just after clementine picks up her toothbrush. if you can wrap your mind around the emotion in that one line, then i think you can understand how i feel for crystal.

jim carrey is an excellent actor. now that he is a little older, hopefully he'll play more mature roles and this is a prime example of brilliant acting. in my opinion, he should win many awards for his performance. charlie kauffman (of 'being john malcovich' fame) is an unbelievable writer and should also win awards for his work as well.

on a side note, i think iText is a wonderful library. im currently using the C# port of it, and i must admit that it is not only VERY powerful, but has a VERY clean interface. my hat is off to its creators.

back to fixing baselayout

baselayout

2004-10-25T20:54:00.000-05:00

been 5 days, i didnt feel like blogging over the weekend, my apologies for the delay.

this morning before i left for work, i did an emerge -uD world. i come home to see eterm borked out (stupid libAST). some windows were actin funny, so i rebooted. it's been about 3 or 4 months since the last power outage, so i supposed a reboot is acceptable.

little did i know, my 75% world update borked my system royally. apparently baselayout-1.11.x has switched over to the new udev for the 2.6.x kernels. if you're gettin problems, check this. just hope you didnt do an etc-update. if you did, and you're still on devfs, you got a lot of work ahead of ya. i'll have to rebuild my kernel, grub (splashimage doesnt work for some reason), and all applications that deal with the devfs. that last part basically means im gonna have to do am 'emerge -e world'.

side notes: i was filmed this weekend by crystal's group in an interview discussing Blu-ray. was kinda fun, but mostly caught up on reading some of ol' Hank's book. GTA:SA was released today and i was hopin to go pick it up. i recieved $50 in the mail and a $25 dollar debt was paid back, so it seemed like the perfect time to burn that money. so i went to the bank to get my cash. apparently im behind in my "JBNANC" fund (or "Jason Badly Needs A New Car" fund). its only $150 bucks shy, but that's enough to make me skip GTA:SA this time. it isnt online, so i dont have a problem waiting a while. if i can manage to save maybe $100 this month, i'll get a game or 2. there's a ton of games being released this month, so saying "No" will be very difficult. luckily i have Mario Paint to assist in this matter.

time to go run, im training with ankle-weights now, so maybe it'll help improve my speed.

its really late

2004-10-20T01:12:00.000-05:00

i cant sleep, yet im very tired.

i decided today that i was going to vote LIB as they have the most likely chance of snaggin that needed 5%. it's also been big news that even though ralph nadar is under the IND platform, he's pullin a key 1% in some swing states (read: florida) where it'll have a dramatic difference on the REP/DEM outcome. this is good, as he should do everything he can to screw up the results for either party. this nation needs more than 2 political parties.

this was an interesting read, as i know several people who should've read the sarcasm in that.

it seems gentoo will be getting a facelift. this is nice, as it's LONG overdue.

building a gentoo system without a net connection has proved to be a MAJOR pain in the ass, but everything seems to be rolling along on that. friday is too close.

i've got 4 dvd's in the works right now. by the end of the week i'll hopefully be able to add them to the list (most notably Fahrenheit 9/11).

lastly, i've been reading "Smile, You're Traveling" by Henry Rollins lately, and its a fairly good read. sometimes it may seem like he's trying too hard to be intellectual and it really shows. it's like watching a VJ on MTV try to explain neurology. its still a good book thus far. its interesting to read about this guy's travelling; he seems to be out of LA 3/4 of the year.

"For making langing immediate time, incrediby. Broken moving not now stupid motor on flaming. I declaration emergency!"

go

2004-10-18T23:29:00.000-05:00

i've recently become addicted to board games. not games like Sorry or Clue, i mean games like Chess, Go and Shogi. i've found myself more interested in the eastern variant of chess (shogi) to be more interesting because the game is more fluid. there is no concept of "forward, not backward". captured pieces can be played, and normal pieces can be promoted. it sounds like it would make things much more difficult to master than plain old fasion chess.

chess is still a lot of fun, but Go makes chess look like chutes and ladders. the sheer magnitude of Go's possibilities is enough to make your head spin. i am terrible at Go, but i am practicing and learning. i bought a book that helps explain the ideas needed to master Go. i've been playing mostly unrated games on 9x9 boards. this makes it easier to focus and you dont have that additional baggage of the game being rated.

on a side note, i've found that compiling while in frame-buffer mode can cause SERIOUS performance hits. while bootstrapping a gentoo stage1 install, i found there wasnt much speedup on a 2.4ghz intel processor over my 950mhz athalon. once i switched to a normal console (ssh'd in), things went MUCH faster. it took a mere 5 minutes to compile a kernel. that's very impressive if you ask me. getting the mono project up and running has been a real struggle and has required some real cleverness.

i promise to post more frequently this week, its just hard to keep all professional matters off this blog.

word puzzles

2004-10-13T01:26:00.000-05:00

so i mentioned earlier that i'd write a program that solved the word puzzle that had you spot words within a word. i did, problem is this.

my webserver is a 110mhz sparstation 5. im running a 2 year old version of debian. in debian years, that's probably the second youngest release since their development cycle appears to be a release once every 2 years. im runnin an old version of thttpd on the machine. apparently the CGI timeout is a lil too short. a 2.4mb dictionary file is a lil too much for my workstation to handle, as it took 9 minutes to solve "loath". i at first thought it was just the browser timing out, but upon further inspection, it appeared the program was being killed after maybe a minute. so i gotta do an update, if not a homemade install. argh!

damn thttpd developers put configuration options that cannot be set via a script or command-line. who does that?! compile time only config options?! i dont mean compiling with support for certain features, i mean the CGI_TIMELIMIT cannot be set manually. i will eventually be switching to lighttpd on a gentoo box. im tired of dealing with a half-assed debian system. once you go gentoo, you never go back.

on a more positive note, i won that mario paint game! not too shabby for $7.

on, on a parting note, read this: clicky-click

long blog delay

2004-10-12T11:59:00.000-05:00

its been damn near a week since my last posting, and i have a good reason. most of the things i want to blog about are things i do not want to blog about. let me explain further.

i have made it a point to keep my professional career off my blog. as a matter of fact, i try not to discuss anything related to my past, present, or future employers. i dont like to discuss matters that concern work related issues, as this can lead to serious reprecussions. anything from a co-worker reading it, to a future employer reading it could possible lessen their opinion of me. its not a matter of vanity, its a matter of not burning my career to the ground.

that being said, i can cut the fat off my blogging topics. so lets move on to other things.

i spent a good couple hours this weekend and yesterday working on our invitations. they all wont be perfect, but their hand-made, which by many peoples' standards, makes them more valuable. we printed them on our own printers, both the velum overlay and the actual invitation. the velum overlay has been monogrammed (sp) in a diagonal fashion. what i was recently working on was punching the holes in the top of the invitation and velum overlay so that we could tie them together with ribbon. exhausting.

everyday my co-workers and i work on some puzzles provided in the san antonio express. in the "s.a. life" section they have many word puzzles (and a fun chess puzzle). i am rather bad at most word puzzles as it takes too much memory to recall unusual words to descramble and generally play with them. so, in the spirit of hacking, i came up with this word descrambler. now bear in mind the dictionary being used is rather limited, as i intend to update it with one that i installed off my gentoo install. it will rescramble all the letters you type to form all possible words. every letter has to be used. this solves the "Jumble" puzzle in the paper.

next on my plate, i want to solve the puzzle that has you pick all possible words that can be written from the word provided. this one will be fairly simple and i should be able to finish it tonight. an even more difficult problem to solve is something that will solve cryptograms. this will be much more difficult as there are MANY MANY more possibilities. i would not be surprised if cryptograms are NP-complete. that wont stop me from writing something to try at least.

the only recent additions to my dvd collection has been Sex And The City season 2. i have not updated my list to show this yet. im also downloading a GTAVC dvd. since it's the full dvd, and the playstation 2 will play burned dvd's, i'm hoping i can download games to play. if this works out, i'll convince myself to buy a dual layer burner ($12 a disc is less than $50 a game).

im also bidding on Mario Paint as i remember it being so much fun as a kid. a family friend of ours, when i was young, had it and i was green with envy. i intended to squelch that envy for $10.

mileage

2004-10-06T22:53:00.000-05:00

on monday, i ran a mile to see if i could beat my personal best. i did, by a whole 60 seconds. this time i completed the mile in 9:15 (or 555 seconds). while that time still kinda stinks, its nice to see improvements. the thing about running is improvements take much longer to notice than weight training. i think i should start working on my 2 mile jogs, try to improve their time. if i can get my 2 mile time down to 18-19m (or 1080-1140s), then i'll work on my 3 mile time. once i got that down, i'll work on getting the average mile in the 8-9 minute range.

on a lighter note, i've continued my quest to clean up my 120g hdd. i've liberated 40g now for further usage. this will come in handy when i start ripping my CDs. i have 6g left of unorganized music in 1 (of 2) trees. the second tree will take much longer to complete and will be more of a gradual process since it contains all 18g of music in a single directory.

im working on rebuilding a gentoo system that josh donated a while back. it's been sitting in my closet for several months. i decided it's time i built that emulator arcade. im rebuilding all the packages, and gonna slowly start emerging the emulators that i need and such. eventually im gonna have to buy a usb jamma controller and get that setup. then i should work on building the cabinet at my dad's house (he has all the necessary tools, i have all the necessary skills). when i finish this post, before i go to bed, i will check to see how many packages it's built thus far, it should be done by now.

lastly, crystal wanted me to post a link to her blog.

Control Twiddle

2004-10-04T23:14:00.000-05:00

this past weekend was relaxing. sunday i broke my habit of no more than 2 cups of coffee a day and had about 8. i was pretty wired all day, which was nice. crystal is going to use me as an official source for her Info. Soc. class, since i am now considered an actual "software engineer". she asked me about sap, and i of course had a very biased opinion about the oracle database frontend.

to coin a new term, a previous professor of hers (who apparently taught some business computer course) referred to the tilde (~) character as "twiddle". the joke was crystal assertively told me to hit "control-twiddle" to perform a task, which i refused to let that one slide. i laughed for a some time while she explained where she got it from. so from now on, "control-twiddle" can solve ALL of your problems!

new additions to the dvd list. seems i had a bout with the electricity but everything is back up and running.

i have been working on reorganizing my downloaded music collection, and needless to say, its rather painful. where people learned to name a file is beyond me. i've organized a meager 3 gigs (~30 albums), and im down to roughly 2 dozen left in the current directory. there are a few more directories, not including the 12+ gigs of stuff that was just mashed into one directory. i will not be downloading any more music until my current collection has been organized to maximize sanity.

i saw an ad in the Daily Texan this weekend for GoogleLabs. its no secret that google has been lookin to hire the best of the best, so they have been posting several ads for employement which basically equate to riddles and puzzles. these arent your average puzzles, they require some rather unique thought, you (and i _hate_ this term) have to think "outside the box" to solve them. for the last week, i have been working on a decent solution to the MIT billboard problem (first 10 digit prime in e). i came up with a somewhat decent idea, but it will day quite a while to prep the actual program.

anyhoo, back to the ad in the paper. it was a number puzzle, find the pattern. that's my specialty. it took me no more than 5 minutes to solve it. at the bottom of the ad it said that special attention would be given to applicants who obtained a correct answer. so i packed up a cover letter and resume and explained my answer. i doubt i'd get a job cause they pretty much just want PhD's, but even if its a 1:1,000,000, "there's still a chance!" i've been turned down by google before so i would be extremely surprised if they actually showed interest in me.

time for bed, i cant keep my eyes open any more.

SRV

2004-10-03T09:51:00.000-05:00

today would've been stevie ray vaughn's 50th birthday. the local "rock & blues" station klbj is doing an SRV tribute by playin stevie and his influences all day long.

its a shame the lord had to take such a musical genius. i'll never understand a world where brilliant and talented artists like SRV die in their prime and musicians like john bon jovi or michael bolten (sp) are still alive and still making music. its cruel and a shame that the world couldn't hear more of his soul.

i read this time article written in 1990 about his death. its worth a read. it's a shame because he had just kicked the twin sins (alcohol & drugs) which is very difficult to do and gave him a fresh start.

i for one mourn for his death and douth i will see another such genius in my lifetime.

debate

2004-09-30T23:21:00.000-05:00

the first of three debates was tonight. i read through a preliminary transcript since i wasnt able to watch it. i will definately be taping the next 2 (oct. 8th, 13th).

tonights was mostly about international affairs. i listened to some of it while i talked to crystal and on NPR's website. you would think that after 4 years bush would be able to speak in public without needing his hand held. it sounded like he developed a case of the stutters, pausing for effect like william shatner only to break the silence to say "ugh". he fumbled on many topics, namely on when he'd expect to pull troops out of iraq. given the facts presented in fareinheight (sp) 911, its starting to look like he'd never withdraw until he found something (or planted it).

kerry isnt much better. the guy stands on the issues like a one legged man on 9' stilts. one second he's totally against something, the next he's for it (partially). but at least he isn't a draft dodger.

im not sure who i wanna vote for. i'm even thinkin about voting for LIB cause they're so crazy that at least they have convictions. those guys are nuts, and thats just who i think we need to lead the country. i dont think i'll be voting for nader again this round; that guy is just a lil too weird. in fact im not even sure he made it to texas' ballot (missed teh signature deadline iirc).

on a less serious note, i hate a list of my current DVD collection. check it out, maybe we can do some trading. send me your list and your wish list and we can hook something up.

im getting lazy

2004-09-27T08:44:00.000-05:00

im getting lazy with my blogs, i often find myself not posting for several days. i guess its cause i've been so dang busy lately, but its easy to always use that as an excuse.

on friday we finished a project that my boss expected done last week. problem is the work that was expected was about 80% of the total work (just for a demo) and required maybe 3 - 4 weeks with 2 people working fulltime on it. we had 2 weeks and 3 guys and just BARELY pulled it off. when i say barely, i mean that it was finished minutes before we left on friday. everyone that worked on it worked about a 45-50 hour week.

saturday we went and picked out wedding bands. i stuck with a plain solid white gold band. no diamonds, no patterns, nothing. the only thing that i wanted was to make sure that it had the rounded edges. crystal's had 2 round diamonds in lobster claws and acts as a wrap to the engagement ring. it's only ironic that hers cost twice that of mine.

we also went test driving this weekend. this time i wanted to drive an Impreza. we went to the northside dealer as its basically the only one in town. walked around looking at the various cars, but wasnt bothered once. when i decided what i wanted to drive, we went indoors. there was a bit of wait cause apparently they were busy. the guy got a '05 impreza 2.5rs with sport package and i hopped in. only thing was, he let me drive it off the lot without him. so i drove all over town. took some curves, highway, U-turned, you name it. i was VERY impressed. it felt like a sports car. it drove like a sports car. it was a sports car. the thing had more kick than the mazda 3 (which ford said was comparable to the acura tsx) and the turbocharged jetta gls. on top of that, it didnt feel cheap. the interior materials felt well built and sturdy. the seats felt like bucket seats found in real sports cars. bottom line: i loved that car.

even more, i loved the price. brand new '05 with sport package runs for about 2% over invoice, which came to $20.1K. that's about $4k under the gls. so here's the funny part. after i got a final number, i told the guy (a second time) that i wanted to save money for a lil longer for a down payment. i said that if i didnt put down about 25% of the final price, i'll most likely end up upside-down in the payments. i said i wanted to wait a few more months, but i was very impressed and the impreza was on the top of my list. i said this cause i already had the final number and there isnt much hagglin on a brand new car. however, the second i said this, he went sour. he knew he wasnt going to screw me by financing it himself. he told me earlier that he'd be able to get a better deal with only $2k. that's funny cause i know the only person getting the better deal would be him. i asked for a pen to write that final number down and he basically refused to help and pretty much kicked me out of his office.

i kept his card, and if/when i go back to get one, i will make sure to speak with him again. i'll tell him what kind of dick he was, i'll demand another salesman (or threaten with buying from another dealer). very pleasurable experience, even with a comedic ending.

gcc

2004-09-22T23:45:00.000-05:00

to those of you who run a ~arch gentoo system, be VERY cautious about upgrading to gcc 3.4.2-r2. if you already have and are experiencing problems, check out this thread.

i updated this week before it was hardmasked, and ended up screwing myself. basically, since its in a new 3.x branch, its another one of those break-updates, so you'll have to recompile your whole system if you upgrade to 3.4.x.

im currently working to emerge -e system && emerge -e world. i wont be done for quite a while.

i still have 6 invites, if you want one, email me. if you have a nifty Akuma wallpaper, email me as well. any color scheme will do as long as it basically sticks to a single main color. the reason why i mention this is cause i beat SF3 on 6 stars with akuma, as he is quickly becoming my favorite.

forgot

2004-09-21T23:58:00.000-05:00

i forgot to mention how my jog went today.

today i was determined to jog at least 5 laps, which is about 2.5 miles. i completed my goal. however, by time i made it to the end of th e5th lap, i decided that i had enough energy to try and stick it out for 1 more mile. rounding the first 1/4 mile on my 6th lap, i realized my legs felt like they were made of lead. they were starting to stiffen and felt heavier by the second. by the end of the 7th lap, my legs felt like they weighed a ton. on the positive side, my stomache did not start to cramp up, so i think i finally found a good pace and breathing pattern. running is more difficult than it looks.

i eventually finished, slowly, but i finished. my total time was something like 40 minutes for about 3.5 miles. pretty pathetic average mile, but i wasn't going for speed, rather to see if i could complete the whole run. so it looks like i wont have to worry about not completing the race come november.

been a while

2004-09-21T21:18:00.000-05:00

its been about 5 days since my last posting. life has been hectic.

last week was a crummy week for me, hopefully this week will turn around. i didnt make a deadline for work by friday morning, but it looks like we'll make the new deadline of this friday morning. -5 to stress for that.

we registered at bed, bath & beyond this weekend. this time it only took 2.5 hours to get through, mostly because of the broad helping us out. apparently, she thinks that people give a flyin leap about her wedding. she rambled for what seemed like an hour about how she had an unlimited budget and how her other half was taking such an interest in the wedding. blah blah blah. first of all, its rude to mention money, just plain rude! where the fuck did this girl learn her manners?! dont discuss how you have unlimited funds to people who most likely dont. secondly, i dont give a rats behind about your fiancee or how he went and pretended to pick a tux, probably so he could get some that night. leave your business at home.

i read at blue-ray.com that the PS3 is confirmed to use blue-ray technology. that, plus the purchase of MGM, will definately help push blue-ray as the next standard. its not lookin good for the hd-dvd camp, especially because of all the backers that blue-ray has (they're all PC manufacturers). nintendo also announced that the DS will have a state-side release of Nov. 21. this is big news as they will beat sony to the market by 6 months, but also before the holiday season. that'll help nintendo hang onto its stranglehold, but will sony be able to cut into nintendo's rather sizable pie?

i've been reading about how to generate doxygen documents for code, because i'd like to comment my libhaet API as i work on it. it looks pretty neat and im hopin to get some docs posted this weekend.

i decided to stay month-to-month at my current apartment because it will wind up costing me less if i have to break a least come january (after the wedding). i'll wait till jan and then pick a place.

that's it for updates. i just beat SF3 on 5 stars with akuma and im gonna try 6 tomorrow. im also lookin at getting burnout 3 (and network adapter) or gradius 5. im undecided as to which game i want to play the most. i guess i'll make that decision tomorrow after work.

5k

2004-09-15T21:22:00.000-05:00

several months ago, crystal's friend's mother died of breast cancer. when something happens like that to someone even remotely close to you, it changes your perspective on things. her friend's mother may not have been close to me, but it still has the same effect. you learn to appreciate life and your good health. a neighbor of my parents is suffering from a relapse of cancer as well (i cant remember what kind).

so i decided to take a more positive outlook on things like this. i plan on doing what i can, collecting yoplait lids and doing charity runs. eventually i might donate time/money as well.

today crystal told me that there was going to be a 5k run in austin for breast cancer, "Race For The Cure". im sure you've heard about it, cause its kinda popular. i've never run a 5k before, and now i know why. that's 3.2-odd miles. my current jog is usually 1.5 miles. when i jog a lap around my apartment complex, i've jogged a half mile. so to be able to run 3.2-odd miles, i would need to jog 7 laps. today i wanted to see how many laps i could jog without having to stop. i made it 4 laps before my legs were pretty tired and i was starting to get dehydrated. my shoes also didn't help any, since they are really really old shoes. i need to buy some jogging stuff, new shoes, shorts (currently, i use wind pants) and an actual water bottle.

next time i run, i intended to add a lap. for now im not concerned with time, just being able to complete the entire 5k without stopping is a milestone in my book.

misc

2004-09-14T16:25:00.000-05:00

i borrowed crystal's netmd this week, i've been dyin to get some use out of it. she got it for christmas last year and has yet used it. its a very nice piece of technology, but suffers from some major ailments that make it very crippled.

first, nobody uses minidiscs, which is a real shame. i love the things, they're so neat. secondly, the format that it stores tracks onto the minidisc is ATRAC, sony's proprietary format. this leads to the third flaw: communication is encrypted, fairly well from what i've read, which makes 3rd party support very difficult. so there it lacks linux support, which is a major downer to me. lastly, it lacks basic functions of a standard cdplayer like shuffle and repeat. how can you skip on that!?!?!

its neat, but it's a shame that it's been made so proprietary. that might have to do with its demise. usb devices are so easy to use and the protocol is fairly standard. why they decided to make everything this restrictive is beyond me.

i finally beat Gil last night in SF3. SF3 is a totally different game than snk2. the motion is more fluid with less emphasis on speed. all the fighters seem to be on a more level playing field this time. there is only 1 special system, and you choose which special you want before the match. the only super-human type of fighter is Gil, and he's not all that good. resurrection is just plain cheap though. ken and ryu's differences shine through more-so in this game. ken's hurricane kick is much more powerful than akumas and ryu's. his dragon punch is way better as well. ryu has the outstanding fireball again. i havent played with all the new characters yet, but Twelve looks the most interesting. having played against them all however, it seems that they just recycled fighting styles for more of the new characters. overall, im very pleased with the Anniversary Collection.

politics

2004-09-11T13:47:00.000-05:00

since i registered to vote a couple months ago, i've been pretty interested in politics. i also started receiving benifits from my current employeer, so im fairly interested in how taxes and health care are dealt with in the white house.

so i found 2 blogs of interest. first, john kerry has a blog. he seems to be the candidate i'm going to be voting for, mainly because of his policy against outsourcing.

then there is the bush blog. well, i can't stand him, so im only interested in reading his anti-american propaganda. since he has done NOTHING to better this country and all of it's problems, i will be voting to get him out of office. i want to "outsource bush".

xorg update

2004-09-10T01:35:00.000-05:00

ok so i've been messing with xorg for quite a while, and i must admit, i am very impressed. keith packard is the man!

rather than eating up tons of memory, it eats up more CPU. this is an acceptable trade off because i am expecting to upgrade my machine anyways. while memory may be cheaper, gdesklets pails in comparison to what this new xorg is capable of.

there is a down side however. it can be rather flaky. sometimes i have problems with the root window not refreshing, then i end up with a terminal i cant read and a dozen menus still showing (due to not being refreshed).

also, my focus seems to be screwed up. i am having problems with getting windows to come to the foreground. sometimes, my menu drops up behind mozilla, which is always bad if the menu isnt on top.

if you're considering makin the switch, read these two sites first. its easy to get it to work, configuring it is a nightmare.

the gdm theme that i decided on is based on warcraft, specifically, 3. its a really neat theme, cause they utilize the err... utility button section for GDM functions. it has a really spiffy image of the Thrall toy too, which is pretty cool.

i wonder if gdm themes can be self updating (ie they can dynamically change as they see fit).

anyhoo, i need to go to bed, just another sleepless night.

xorg

2004-09-09T21:47:00.000-05:00

some neat updates.

first, i was determined to buy SF: Anniversary Collection tonight (its the one with the old school SFs and SF3:Third Strike). thing is, if you go to eb's site, you'll find that if you buy it online, you can receive a free bonus item, a ryuu bust (chest up figure type statue). i dont really like waiting for shipping, so i called every EB in town to see if anyone had one left. come to find out, the only one left in town was at an EB in the Quarry. not bad for $30.

secondly, i finally did the move to xorg. since they moved all that drop-shadow and native transparency into a stable release, i just couldnt say no anymore. it didnt go as smoothly as it could have but its obviously working now.

the first major problem was that i had 300+ config diffs to merge, most if which were for xorg. rather than wanting to go through all of them (i actually did 20 or so, then got tired of it), i just did an auto-merged em all. that presented some problems with the overwrite XF86Config. i want to move to the new xorg config, but for now, this will do. i also setup gdm to load at boot. if i need to drop to terminal mode, i imagine i can just ssh in from another machine.

i need to go play this street fighter, now!

100th posting!!

2004-09-09T01:11:00.000-05:00

this is my 100th post!!

just had to get that off my chest. its kinda nice, to know that i've consistantly kept my blog up to date since june.

anyhoo, on to many more pressing matters.

first on the agenda is poker night. it's kinda dwindled into about 4 of us, which is kidna nice cause then i was actually able to seat everyone. tonight, i grilled some burgers and it was much fun. we learned to play a new vietnamese card game, poorly translated into, "charge". the rules make some elements of gameplay feel lop-sided, but its a decent game. it seems to be lacking in the rules that define what hands can trump others. it would make sense that if 2's are played (in multiple or singles) then they should be allowed to be trumped by anything that's better (and change the pattern as well).

next on the agenda, libhaet. back in concurrency, i did a project (link to eventually provided on my website) to provide performance enhancements for ripping and encoding a CD. i have been wanting to turn that into a library for quite a while because i want to write an application that will rip/encode from my scsi cdrom tower. there has been progress!! to develop libraries, i find it best to write sample code that calls the library, so i can get a sense of how the API should look. last weekend, i wrote a sample client for libhaet, and it can be found here. it's a very clean and nice start. from what i can see, it'll be fairly simple to add features onto this design. i intend to finish the sample client and start work on the official API this weekend.

on the dvd front, i am about 2-3 weeks away from needing a 250+ disc binder for my dvd's. i have completely filled the binder crystal bought me, which i love, for my birthday (with the exception of 1 page). i copied Band Of Brothers for ford in exchange for seasons 1&2 of curb your enthusiasm.

lastly, my system updates was this week. i updated world, and it borked out at docbook-sgml-utils, and the fix was to re-emerge openjade. it finally finished and i have 77 friggin config files to merge. xorg finally moved the xdamage and drop shadow stuff into an official release (6.8). this is the stuff that keith packard has had in experimental for a long time cause xfree wouldnt allow cvs commit. since he forked, he finished up the extensions and pushed it to stable. i can't wait till gnome/fluxbox/enlightenment/xfce4 can take advantage of this. it will definately make computing WAY more interesting. this might even be incentive to purchase hardware upgrades. fortunately all this xorg stuff was written in C, so i dont have all that suckage like gdesklets.

oh, and i found this site. not sure exactly how they verify that you partake in their "offers", but i just make do that myself so i can get a ~$40 ipod. hell, i could do this a couple times and start sellin those things on ebay.... >:)

peace out, its bedtime.

dogs and cats

2004-09-07T16:26:00.000-05:00

a lil side note as i get ready to leave work today.

earlier, josh said he bet he could find a website dedicated to someone's dog. i told him not to look too long as im sure google should turn something up on the first page.

as it turns out, i found this dog-lovers contract and this page proving that cats are evil. makes for an interesting read.

btw, i LOATHE how microsoft's copy and paste for URLs automatically format themselves.

wedding registry

2004-09-05T09:32:00.000-05:00

once again, i lost a long blog, so i'll try to recreate it.

on friday, crystal and i went to target to start a wedding registry. we started an account and they gave us one of those scanners. side note: they have an rj-45 connection in the handle, i wonder if i could connect to it...

we scanned 160 items, totaling out to $3200 bucks. we put some stuff on there that we dont expect to actually get, but why not shoot for the moon. we were in there for 3 hours!! we were even there long enough to see a shift change!

apparently, a clerk told me that target owns amazon. i didnt know that. it seems to be true, because i can log into target with my amazon account.

next on the list is bed, bath and beyond. hopefully it wont take as long as target.

moocher

2004-09-02T11:52:00.000-05:00

i hate explorer, i had a really long complaint, and explorer crashed. mozilla rocks so much more.

so a while back i started a project to copy each of ford's cd's. that undertaking took 1.5 years while i borrowed 12 cds at once and would return them in about a half a week. however, i didn't just take the cds without offering something in return.

since i got a dvd burner and netflix account, i promised ford a copy of any dvd i have. i would even provide the dvd+r free of charge.

there's a general understanding that you can't borrow something like the aforementioned example without at the very least offering something in return. that may include cds, dvds, media, or even money. unfortunately there is a guy that we work with (not for, and not in my company) who doesnt follow this code.

this moocher has borrowed cds, twice, without offering any goods in return. on top of that, he helps himself as if my binder is his. the next time he does this, i will not be friendly about it. i might have to reburn the cd because im afriad he'll screw it up. i dont like or trust the guy therefore unless he offers something decent in return for this, i cannot let him borrow a single thing.

i guess i should go ahead and start (or redo, whichever works for you) that high performance cd ripping library that i started for concurrency. that way i can burn a ton of stuff to a few inconspicuous dvds and not worry about moochers getting their hands on my stuff.

dvd+r

2004-08-30T20:24:00.000-05:00

there was an ad this weekend in the newpaper for officedepot. 50 pack verbatim dvd+r for $55, buy one get one free. that's 100 dvd+r's for 55cents. that's a pretty good deal in its own right.

i decided to go and buy some. accidentally went to an officemax and didn't realize it until my retarded self read the clerk's name tag. i stopped off at an actual officedepot further up the highway (bitters and 281). found 2 packs, and took em to the register.

they rang up at $37.17!!! im gonna try to go back tomorrow and see if i can rip them off again.

loads o' updates

2004-08-30T08:04:00.000-05:00

wow, ton of stuff went down this weekend.

friday and saturday were pretty lazy days. i enjoyed doing nothing.

sunday was busy. we started by harrassing my parents for some cash. we took that cash to Kerby Lane. this week, we sat at the "bar". since we were somewhat limited in our funds, crystal bought a fullstack of buttermilk pancakes. i bought the sampler (pancakes, bacon and eggs). since i am trying to limit myself on my coffee intake, i only drank 3 cups of their everlasting bottomless "cup of brown love". (inside joke)

we then went to the 14th annual austin chronicle hot sauce festival. we got there at around noon. there were about 20+ booths all serving free samples. there were beer booths and even a booth selling those peppers that are attached to a big thread.

we were there for 2 hours, and my tongue was begging to leave. well sorta. at around 1, we had to sit down in the shade (it was 90F in the shade). i was drinking large amount of water due to a couple stands that sold some serious firewater (winstons). that winston's stuff made me choke. few others bit back pretty well. there were too many "jellies". some were sweet, most were mild and all of them were terrible. after we got back up from the break, there weren't too many decent sauces. we left at 2, my stomache had all the water it could hold.

got back and washed crystal's car. i kinda wish i had a new car to be proud of.

come to find out, i received 6 gmail invites. if you want one, drop me a line. maybe i'll be generous.

i also found a way to run through my netflix queue much faster. i dug up an old Win98 machine of crystals, cleaned up some disk space, and installed DVDShrink. works like a charm, a very slow charm. but now i dont have to wait till the weekend! perhaps its time to get some more dvd+r's.

the joshua effect

2004-08-27T13:34:00.000-05:00

i must be slipping, i havent blogged in several days.

first, on the agenda. we officially started the poker night thing this week. the party consisted of josh, alan, ford and i. alex was scheduled to attend but had to bail because i apparently didn't remind him in advance. that aside, it was a lot of fun. as usual, my winnings sky-rocketed and then plummeted (sp). ford hovered above being bought out, but ended up pulling some pretty decent hands near the end (he won the last all-in hand). alan did ok, pretty much broke even. josh was doing really bad early on, then started winning some big pots, and then started losing it again. he claims he had more than me before the last all-in, but i refute that. next time, we should count it before the all-in.

i also coined a new expression: the joshua effect. when we played texas hold'em, we started the big blind at $2. after a while, it became apparent that if josh didnt want to check, he'd lay down $2. this is apparently because when he played, $2 was the minimum bid (or something to that effect). after a while, i started givin him a hard time and called the $2 bet the "josh bet". eventually it just took the name of the "joshua effect" whenever i wanted to check but wanted to keep everyone playing instead of fishing for cards and folding when someone layed out a measly $5.

im going to drive some more jettas this weekend, as well as some corrollas (sp). i had tossed around the idea of keeping le tank for a while. ever since i was a kid, i've always wanted a muscle car. i've been tossing around the idea of keeping the olds, and getting a vintage (early 70's model) vette. it'd make sure the body needed little to no work aside from paint and that the engine would at least work. i dont want something i cant at least drive to the gas station. since i take pride in personal creations (ie code).

i found out last night what the maximum queue size on netflix is 500 dvds. bummer, maybe i should increase the number of dvds i can have out at once to 5.

/me wants coffee

Gc.Collect(ADO.NET);

2004-08-24T17:11:00.000-05:00

ok so ADO.Net is garbage. in fact, its the perfect example of poor object orientation. The factory that exists for the current version is basically non-existant.

i have been working on writing generics for database INdependent code, which is more challenging than you might imagine. in ADO.Net 1.0/1.1, you have to create seperate DataStore provider objects for communicating with different databases. rather than having a decent factory with a good api, they allowed each provider to basically use a seperate api.

what's microsoft's suggestion? use an enum/switch technique, which would give Kay (robbins for you non-utsa cs grads) a heart attack.

so my work-around is to mask the Provider object's type behind a wall of imported DLL code. that means that in a library that's already being implemented, i keep track of said provider object by the aforementioned enum/switch technique. in doing so, it's actually cleaner for me to hide the provider objects completely.

i have managed to squish the code needed to communicate with a provider down to a half-dozen lines of code. it can manage a pool of connections to multiple providers. it can also obscure the data access via IDataReader, IDbConnection, IDbCommand, IDbDataParameter, and IDbDataAdapter. pretty slick. i'd post an example, but im sure my employeer would be opposed to that.

on a more positive note, im starting a poker night. last week, everyone showed up sporatically. this week, i have more people showing up. there should be 6 people so far, not including myself. the only problem is i dont have enough room at my dining table for that many people....

test drives

2004-08-21T22:16:00.000-05:00

what an exhausting day. we went test driving cars for the better portion of the morning.

first we went to a VW dealer. i wanted to drive an automatic to see how they handled. before we were even able to see their selection, a salesman came out to see what we wanted. i made it fairly clear from the get-go that i was not looking to buy today, hoping that he'd back off.

so i found a jetta that i was interested in, so i asked to take it for a spin. i was a lil worried cause the first thing the guy said was to keep the speed low due to local police. before i even made it out of the neighborhood, he was asking me "what it would take to get [me] into the car". i repeated what i already told him. not once did he mention features or benifits. instead he hammered on and on about how i need to buy the car today, despite my telling him i wasnt wanting to buy today. i never got to take the car about above 40, and he had the nerve to ask me if i liked how it drove. we left, and i still feel that i never got to test drive a jetta.

next was the gunn honda dealer across the street. i was interested in checking out civics. they had some '04 civics for $16k new. i decided i wanted to test drive one. this time, the guy focused on showing features and functionality. before he let me drive, he pulled into a car lot to show me everything about the car. the features were basically the same as the accord, so i was already pleased. i liked the vtech engine and the fact that it was a quiet ride. it had plenty of power even though it was low on the horse-power. the drive went well. i was able to take it to the highway, around some curves and punch it a lil. i liked the way it handled. smooth acceleration, responsive steering and braking. the salesman wasnt pushy. in fact, he said he was paid on salary. i walked away with a very positive feeling of the dealership and the car.

then we went to a ford dealer, northside ford, to test drive a focus. the kid who was took us on the test drive couldn't have been older than us. the only thing i can say about the focus is that i didnt like it. it felt cheap. it drove cheap. i dont think i'd like driving it after a few years. it felt much like a car that crystal's parents own and affectionatly refer to as "the pickle". the kid was desperate to get me to like anything. he showed me a focus wagon, YELLOW! i don't know what it is about me that says i would like a yellow stationwagon. they were apparently moving locations on monday, so they didn't have much inventory. but the inventory they did have, which sucked ass, he was desperate to sell me. he even showed me a smelly altima with a big brown stain on the passenger seat. i wont be buying a ford.

that leaves me with a jetta, impreza, and a civic. i think the impreza's will be out of my price range but im still very interested in them. i should prolly do some more research on these models' consumer report.

weekend finally

2004-08-20T15:54:00.000-05:00

woot, the weekend is finally here.

crystal is comin down this weekend, we're going to do some relaxing, working out and relaxing some more. im thinkin i want to go try and drive some cars this weekend. specifically, i have my eyes on a focus, impreza (out of my price range mostly) and a jetta. we'll go drive some and see what we can find.

im slowly reorganizing my music, one album at a time. i try to do a couple albums at night before i go to bed. i just have so many, it's hard to organize them all properly. i've been contemplating whether or not to not collect live performances. "recorded live performance" kinda sounds like a paradox. most bands that play live play a pretty typical and boring set. few bands will branch off and play something you'll never hear on their record(s).

i have been downloading a lot of anime off animesuki lately. i've recently snagged a copy of Madlax (eps 1 - 20), and Samurai 7 (eps 1-8), both are pretty good series. i'm glad alex snagged all the Shura No Toki before it was licensed. i don't understand the ethics of fan subbing. they bootleg anime until it gets licensed. bootlegging is bootlegging, no need to be a bunch of ethical asshats about it. the nature of fansubbing alone violates the ethics they try to mandate.

anyhoo, im about to leave work, i'll blog about my test drives later this weekend.

zoom zoom

2004-08-18T16:32:00.000-05:00

ok i'm a lil slow bloggin this, but last night i went to test drive cars. ford and i went to a mazda dealership and planned to visit the VW dealer nearby afterwards. we didn't get time for the VW dealer, but the mazda dealership experience was rather interesting.

when we first get on the lot, they had very few used mazdas, as it seemed they specialized in new cars. this was ok, because they had 2 used mazda 6's that i wanted to drive. they had a '04 acura TSX that ford was interested in driving. so we went inside to ask about test driving it, and the guy they sent out to deal with us was a complete trip.

he couldn't locate the keys to one the 6's that i wanted to drive. he kinda wanted to push a new car on me, asked how much i wanted to spend and why i hadn't considered a new car. eventually we agreed to just drive the other 6 after ford drove the TSX.

this man was large, i mean _large_. he had problems fitting in the acura. the drivers seat had to be back all the way when he drove it off the lot, and he had to sit VERY awkwardly in the backseat. ford seemed to feel comfortable in the driver seat of the TSX, punching it as soon as we left the parking lot. it was drove very smooth, and from what i get from it, he enjoyed driving it (even though it apparently didn't live up to the hype).

when we got back, i got in the 6 and headed off the lot. mind you, i've driven an '85 olds (Le Tank) for over 3 years now, so as soon as i hit the gas, it was a lil more responsive than i had expected. unfortunately it was still disappointing. transmission was decent, but it didn't drive much better than Le Tank. it was still sluggish, and the brakes were far too sensitive for my liking.

next, i decided to drive a mazda 3 just for s&g. i had no intentions of buying one, just wanted to drive it. it was a lot more sporty than the 6. the transmission was smoother, and the acceleration was better. if i were to even go with a mazda (which i wont) i'd be a 3. the salesman said that they were selling like hot cakes, but i don't really care (i'd wait till the '05). ford drove the 3 next, cause i wanted to see him punch it better. it handled alright and he thought it wasn't too far from how the TSX handled.

one thing i did like was the triptronic shifter. that is the most amazing thing i've seen in cars since OnStar. you can drive an automatic if you dont feel like being annoyed by the manual. or if you feel like driving the manual for the added performance, you can. it's smart enough not to let you fuck it up, and easy enough anyone can do it. i really like that and if i get a more recent car, i really want the triptronic shifter.

the car salesman, what a hoot. he started with the verbal handjob, telling us he was an EE grad from georgia tech and that he drove a new 'vette. EVERY drive we went on, the clown fell asleep in the backseat. i don't mean dozed off, i mean "snoring loud and falling over into the seat next to you" kinda sleep. when we went in to exchange info, he pointed to a 'vette in the service drive and said it was his. that was funny cause a mechanic had the keys and was moving the car. he then had the balls to say that he spent enough time driving with us that he felt he deserved my business!! what nerve!! if i decide to get a mazda (which i wont), i will make sure to buy from someone else.

all in all, i wasnt impressed with mazda. they weren't worth the asking price in my opinion. next on the list is Civic and Jetta.

allergies

2004-08-17T00:15:00.000-05:00

today hit me like a ton of bricks. around 9.30am, my allergies started flaring up. my head split right open and my nose was runnin like it was in the olympics.

i went to the grocery store and some high-school broad forgot to include a bag of my sandwich stuff. so i went back to claim my goods. they told me to just go get what i paid for and bring it back. upon my return, they had thrown away my receipt, so i waited a good 10 minutes while they fished it out.

on my trip home, i was nearly in a car accident. some douchebag decided at 1604 and Gold Canyon that they wanted to get over at the exit ramp, IMMEDIATELY. i was driving about 45-50, in the far right lane, and about 10 yards behind a trailblazer that was exiting the highway. they ended up crossing over ~5 feet of solid white lines to get into the parking lot next to me. this meant that they dropped their speed to below 30, and were now driving perpendicular to me (and the rest of traffic for that matter). i slammed on my breaks, layed on my horn (the most important part) and swirved to the left to avoid them. BARELY missed em, but i ended up with coffee all over my floorboard.

i had half a mind to just pump the gas and hit the car, to teach the wanker not to mess with an 85 olds. but i figured if i did, i'd roll the suv (low car hitting a tall suv = rolled suv), and possibly kill someone. didn't feel like having manslaughter over my shoulders. i also wanted to follow them into the parking lot and give them my "what-for", but i didn't want to add battery/assualt to that as well. so i let it be, as much as i wanted to punch a hole in their chest, i left them alone.

by time i got home, all i wanted to do was have a beer and pastrami sandwich, which i did. i watch narc (it finally finished downloading), and did some housework all night. i downloaded "samurai 7" episode 2, and it was really neat. it hasn't been licensed yet, so im going to watch all of it that i can.

time for bed.

dallas

2004-08-16T23:55:00.000-05:00

so crystal and i drove to dallas this weekend to visit her uncle brian. man, that was a blast.

i left work at 4.30, and made it to austin by 7.30 (yes, i hit traffic in both cities). we left austin by 8, and made it to dallas by 11. since he lives out in the country, it took us an hour to get through dallas (to the east side), arriving there by midnight. it was fun finding our way around in pitch blackness with no roadsigns or city lights.

we woke up sat. morning around 8.30, and uncle brian was cooking breakfast. apparently its kinda unusual to eat cereal in the country. we spent a good portion of the mid-morning lounging around watching satallite tv. yes, that's all you can get in the country. there is no such thing as broadband either.

around 3 we went to visit her chain-smoking grandma (im not insulting her, it's just a very bad habit of hers). she just got a new house and we were curious to see the place. it was nice, she wanted to try and garden the place up, but lacks a green thumb. like her uncle said, you can't go over without having to do a chore. she _tried_ to get me to trim the hedges, but i didn't intend on doing that on my vacation.

that evening i learned to play texas hold'em. her grandma came over and we fixed spaghetti. uncle brian's youngest (from the divorce, nicknamed bart simpson for a reason), crystal, gran, uncle brian and i all played a game of texas hold'em. i think we started out with something like $2000 (not backed by real money!). the chips were really nice (in fact, im bidding on a set right now). that game is incredibly fun.

i've been thinking about starting a poker night.

sunday we went fishing for 2 hours. uncle brian caught a fish in less than 5 minutes, and i hadn't gotten a bite in over an hour. guess some people got it, and some don't. we made plans to go back in october, this time we're gonna take his boat out to one of the lakes in dallas (i think there are 4).

we left for austin/sa at 4pm, and arrived in austin at 8pm. i made it back to san antonio by 10 and was ready to zonk out. i can't wait to do it again.