Laydros.org

New netbook

2011-05-09T13:08:00.002-04:00

I picked up an Acer Aspire One netbook at Target last week, on sale for $220 with a free case. 1.66Ghz Atom CPU, 1GB DDR3 RAM, 250GB HDD. I upped the RAM to 2GB, and installed Ubuntu 11.04. Resized the hard drive to keep the Windows install on it if I ever need it.

I would like to move away from Ubuntu, and use Arch or Crunchbang or pure Debian, but I don't have time to mess with setup right now. I used Crunchbang recently on my Macbook, and got everything working except suspend. Crunchbang is almost pure Deb out of the box, so I expect the same problem, and Arch will certainly be more setup. I did however setup Openbox in a very Crunchbang-like setup, and things are working well so far. Because I had some interest about the setup after posting a screenshot on Twitter this weekend, I'll follow up with a post containing some info on what I'm using.

So far I think this has a better chance of staying around a while than the Asus I picked up a year or so ago. I haven't really used my MacBook at all in the mean time.

Hi three years later

2011-05-09T13:07:00.001-04:00

Been mostly using tumblr lately, but it is blocked from where I work (Fidelity) so I'm just going to try to cut the friction to posting by posting here some.

How to stick to something?

2008-09-12T14:08:00.002-04:00

I currently have 2 monkeys on my back that are bothering me more than the others. One is to lose some weight again. I did a good job earlier this year by loosing ~20 pounds, but most of it has been gained back. The other is to try to write, or play music, or something. I started to get serious about the idea of blogging more, in a less personal way near the beginning of the summer, but then I was invited to play in a band, which seemed to sorta fill that "artistic" hole. Then that fell apart about a month ago. I've debated if I should try to start something up since. I used to hate writing in English class, but when I was in high school I started to enjoy it more. I had some great instructors in high school and college, and many of them encouraged me to write more. Then a couple of years ago I ran into Steven King's book called "On Writing", and it caused me to think I should try to write. I am very interested in either being a journalist or novelist in the long run, but I feel like getting a blog going with a strong readership could be great training to get me ready for something more serious. I still feel like music is closer to "my" form of art, and I would love to have a reason to play regularly, but I really enjoy writing.

I told Katy yesterday when we were driving home that I am going to seriously try to work on these two issues, because I have always read that telling people around you that you are going to change causes you to be held responsible. So here it is, for anyone that does ever read this blog. I'm going to try. I'm going to try to get into better shape, and I'm going to try to start up a blog. I'll probably keep this one as a personal blog, but I want to try something more serious.

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin

2008-09-10T14:44:00.003-04:00

I don't think of Damon as a great political mind, but he is certainly well spoken and makes valid points. I won't spoil the killer quote for you, but you will catch it at the end.

John McCain

2008-09-09T11:00:00.003-04:00

I was a big McCain fan in 2000. Now I'm not, here's why.

The monster under my bed

2008-09-04T11:26:00.004-04:00

I don't know why I'm posting this in a public place. But whatever. So I have been reading Jason DeFillippo's blog for a while now, and I guess I'll just link to his post and and paste in my comment I left.

I don't even remember what post of yours got your blog into my feed-reader, but for some reason it's survived many prunings, and it's fun to see you posting again. So, about these past few posts, it sounds like you are on the right track and it will be hard as hell to do, but you probably do need to avoid the drinking. But I'm totally hearing you. It's like if I don't have my distraction, I get depressed. I quit smoking, and I've been fat since, and I spend too much money on crap I get excited about and then drop. If I don't have something new to buy and be excited about, or a new video game to play, or a new TV show to watch, or a computer to build or whatever, I get depressed. What I should be doing is exercising, reading, getting real work done, but instead I keep falling into ruts of doing other crap. The really crazy thing for me was that I was a happy person most of my life, then as soon as I achieved my really big goals for the first part of my life, got married, a good job, bought a house, etc, I suddenly have this monster under the bed. If I don't continually feed him new CD's or books or whatever, he gets me.

I should write more, but I have learned from the times that I do successfully blog or journal that I need to just put what I can, I'll never really sit down and write the long things that I should.

I think I should add that I am super happy about my wife and house and job. There are no complaints, but it's like the fact that I don't have any huge goals to fight for makes me sad. I would rather deal with the downs I have had than not have these things (especially Katy). When I was a little kid I would sit up at night and read the JC Penney catalog. Now I sit up and surf the web. But I remember the first time I walked into CompUSA and didn't really really want anything, then Best Buy, and this past weekend I walked into the Apple Store and didn't really desire anything. It's weird. And I think that makes me sad. I just need to turn that around, instead of continuing to feed the problem.

Quick thoughts on the iPhone

2008-09-02T13:29:00.002-04:00

The trigger for this post is using my iPod Classic. I love the thing, when it came out I quickly decided it was the best iPod ever. My previous favorite was the 3rd gen. I used the 4th gen and owned a 5th gen, but this was the best. All of them work well, are fairly reliable, etc, but the interface improvements on the classic are nice little touches. The kind of touches that Apple and IBM make, but no body else takes the time to make.

But as I sit here listening to Porcupine Tree while updating a RHEL server, I keep reaching for the little bud on my headphones to pause or skip a track, like I have on my iPhone. I really thought that the lack of physical controls with a click of feedback would be missed, but they aren't. The only things you could do on the old iPods without looking were change the volume, and pause, but the same things can be done on the iPhone without looking. The other nice things like coverflow, the iPhone method of scrolling, etc, are even better.

I still have my iPod classic for size reasons, 80gb easily holds my (recently slimmed down) media collection, but the 16gb iPhone comes no where close. I also like having my classic because of the biggest downside to the iPhone, battery life.

Right now the only thing I REALLY want for the iPhone that isn't available is a good text editor. I'm getting pretty quick with the keyboard, and I would like to be able to really write and edit text/doc files.

I am seeing things

2008-08-29T13:36:00.001-04:00

Not being funny, but I just thought someone should know if this is some last stop before complete insanity, but I am now seeing things when I read. As I read something and my eyes inadvertently skim ahead, I will read things that I expect to see in later sentences. I then get to those later sentences and they are not there. It happens a few (5-7) times a week now, for the past month or so.

Gratitude Exercises

2007-11-22T08:55:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am a bit excited because I got up at six this morning and went to the Ridgewood Shopping Center Turkey Trot, and participated in the one-mile fun run. It was for extra credit for PE, but it was a fun thing to do. The $20 entry fee went to MS research.

I read a very good blog post from Timothy Ferris, and wanted to share it. Link

Basically he recommends listing five things that you are grateful for each day for a week, starting today. I'm going to try to list mine here.

1. The ability to run, because it feels good and there are people that can't.
2. My two dogs. They are one of the greatest joys in my life and Missy ran with me today.
3. Air conditioning. It's Thanksgiving day, and mine is on.
4. Manual transmission. It's more fun and easier to maneuver in tight spots.
5. Hand sanitizer. I have become a bit of germ freak, and having a bottle of this stuff in my bag helps me cope.

Lisbon and Europe

2007-11-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

I am writing this from a hotel lobby in Lisbon. Hotel Mundial. It has been a great experience, although nowhere near as life changing as my first trip to Europe. Towards the end of my sophomore year in high school we took about a week in northern and western France, and I saw myself and the world around me in a totally different way.

This trip has been fun, but it has allowed me to rehash some of the thoughts of the prior trip. Relearn some of the lessons, and even question some of the things I thought I learned when I was in France. Since going to France I have been to St. Louis, San Fransisco and the Napa Valley, Deleware, and a lot of the midwest (on the way to Iowa.) I still think that Americans are too serious. We don't appreciate living life as much, and we appreciate money more. I learned that before, and it has been confirmed. We also are absolutely too fat. And I think this is a phenomenon that has gotten significantly worse in the short span of time since I was here before.

I don't think that the US is as devoid of culture as I thought before. Raleigh is, but San Fransisco was incredible. The city differences aren't as big as I thought before. When I came to France I had really never left the southeast. I never crossed the Mason Dixon or the Mississippi. Those are huge boarders, and it took a few trips out to realize that. Today the rest of my group (my wife and her parents) went to a meeting for the company that we are on the trip with, and I went out to walk for a little while. I realized that I probably don't want to live here. I still think I could live in Normandy, or maybe England, but I don't quite feel right here. However it was a great experience, and I want to visit more. I walked out with no camera, no note book, just the clothes on my back. I can't blend in because I look so physically different from the natives with my almost red hair and freckles, but I tried to dress and walk like they do. I tried to breath the city and the country. There is a lot here, a lot more than I expected. I had this dumb American view that Portugal was this weird subset of Spain, which it is not at all. Portugal is certainly a place of it's own. No more Spanish than Italian.

International Business Machines

2007-10-10T09:35:00.000-04:00

I have a new job. I am at IBM as an intern. Specifically I am in the WebSphere Technology Institute Datapower Integration Group.

And I couldn't be more excited.

I have a long road ahead of me. I know practically nothing about writing software and I am in a development group. To start I will be doing sys admin type stuff which I think I know fairly well. But there is a lot to be excited about. First I will say that my pay is almost double what I was making at FedEx Kinko's, but I would have probably taken this job for less money.

The most apparent thing to the people around me is that I was burned out from working customer driven retail jobs. This is of course a very customer driven job, but in a much more distant way. I come in pretty much when I want to, leave when I feel like leaving, and can work from home. I think that shortly it may mean working more than 8 hours instead of less, but at least I can go to the doctor, or if I get stuck in traffic it's not the end of the world. On a more Jason level this is exciting because of what I will be doing. I have wanted an "IT" job for a while, something where I work from a cube and play with technology and become an "information worker." I finally get to apply all of the GTD stuff I have been looking at for a couple of years now. And I love that it is IBM. They used to be the evil empire, but in recent years IBM has become a radically different company. Things move faster, they take good care of employees, and very important to me, have made huge open source contributions. A lot of what I will be working with is Linux. One of the first things my father asked me when I was telling him about work was if we all had to wear suits. Now its very much business casual, and its not entirely unusual to see someone wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

And I got a ThinkPad. It's a couple of years old, and only about as powerful as the laptop that I had anyway, but just as with Katy's ThinkPad and my old 600, the engineering involved is incredible.

It also seems that I am with a great team. It's a very laid back group that can joke around. The work we are doing is very Web 2.0 oriented, which is another major interest of mine, so all in all it seems like a great fit.

So all in all, I am excited.

Site specific stuff

2007-07-12T10:43:00.000-04:00

I've added my GReader shared items piece just to the right of where you are reading this. This is basically stuff that I find interesting when I'm going through my feeds. I've recently gone through and pruned out a lot of stuff, but up until about a week ago I was reading about 6000 items per month. I thought I might pass some filtering of that information onto others.

In addition, I'm lightly looking for a new job, and I'm very interested in getting a blogging gig. If anyone likes what they see, I certainly could tailor things for topic and style. I'm available at laydros AT gmail DOT com.

A few sites I reccomend

2007-07-12T10:27:00.000-04:00

I've been expanding what I read lately and have come across a few blogs that deserve mentioning. One of my favorites is "More Than Fine" by David Chen. He does a great job of only posting interesting stuff. The flow seems to be a bit random because he hops subjects quite a bit, from politics to religion to pop culture to movies and TV, but somehow it works.

Another new one I found is called "Dumb Little Man." It's yet another lifehacker type blog but Jay has some great material. He doesn't post links, and doesn't publish filler. He also will go into financial issues, not just productivity.

A more high profile blog that I have enjoyed for a long time is UneasySilence. They cover a wide range of stuff like BoingBoing but again pretty much skimming the top of good stuff, and there is also a strong Mac focus.

One with a bit less pulp but lots of fun would be Geekologie. It's sorta Engadget on crack. They post tons of gadgets and happenings, always with a cynical and sarcastic bend.

Finally is the blog of Tim Ferris. Tim has recently published a New York Times bestselling book and I think he could certainly be called a model lifehacker. His basic premise is to outsource what you can of your life so you can enjoy your time and money. I'm going to pick up his book soon but he still shares a lot of secrets and tips on his blog.

Michael Moore Freaks Out

2007-07-09T21:28:00.000-04:00

I'll have to find this on youtube but today I happened to turn on the TV, which I do about twice per year, and while flipping around landed on CNN. Wolf Blitzer was on and they were running a piece on Michael Moore's film Sicko. The report certainly seemed to be opposing the views in Moore's film but when they interviewed him his reaction was pretty amazing. I will first add that I have not ever seen any of his films yet, but plan(ed) to, and I have generally thought that he is on the right track with much of his stuff. I am very happy that we do have strong voice presenting some information on modern issues that the mainstream media isn't doing a good job of covering. However, my first direct exposure to Moore makes me think he's nuts. I have also been a pretty big fan of the way the Blitzer handles stuff in times that I have watched more television news. I typically pick CNN's coverage for major national news because it seems to be a better mix of opinions from both sides than most other media outlets.

Basically after the piece ran, which argued that our health care system is not as bad as the file depicts, the second they showed Moore he went on a tirade. Blitzer first had to sustain a barrage of direct offenses from Moore claiming that he was not allowed a voice on CNN for the past three years and demanding an apology because everything he said in Fahrenheit 911 was true. Moore then continued to rant well into the interview not allowing Blitzer to say a single word. Blitzer largely maintained his composure and tried to get the interview back on topic. He actually managed to get Moore to field 1 question, although the answer was filled with jabs back at Blitzer. I don't totally disagree with a lot of Moore's politics, but I strongly believe acting like a child, or better put, a jackass, is the best way to get a point across. I think Jon Stewart's undercutting commentary has done more to forward our collective mindset than Moore's ranting will ever accomplish.

Check this out:

MOORE: You have the questions. Why are we here? That's the question. Why are we here in this war? Where's the weapons of mass destruction? Why didn't you -- why did it take you so long, Wolf, to finally take on Vice President Cheney? It took you to 2007 before you made the man mad at you.

BLITZER: Those are fair questions.

MOORE: Four years!

BLITZER: Let's talk a little ...

MOORE: Where were you?

BLITZER: Let's talk about "Sicko." That's the film that you're here to talk about.

MOORE: Yeah, let's forget that. Yeah, OK.

BLITZER: There's plenty to talk about the war. There's plenty to talk about with "Sicko."

MOORE: I just haven't seen you in three years, so I was wondering how you felt for three years of not seeing me after you trashed "Fahrenheit" and said that I was wrong about, oh, yeah, this war was -- come on, I'm just waiting for an apology.

Update: Still no video, but the transcript is up:

here

It's a little more than half way down.

Update 2: Here is the video

Update 3: CNN has posted a response.

Take me out.....

2007-07-06T20:46:00.001-04:00

Watching USA baseball at the DBAP. Im enjoying this phone so far. With a 2 megapixel camera and 3G much of the connectivity from anywhere really comes true. Between tethering and hitting the web from the phone I hope I will be posting more.

More Than Fine: Most Incredible Breakdancing Video Ever

2007-07-03T10:18:00.000-04:00

More Than Fine: Most Incredible Breakdancing Video Ever

Totally worth watching.

"What do you do?"

2007-07-03T09:06:00.000-04:00

I experienced that question last night for the first real time. Of course I've had people ask me before but this was a group of peers that I had a lot in common with, and basically we went around and asked that. I was at Shwin's bachelor party, with people that I either met last night or hadn't really seen in a few years. I wasn't really embarrassed to say I'm still undergrad and making copies, but I certainly felt a couple of steps behind. Almost everyone else there is in some type of professional career or in grad school.

I actually had a lot of fun though. We just went to a restaurant then went back to the clubhouse at Shwin's apartments and played Texas Hold 'em and hung out. It wasn't a binge drinking fest like my party turned out to be, and I really felt more like I was with a group with similar interests than I have since high school. Actually the crazy part was how much fun Nick and I had. A lot of the time when he and I have talked in the past couple of years it felt like there was an invisible wall, but we had a blast last night. Before he left we kinda promised to each other to take getting together a bit more seriously. This is good.

I keep looking at things I want to change and keep reminding myself that everything is going to change in about 5 months. I'll have a degree, and I will finally have an open schedule to work when I need to. I hope I can develop a routine that involves daily exercise and more stability in what I do. I also hope I will make enough money to get us out of credit card debts quickly and start working on paying off cars.

Liberty Line (In the Sand)

2007-07-03T09:03:00.000-04:00

My good friend Glen has just started a blog of his own concerning where our government has gone. He served our country in the Marines earlier on in his life and now is a bit concerned about what has happened to the state of liberty. He's just getting it started but check it out.

Liberty Line

Ducks at BRDD

2007-07-02T01:12:00.001-04:00

I took dinner to Zoe tonight at Baskin Robin and there were a couple of ducks in the parking lot. They weren't exactly afraid of humans either.

In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man

2007-03-20T08:48:00.000-04:00

So last night I was settling in to do some homework and went to put on music. I realized that I had the Led Zeppelin song "Good Times, Bad Times" stuck in my head so I pulled out my box set to find which disc it was on. I quickly realized that it was one of the 2 songs that get fairly regular radio airplay that are not on that set. I then got on my computer and found it on the Early Days CD, which I do have in MP3 format, so I burned it out and listened.

I wasn't looking for a song that said kinda what has happened to me, I was just looking to hear the song that had been stuck in my head, but I ended up with something that is leading me to this blog post.

The lyrics:

Good Times Bad Times
(Bonham/Jones/Page)

In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man,
Now I've reached that age, I've tried to do all those things the best I can.
No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam.

*Good Times, Bad Times, you know I had my share;
When my woman left home for a brown eyed man,
Well, I still don't seem to care.

Sixteen, I fell in love with a girl as sweet as could be,
Only took a couple of days 'til she was rid of me.
She swore that she would be all mine and love me till the end,
But when I whispered in her ear, I lost another friend, oooh.

* Chorus

I know what it means to be alone, I sure do wish I was at home.
I don't care what the neighbors say, I'm gonna love you each and every day.
You can feel the beat within my heart.
Realize, sweet babe, we ain't ever gonna part.

So it's really a song about a girl leaving you. But that first part, and I know I'm not the first person to blog about it, says a bit more.

I've had a hard time over the past two years or so. I've dealt with depression for the first time in my life, and I have experienced a lot of changes. Thus far I have viewed this as a very unfortunate occurrence to have happen at the same time I finally have achieved a lot of my life goals. I now have a wife, a house, two dogs, a nice car, my own home office, and I'm going to NCSU. But I started to realize a few days ago that maybe there is something different going on. Right now I'm trying to read Stephen Covey's "8 Habits of Highly Effective People" and one of the things he talks about is paradigm shifts. I'm familiar with the concept, but I think it has become a mainstream idea that I have encountered in the past because he wrote this book. At any rate, a paradigm shift is a change not in the way that something is, but a change in the way that you view something. He correlates this to things like when we realized that the earth is not the center of the universe. I have experienced things like this before in my life, like when I started to view my financial situation in a different way. I didn't change the situation, I changed the way that I saw the situation, which then allowed me to handle it.

So as for the song, and how it relates to the last two years. Like I said, I have seen the last two years as a very unfortunate time period in which I had a bad section that just happened to occur when these great things in my life happened. I'm starting to see it as a phase shift. There was a very definite phase shift that occurred for me when I went from childhood to adolescence. It wasn't overnight, but it was over the course of about 6 months. My ways of seeing the world changed drastically. I went from being the nerdy kid that I was growing up to being someone more interested in music, socializing, and had my first interests in art. I wasn't a completely different person, I still had a lot of the same personality and interests, but a lot did change. And there was a catalyst in this, actually two. My parents got divorced, which kinda meant both of them were more lenient and my dad married Beth, who did a lot to help me loosen up from my geeky past, and I became friends with Nick, who also helped me loosen up. The two of them could have been considered bad influences, but I hate to think what I would have become if I didn't go through those changes then. I think what has happened in the past couple of years has been another period of change. And its not that all this stuff happening in my life is being enjoyed less because of my stress level, nor that they are the cause, but that they are the catalysts in another life period starting. As I leave that adolescent period and enter adulthood I'm already starting to see things differently. Probably the biggest difference is that I am now very interested in leaving a positive mark on the world. I never cared about this in the past very much. I thought it would be nice, but it wasn't a priority. Now I am fairly sure that I want to do something in some sort of church outreach, or missionary, or educational way. My family is still the most important thing to me, but I'm more interested in who I help than what I have. This all sounds very sappy, but it's less of an altruistic dream and more of a need to do something. There is also this urge to be kinda artsy/hippy. I've always been very into art and music from a distance, but now I really want to live more of a Carrboro/Asheville/San Fransisco weirdo life. I still find the majority of those people to be pretentious, and the ones that aren't to be weird, but that is the direction. Also, I don't see the more recent period as bad. Even though it was fairly self-centered, I think it was needed. It made me a normal person. It taught me a lot about how to socialize with others. This not only helped my self-confidence and self-image, but also has allowed me to develop some charisma that I think will be important to achieve what I want to do in life.

A big part of what I hope to do is to be an influence on people as a christian. I was raised in a church going family, but when I was a teenager I developed this idea that religion was a crutch that the stupid used to explain what they didn't understand. Throughout history we have thought everything was magic, and then we eventually realize the science behind it. The big change for me was one time talking to my maternal grandmother. She was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known, and I thought that she basically was a Christian in practice only, not in true faith. I thought she was scientifically minded enough to realize it was a farce, but went through the motions just because she was raised that way. But one day we were talking about God and what I would do with my life and she told me in a very genuine way how important it was to her that I lived my life as a Christian and I realized that she wasn't just going through the motions. I think people at least see me as a fairly intelligent, reasonable person. I want them to see me that way, not as some weirdo, and then see that I really have a faith in this stuff, and hopefully influence them in the same way my grandmother influenced me.

So this different paradigm kinda gives an explanation for the depression from two points. One is that I am yet to achieve much in helping people, and to be quite honest I'm scared to. I see the beggars on Hillsboro St. or around New Hope Commons and I want to help them, but I'm not quite ready to deal with them. I think what I really want to do is influence unchurched people that it is not a joke, and hopefully later on have the money and influence to help people through organizations. I want not only to help people with faith, but also in opening up education, censorship, and art. The other hard part goes back to the influence of Nick. I haven't really had someone to walk me through a lot of this. My Mom's boyfriend John has helped me a lot with the art stuff, and has been a great confidant. But I haven't had a Nick. I have a good friendship with my wife, and I have a good friendship with my brother-in-law, Jeff, Maggie, and my parents and in-laws, but there isn't really anyone that I have connected with on the same level that I connected with Nick. And of course Nick and I have really drifted apart since he got married. I struggle with the loss of that bond, and perhaps even more with the total lack of replacement. Before now I thought it was really just the loss of Nick, but now I wonder if a lot of it is the loss of that slot.

"No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam."

PicoPad

2007-02-27T14:49:00.000-05:00

I found a nifty new tool today. In my constant productivity quests one of my bigger hangups has been carrying pen and paper with me. I found something today at a local bookstore that seems interesting.

I typically have my messenger bag with me, and in it a number of different surfaces to write something on, along with plenty of writing utencils. However there are a lot of times that I have something occur to me when I am somehow away from my man-bag. This new tool comes into play for that. It is called PicoPad, and its such a simple concept that it could pretty much be done in a homemade style, but cheap enough it's just as easy to buy it. It's a piece of plasticy cardboard folded in half, with what is basically the top half of a post-it pad inside.

The part that is perhaps most ingenious though is the pen. It's pretty much a short pen refill with a small piece of the same plasticy cardboard attached to it that creates wings you can hold onto, and in the cover there is a slot to hold it. The whole thing is about the size of a stack of a half dozen business cards, so if you throw away some of the crap in your wallet you know you should throw away anyway, it will probably fit.

Simple, elegant, and ingenious.

The Elements of Style

2007-02-07T22:44:00.000-05:00

I love this book

I found it from reading about writing, and more specifically people blogging about Stephen King's On Writing, and later reading the book myself.

It's a great handbook on what to and not to do when writing. To start, it's short. It is around 100 pages and is significantly longer than it was when William Strunk originally wrote it. EB White (yes that EB White) was a student of Strunk who wrote a very terse text for his class. Years later White added to it, and with a little bit of modernization, the book exists today in it's fourth edition. It's to the point, and perhaps could be considered a bit rude, but most good English teachers are. The first part, which is what Strunk wrote, is pretty much a drill sargent issuing orders. These are simple points like

"2. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas."
"6. Do not break sentences in two."

The later parts, mostly written by White, highlight issues related to overall form, like using paragraphs, using the active voice, be clear, and one of the most important, omit needless words. Good writing is simple.

I'm still not sure why none of my English instructors have ever told me about this before.

And the old skool just keeps comin'!

2007-01-26T10:29:00.000-05:00

How bout some Transformers action? Quite possibly my very favorite of the franchises I grew up with.

Some pics for the new movie

^I gotta give Brian credit for showing me that one.

A funny but NSFW fan clip

And some trailers

OMG!!! OMG!!! OMG!!!

2007-01-17T16:09:00.000-05:00

First and foremost, and the real reason for the post:

TMNT Trailer

SA-WEET!

Second off is the trailers of a new Ghostbusters game that have been floating around, such as:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yo__g_5sdsI

You know you want this

2007-01-12T19:50:00.000-05:00

The 80's stuff is coming back hard. In my time I've seen the 60's and 70's stuff roll back around with hype, and only now that stuff I lived through is rolling back through do I really understand the nostalgia. The kids I see on campus all Risky Businessed out with khaki shorts, laconte polo, and big cheap sunglasses with the elastic band. The Transformers movie coming out. And now, the updated Lasonic Ghetto Blaster. Check it out here.

Exams

2006-12-12T21:08:00.000-05:00

It's that time again!

Arg.....

I'm having so much trouble focusing. I'm not used to really NEEDING to study. Like, if I don't study a lot for Ag Markets it will not be good. But I can't focus, I'm freaking out. My Dad and his wife are coming to stay with us this weekend, which I'm really looking forward to, but we need to clean up a lot. We have to finish Christmas shopping, the dogs are pretty nuts, Katy is sick, and we now have a Nintendo Wii, which is of course a distraction. Then just plain, old-fashioned, ADD-induced, Jason procrastinating. Doing things like, oh, I dunno, posting to my blog.

Again I say:

Arg.....

The Decline of PC Gaming

2006-12-07T09:15:00.000-05:00

There was a time when most households did not have a computer. Many of them did however, have a Nintendo. Then the PC's started to become more popular. With Windows 95 it became common, and by the early 2000's and Windows XP, they were in almost as many homes as a telephone or a TV. We saw games for all platforms, but there were a lot that weren't really doing as well on the consoles. They didn't have the graphics and processing capability, they didn't have the controls, and perhaps most importantly, they didn't have the Internet. I actually started to think that the PC gaming was going to eat away at consoles enough that they would fade. But instead it started moving the other way. I had friends tell me they didn't worry about what their video card was because they used their XBOX or PS2 for games, not their computers. One of the biggest changes was Halo. Suddenly someone figured out how to make a First Person Shooter work with a game pad.

Now with this generation it gets even better. The Wii has what perhaps could be a better system than keyboard and mouse for things like first person shooters and point and click systems like command and conquer. The online setups are in place. Nintendo's online system lacks the ability to find people that people probably want, but with the consoles connecting to friends will be consistent among different games. All three new systems feature wireless controllers. Another huge pointer to the shift is Call of Duty 3. This is a major FPS, and so far they aren't planning to release at all for the PC. At this point it's hard to argue as much cause to stick with PC games. The big MMORPGs are still on PC, but that will change with time.

Time will tell which one of these three systems will rise to the top, but I certainly think the Wii will do better than the Gamecube did against its competition, and I think we will see less focus on PC gaming.

Back to blogger

2006-11-30T09:50:00.000-05:00

So I created a Blog at Wordpress, but in my recent phase of "must perfect my computing enviroment" I decided that Google=good. I thought it would be smart to use google services when possible, so I pointed laydros.org back to blogger. It has been a good service, and they have a new beta with some extra features. The old posts are still at Wordpress, including a big article on pencils. Later I may try to move some over.

Justice is served.... to an alligator

2006-11-30T09:43:00.000-05:00

What happens when a Florida druggie gets cracked out and decides to go seduce an alligator? Well, it's pretty funny, if you are as cynical as me.

Adrian Apgar was heard yelling for help at about 4 AM and when police arrived they found the man, naked, on crack cocaine, and partially digested by an alligator.

Best line of the article:

Judd said Apgar told deputies he was smoking crack-cocaine at the adjacent park, but it was unclear why he was naked or why he was attacked by the alligator.

Link

History of Zelda

2006-11-28T00:38:00.001-05:00

This is a great video for the Legend of Zelda fan. It's certainly not short or for the non-geek, but it is quite tastefully done. I'm pretty excited about the Wii and hope they drop a bit in price soon so I can excuse picking one up. As many people my age I have a soft spot for Nintendo and wouldn't mind seeing them take the lead in the "next-gen console wars" or at least get a bigger presence than they have had over the N64 and Gamecube eras.

We take a look at the humble beginnings of the boy dressed in green, and the adventures he found on his quest for greatness It continues with a look at Link’s return to his roots, and his first handheld outing. Then we find Link riding his way onto the Nintendo 64, and becomes the ultimate master of disguise. After that Link brings us back to the handheld market where Link meets a few new friends. Lastly, ventures onto the GameCube where he undergoes an extreme makeover, and meets a talking cap that’ll change his world perspective.

As our retrospective comes to an end, we try to make sense of the history of Hyrule and it’s ever-present green-clad hero.

There is a free DVD download of this here:
http://wiinintendo.net/?p=1932

Flock beta

2006-06-17T13:01:00.000-04:00

Flock is a "social browser" built on the Firefox code base, which integrates blogging, photo sharing with Flickr or Photobucket, "favorites" (a.k.a. bookmarks) using del.icio.us or Shadows, and other collaborative features. Last November I took a look at an early Flock release, and found it to be interesting, if a little bit rough. The Flock folks have been hard at work, and the new Flock beta release looks solid enough to be a must for users who spend a great deal of time blogging, sharing pictures, or using services like del.icio.us.

NewsForge | Flock beta rocks

When the original Flock developer's preivew (which meant alpha) came out I tried it and didn't think it really did anything that I wanted. I had seen a little bit of praise for the new beta when it came out so I decided to try it again. I haven't really had a good chance to take it through the paces yet, but so far I like it alot. I'm using the blogging feature right now to make this post, and all I did was highlight the text in that newsforge article, and then right click on it and choose "blog this" and it popped up a nice window for me to work in. It will now, at least in theory, just send this right to my blogger account without me needing to do anything. It also interfaces your bookmarks with Del.icio.us, and your picture with flickr. I'll see how things go.

Blogged with Flock

Almost.... there.......

2006-05-04T22:45:00.000-04:00

One exam down. Now all I have left are the corrections for my FEWAS and 2 exams. I took my Ag Mktg exam today, and I still have Interpersonal Comm on Monday and Law on Tues. I know I made a solid A in my English class, but I honestly don't know how I'm doing in the other three, I doubt I have an A in any, and I doubt I'm going to fail any, but it could go either way. If I can manage to come out of this semester without failing anything and without totally slaughtering my GPA, I think I'll be ok.

I'm just ready for more of a break from this crap. Most of all I want to spend more time with Katy, but I also want to do more with the church, and I want to be able to watch primetime TV, and go to see music shows once in a while. Some things like TV seem so mundane, and I don't really watch much TV, but it just sucks because so much "stuff" happens in the evenings, and I just don't have evenings.

On another subject, NC State has hopefully found a basketball coach. Sidney Lowe was on the 1983 NCAA winning team. He's been an unsuccessful head coach for two NBA teams, and a very successful assistant more recently with the Pistons. So we will see how he does. Good to have an NC State grad in there, but hopefully his coaching will be more student oriented that Jimmy V.

5 things

2006-04-26T20:12:00.000-04:00

Every now and then the internet does turn up to have something good. This comes from a pretty good site called 43folders. It is about organization, and is named after a part of David Allen's Getting Things Done program. This though, is the authors site with lists of 5 things. http://www.5ives.com/

The one that made me totally laugh outloud was the fifth in his list of Five requests with regard to my eventual death, the last one threw me out of my chair:

1. If it happens that my death occurred in some public place, there is to be no ersatz memorial created on that location comprised of teddy bears, mylar balloons, or terrible poems written on posterboard in pink Magic Marker™. This is very, very important.
2. If you choose to have any kind of service “memorializing” me, there will be no use of the phrase “looking down on us.”
3. At no time is any outraged friend or family member to appear in public looking indignant and holding up a framed photograph of me.
4. If you refer to anything I’ve ever done as “brave,” “courageous,” or “special,” I will personally come back from the grave and shit angry ghost turds in your coffee pot.
5. If the resources exist and the weather is fine, I’d prefer to have my remains torn asunder by vicious dogs while “Tusk” is performed by an enthusiastic high school marching band.

I personally have fairly similar feelings about a lot of it. While I believe that I might be "looking down" I think it is somewhat cheezy, and I pretty purely agree with the other 4, including the last one.

Where did we come from

2006-04-17T16:32:00.000-04:00

Today, for some reason, sitting with the dogs, my mind wandered to this place it doesn't go very often, and I try not to go to often. I am very much a Christian. But I try to also be open minded and see things from others points of view too. And one place that neither Christian's or aethiests have any explination. If God (of any religion, not just Muslim-Judeo-Christian) put us here, where did he/she/it come from? If the scientific explinations are true, and there was a big bang, and bam, stuff started happening, where did that initial stuff come from.

Doesn't everybody think about this? If so, why don't people talk about it more. If not, why doesn't everybody think about it.

Wasting time again

2006-04-16T22:51:00.000-04:00

Again I have a paper to work on, and more importantly a few case's to analyse, and I'm doing other stuff...

This seemed to be fairly accurate, but I think one thing about this is my current state exaggerates how I usually am. I am more stressed right now that I have been in the past, and I tried to answer the questions in this quiz with the current in mind:

Advanced Global Personality Test Results

Extraversion	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	46%
Stability	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Orderliness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	43%
Accommodation	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Interdependence	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	70%
Intellectual	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	63%
Mystical	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%
Artistic	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	63%
Religious	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	90%
Hedonism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	56%
Materialism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	76%
Narcissism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	70%
Adventurousness	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Work ethic	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Self absorbed	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	43%
Conflict seeking	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Need to dominate	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	36%

Romantic	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	63%
Avoidant	\|\|\|\|\|\|	23%
Anti-authority	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	36%
Wealth	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%
Dependency	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	90%
Change averse	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	43%
Cautiousness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	83%
Individuality	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Sexuality	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%
Peter pan complex	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	83%
Physical security	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	90%
Physical Fitness	\|\|	10%
Histrionic	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Paranoia	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	76%
Vanity	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%
Hypersensitivity	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	63%
Female cliche	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	63%

Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

Stability results were low which suggests you are very worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.

Orderliness results were moderately low which suggests you are, at times, overly flexible, improvised, and fun seeking at the expense of reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment.

Extraversion results were medium which suggests you are moderately talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting.

Just two more weeks of class, then 3 exams, then I'm done for the semseter....

I guess I'm stalling

2006-04-12T15:47:00.000-04:00

I'm in the NCSU library with my laptop, hoping to make some progress on my Business Communication final paper. In reality I've got little more than a page done. As usual, I'm struggling to focus. I'm more interested in reading stuff on the web, looking at what people are doing around me, etc. But this semester is almost over. Just about 4 more weeks.

Missy and Milo

2006-02-26T15:48:00.000-05:00

Missy and Milo
Originally uploaded by laydros.

A couple of weeks ago Katy and I got a new puppy. He was born on Katy's birthday, which is kinda neat. He is a German Shorthaired Pointer like Missy, and has a similar level of energy. They are nuts running all through the house, biting each other, growling, and causeing a rukus. But he's ofcourse cute, and it will be nice to have him from a puppy for training, unlike Missy who we got when she was about 2.

New Toys

2006-02-26T03:23:00.000-05:00

New Toys
Originally uploaded by laydros.

So I finally got a new laptop. In fact, this is the first new computer I have ever purchaced. Everything else I have bought second hand. It's nice. Turion ML-32, 512MB ram, 80gig HDD, and the ATI 200M turns out to be nothing bad for video. It was fairly cheap, and I really haven't touched my desktop for much of anything since. That was my hope, to basically just stick with the laptop, and it seems to be working out. I wanted to get something from Apple, but I don't want a PowerPC, because they are moving to Intel chips, and the only Intel laptop is about $2k. So it just wasn't time yet. Hopefully this will get me through school, then I can get something different.

On a seemingly different end of the spectrum, I also found out this week about Moleskine notebooks. As I look further into this, I realize there is a whole culture around it. If you do a search on flickr for moleskine, it is interesting what you will see. They are these overpriced notebooks that people seem to love. Most people use them for one of 3 things: journal, sketchbook, or organizer. They company claims that they are the same notebooks that great minds like Van Gogh, Hemingway, and Picaso used, but in reality they are just making a similar product, that was previously offered by a number of makers. But nevertheless, I'm hooked. They are nice, and very functional. After first learning about them I explained to someone that they are the Macintosh of notebooks, and sure enough a lot of the pictures I have seen on flickr have also featured either an iPod or some sort of Apple computer.

Christmas List

2005-12-15T02:03:00.000-05:00

I'll put my christmas list on here again this year. At the top:

Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir

Star Wars Episode 3

The Kevin Smith movies I still don't have:
-Clerks
-Mallrats
-Chasing Amy
-Jersey Girl

new toolbox

New Third Day CD
Peter Gabriel The Hits
Beck Mellow Gold
Nirvana Boxset
Johnny Cash Live at San Quentin and Folsom
iTunes Store Giftcard

Happiness for all the little girls and boys!!

This is too funny

2005-12-07T00:40:00.000-05:00

This is great. It's a list of 213 things someone in the military was instructed not to do. It made me think of the stuff Jody has to tell me I can't do at Kinko's all the time. Especially:

87. If the thought of something makes me giggle for longer than 15 seconds, I am to assume that I am not allowed to do it.

Check it out here

The explination of how these rules came down to the author:

a) I did myself, and either got in trouble or commended. (I had a Major shake my hand for the piss bottle thing, for instance.)
b) I witnessed another soldier do it. (Like the Sergeant we had, that basically went insane, and crucified some dead mice.)
c) Was spontaneously informed I was not allowed to do. (Like start a porn studio.)
d) Was the result of a clarification of the above. (“What about especially patriotic porn?”)
e) I was just minding my own business, when something happened. (“Schwarz...what is *that*?” said the Sgt, as he pointed to the back of my car? "Um....a rubber sheep...I can explain why that's there....")

To explain how I've stayed out of jail/alive/not beaten up too badly..... I'm funny, so they let me live.

I've got to paste in a couple more:

36. Can't have flashbacks to wars I was not in. (The Spanish-American War isn't over).

52. Not allowed to yell “Take that Cobra” at the rifle range.

55. An order to “Put Kiwi on my boots” does *not* involve fruit.

56. An order to “Make my Boots black and shiny” does not involve electrical tape.

119. I cannot arrest children for being rude.

130. “I’m drunk” is a bad answer to any question posed by my commander.

137. Should not show up at the front gate wearing part of a Russian uniform, messily drunk.

138. Even if my commander did it.

Katy

2005-10-20T03:55:00.000-04:00

So with the house coming up and more importantly getting married, Katy and I spend a little time trying to hash things out. With a couple of things tonight we had to reach a compromise. I told her that I felt shot down, and that I was realizing I will have to deal with being shot down a lot. I also told her that I want to make sure I don't become the husband that deals with being shot down many times, then after 15 years doesn't want it anymore. This obviously led to a great deal of discussion, and we kind of felt better in the end. Of course since neither she nor I have been married before, we don't really know what we will have to deal with, what we will fight over, etc, but I do really think we are trying our hardest to do and work out the right things. I think we are a bit more realistic than many couples.

But after coming home, and listening to some of my old bands music, and thinking about what is really important to me, I realized a couple of things. First off, I'm not really that guy. I have a big problem with getting hung up on things in a moment, but it is EXTREMELY rare that she and I disagree on something and after stepping back and thinking about it I still consider it an issue.

Also, she's smarter than that. I think about things that have happened between us over more than 5 years of dating and more than a decade of knowing each other, and it seems like she usually knows what's going on. It's an awesome thing. We will still fight and have trouble, but in the same way your parent's did things that upset you and you later look back and realize they really were doing what was best for you, she does these things a lot. I think she knows a lot more about what I'm thinking and doing that I even do, much less what I think she knows.

It's easy to take things like that for granted. I'm really blessed. I think it's bad to go off on how I don't deserve her, but I do sometimes wonder if I'm getting the better end of the deal.

And about the old Of music. I don't listen to it often, but I put on an old recording of a practice, (that I don't think anyone else has) and the demo type thing that we did, and I realized something I hadn't in years..... we were pretty good. I was always kinda the weakest link musician wise, but even my parts weren't bad, and going back and listening to Nick's song writing, and some of the little licks and hooks Mike and Shwin were doing was a lot of fun. We were all very jazz inspired and I guess I forgot how much we broke out of the modern rock mold and added some snazzy little bits that to me separate a good performance of a song from just a good song being reproduced. I miss that stuff a lot. Nick has sorta gone his own way now, but I feel like I still have a very good bond with Mike and Shwin.

I'm sure Katy will be able to tell me when I should try to go down that path again............

"But it doesn't looks smaller"

2005-10-18T13:23:00.000-04:00

OK, I really have all sorts of things I want to post, but because I have so much going on to post about, I haven't had as much time to post. But this is funny.

I've been pretty burned out at Kinko's lately. I'm starting to fall victim to a lot of the attitudes I hear Kinko's people talk about. Saturday night a lady came in with an oversize. I had seen one of our guys helping her the night before. As we often see she brought in an 8.5x11 piece of paper (probably designed in MS Word) and wanted it blown up to "poster" size. There is no official "poster" size. Many are either 18x24 or 24x36, but there certainly is no standard. So she had told the employee the night before to make it the same size as the promotional signs FedEx sends us to hang in the windows, because our in-house printing capabilities aren't good enough for us to use for promotion.

She has another oversize that she has somehow mounted to a precut 20"x30" board she bought at Wal-Mart. She shows me the one done for her the previous night, then shows me the board, and says "See, I told him this was too big for poster size."

At this point she has already lost me. Being the jaded punk I am, if someone gets stuck on this "poster size" pet peeve of mine, they have already lost my good favor. But I try to make people happy. At this point I told her I could try to fix it for her, but I couldn't do it as a free redo if the employee last night had done what she asked for to the best of his ability. She told me she asked him to size it to the promotional banners in the windows. I walked over to the window, pulled out my tape measurer, and it was 40"x30". That's TWICE the 20"x30" she wanted. I pointed this out and her response was "But I don't think they are that big!"

?????

Befuddled, and a bit offended someone of the same species as me could be quite so dense, I held out my tape measurer for her to use. She of course didn't like that and said that she didn't need to measure it, she just needed her copy made right.

So I made the copy for her, got it to exactly 20"x30", and didn't even charge her. It just wasn't worth it. I honestly felt kinda bad for her after realizing her capability to reason.

Bleh.

2005-07-05T00:33:00.000-04:00

me with missy. I'm starting to get interested in doing more photo stuff. I have this great digital camera that I basically have only used for holidays. I realized that I have had a lot of fun looking at other peoples pictures, so I'm gonna try to get more stuff up. My obsession with my dog will probably manifest itself quite a bit with my choice of photos. :P

tale of two linux reviews: photos

2005-07-04T23:53:00.000-04:00

This is the CDs for the live CD review.

This is my main desk setup in my room.

This is "the lab." Maybe I can call it "Jasonic Labs." I dunno.

The machine without a front is the Celeron 2.4 Ghz on an intel 865PERL board with 256MB of DDR400 and a GeForce FX 5600.

The black antec case is my server, running Tao Linux 4.01 with a proud uptime of about 50 days now. If you put laydros.org in your address bar to get here, the redirect you ran into is hosted on that server.

The machine under the table on the left is the PII 450, now running RedHat 7.3, to be my older test machine for the Linux Music and Sound review.

And the blue one is of course my Blue & White PowerMac G3.

the tale of two linux reviews

2005-07-03T02:28:00.000-04:00

ok, I'm gonna blog this stuff. Hopefully.

I'm doing two tipmonkies big reviews right now. After all the traffic generated from the linux distro's review i did, we had an offer from No Starch Press to do book reviews. This is the same company that did the Absolute BSD book that I loved, so I was all over it. I got the first book (hopefully of many) today, and its Linux Music and Sound. It already looks very good, but it's from 2000. For a linux software book that would be like getting a 60's book on cars. So I decided to set up two systems in my lab. A PII 450 running redhat 7.3 and a Celeron 2.4 running the newest Ubuntu. Hopefully this will let me judge the book both on how it applied when written, and how well it still applies.

The second project is a live cd distro review. We had lots of requests for this. Martin is going to do Deb/Knoppix based ones, I will do all of the others. I currently have downloaded about 10 different ones. I have two more coming through bit torrent right now. The idea is to get a bunch and pick the half-dozen or so most valid for the reviews. It will probably also be a dual machine review, both on my laptop (mainly to check for WiFi support) and on the Celeron box.

The reason I have no plans for this stuff on my main box?
I currently have an 11 Day, 21 Hour, 36 Minute uptime. And it's Windows XP! :)

Tipmonkies/OSNews/expert-zone

2005-06-24T12:55:00.000-04:00

A lot has been happening with Tipmonkies lately. I did an article on different linux distros, which Martin submitted to Slashdot and OSNews, and we got slammed. We had been open for about 2 months and I think over the whole period had about 17,000 people. In a three day period we had over 300,000 hits, and not get about 30,000 hits per day. My article was all over blogs, and even was on some pretty big sites like the O'Reilly site OSdir and Linux Format Mag.

Martin also opened a new site in collaboration with Eugina from OSNews and Thom from Expert-zone. I didn't actually have anything to do with the new site, even though it's being promoted as a collaboration between the three sites, but I think it was more between those three individuals.

Martin and I did a podcast with Thom once, so I have sorta met him, but I've never talked to Eugina, apparently Martin and Thom do a bit. She was alwasys sorta a hero for me as the Editor-in-Chief at OSNews. But yesterday she revealed that she was quitting, which stinks. She always did a good job of helping keep that site more balanced, and she was willing to step out on a bit of a limb to speak her mind. She just took too much of a battering in the forums and comments. I got a taste of it when my article hit Slashdot. This was one of the best:

eh... (Score:5, Interesting)
by ltwally (313043) on Saturday June 18, @10:48PM (#12854222)
(mailto:ltwally@softhome.net | Last Journal: Tuesday March 04, @08:48PM)

"...The beauty of Slack is in its simplicity. The core of the OS is based off of BSD, whereas Debian and RedHat are based off of AT&T UNIX..."

eh... Is this guy smoking crack or something? I've played with Slack, and have multiple FreeBSD boxes. While Slackware might be the least graphical (and thus, more arcane -- like the BSD's) linux distro out there, it is not based off any BSD that I've ever seen. The kernel is linux, the userland utilities are all GNU, and the location and configuration of all the system files is definitely not BSD related.

I dunno... while much of this dude's article seemed accurate, after reading the above, I've come to the conclusion that even after all his years of experience, he's still a newb... or he's just plain smoking crack.

It's really hard not to take that personally. Overall, for a linux article on slashdot, I had relativly little flames, but there certainly were some.

And my grammer. Eww. My english teachers are probably screaming. I knew logically that it's is the contraction of it is, not the possesive of it. But I write with out much thinking, and often with little sleep. There were other little things, but I got roasted for the its. I guess sometimes you just have to learn from screwing up. ;)

And now it's (<----See thats right) very much time to get ready for work, and stop rambleing.

Strange night

2005-06-24T12:34:00.000-04:00

Last night at Kinko's was very strange. We were relativly slow most of the day, then all of the sudden at about 10 (when the other two working with me left) I had a rush. It was during about the 5th group or pair of students requesting a bound color document that I realized there must be something big due at State. In addition, a young lady called around 8 to ask for a very short turnaround time on an oversize color poster. Jody, my manager, told her we could do 3 hours, even though oversize color is typically 24 hours. When she arrived at 9 she basically asked for us to have it done by about 10, despite what Jody told her on the phone. We explained that we would try, but we have to take care of other customers in the building, especially since Jody knew it would be just me soon. She was nice, even a bit meek, but stood around asking if the file opened, then if we set it up, then if it was to the printer yet. About the 6th time in a row that she asked me if it was at the printer yet (it was like a child askingn "are we there yet?") I basically barked back that I was working on setting the file up. What I said was ok, but my tone was harsh with frustration. Jody then stepped in the situation and told her that it would take a while to print, then quite a while to dry, and reccmended she leave for a while and come back. So she left, and I managed to get her poster printed right about the time my little student rush started, only a little after 10. I called to tell her it was ready and she said she wouldn't come till the next morning. ARG!

So finally my third shift showed up, and with all the students it was almost 45 minutes after I was supposed to have left that I finally counted my till, and didn't walk out to my car until 1AM. There is a Papa John's directly beside our store, and on the way out to the parking lot. As I walked past it I saw a group of about 9 women and girls. Probably 6 teenage girls and 3 women that looked like they could be the girls mothers. The girls all had on prom-looking formal dresses, and the women had on very 80sish southern looking formal clothes. Sequins and shoulder pads. They were getting pizza at 1AM on Hillsborough St., which is a little scary even for me. And then they all piled (some sitting on top of each other) into a single Cadillac. It was a very quick and fluid motion, like it had been done before, and it made me think of clowns loading into a VW at the circus, except these were clowns in formal wear. I dare say they even did it elegantly.

I guess that doesn't sound like the whole night was really strange, but there was just an aura to the whole night that was capped off in that migration via Cadillac. I then got home and of course couldn't go to sleep.

In Your Honor

2005-06-16T01:23:00.000-04:00

The new Foo Fighters CD is out. It's pretty impressive. I think I would already go as far as to say this is their best. They have always been pretty eclectic and they took it to an extreame with this one, it's a double album with one CD all acoustic and one CD all heavy. This with a bit less middle ground than previous records. The electric is pure 4 piece heavy pop-rock. The acoustic side is very strong stuff, and has some pretty big guests on it (John Paul Jones even). I picked up the fancy Dual-Disc version with a DVD on one side and audio on the other. The only actual video is a 20 minute making of, which was fun to watch. If it carried on much longer it would have been pretty stupid, but the length was about right. Dave says he hopes that 20 years from now when a kid says "Dad, which one Foo Fighters record should I get?" this will be the one. The scary thing he says is that he thinks every Foo Fighters record will be the last. The band is somewhat of a supergroup, all 4 members came from a successful prior career, and these supergroups tend to be short lived.

I of course hope thats not the case, and I certainly chew on every song they publish. One neat thing about this one is that I'm pretty sure one of the acoustic songs will hit top 40 stations and Katy will be singing something off of it soon. :)

new music

2005-04-26T13:13:00.000-04:00

I've been struck recently. No really, a coworker hit me the other day for saying something stupid.

But figuratively too.

Most of the music I really love I hated at one point. Three artists that come to mind are Tool, Steely Dan, and Radiohead. I used to not just dislike those bands, but really hated them. Now they are some of my favorites. Well, I have been speaking the terrors of Emo type music for some time now. My first major exposure to it (I had seen something about it on MTV in the late 90's, but that was just like one MTV news break) was Katy's dorm roomate Kerry. She had Coldplay and Dashboard Confessional posters up on the wall.

Then the stuff picks up some mainstream push. It's starting to show up on soundtracks, and there is a bunch of it on the "Modern Rock Alt" Muzak station at Kinko's. I'm certainly not smitten yet. My coworked Cameron loves this stuff. Still not getting me. Then two key things happen. My longtime friend Maggie and particuarly her boyfriend Josh are really into this stuff. They played a few things for me including "The Fire Theft." That's the new album by the band of the same name, and its a recoup of an old Sub-Pop band called "Sunny Day Real Estate." I love that record so much I go out and buy it the night they play it for me, and read up on the guys a little. Turns out Sunny Day is sorta the forebearer of modern Emo.

Then on sorta the other end of the Emo spectrum, my mom's BF John loans me the Snapcase record "End Transmission." Wow. That one is a blow to the head. It's just a balls-to-the-wall screaming hardcore band. Great catchy riffs. Incredibly melodic, but really pushing the envelope of music, and lots of Pink Floyd-ish spacey stuff inbetween brutal guitars.

So one day, a pay day, as I often make the mistake of doing, I go into Best Buy. I was about to leave, but they had a Victory Records table at the front with a number of these bands I've been hearing about. I just suddenly decided to take a leap of faith and bought a record from Thursday, whom Josh had mentioned. It even had a song on it that gets played on the Kink's "Mdn Rock Alt" alot that I hated but suddenly really like.

Just like "Stinkfist," "Karma Police," and "Aja." Hmmm............

So, I start talking to Cameron about this stuff more, and it's kinda like a new door opens. This isn't just a band that I have been pushing off, it's a very large genre, with relativly large sub-genres. Theres the pure Emo, which I haven't really hit on yet, then theres ScrEmo, like Thursday, and then hardcore, like Snapcase, sorta. Snapcase has actually been around for like 15 years and according to what I have read they change genres for each record, but "End Transmission" is all I've heard.

Cameron brought his collection in for me to flip through and explained to me that a good bunch of the ones he listens to are actually Christian bands. For some reason this type of music has caught on really well as Christian music.

So, that's where this situation sits up to now. I'll try to kinda update this soon. Maybe I'll keep listening, maybe I'll get really sick of it. The key thing to remember is that I even think N'Sync and then Justin Timberlake's solo stuff is great pop music. I hated it at first too. ;)

ahh, the phones

2005-04-19T23:27:00.000-04:00

so i've got cell phones on my mind right now. i love my ipaq that i just got, but phones are starting to take all the great gadgets and put them into one. pda, digital camera, mp3 player, portable music player (which, unlike the other devices, are happening on phones at the same time they are happening standalone) and, oh yeah, phones. Right now I have a pretty kick-ass, albeit modest, phone. The LG L1200. Its a tight little clamshell with a VGA cam, a great screen, sorta mp3 ringtones, and IR. That last part is quite important, as I use IR to connect my iPaq.

I should be able to get an upgraded phone through cingular soon, and I'm not quite sure what to get. I don't really have any money to spend on it, so I'm hoping to get a freebee. But they sure run this stuff in circles. The site and phone said starting in like January that I would be eligible for an upgrade March 31 2005. On April 2nd I went back to look at it and it still said "You are not eligible, but will be March 31." OK. So I called. One person told me I was eligible, one told me April 31 (which doesn't exist) and one told me not till my contract ran totally out on July 31. WTF?

So anyway, I'm pretty happy with my phone right now, which makes me think I should let the contract expire and see if they start trying really hard to get you to stay. Hell, I dunno.

it can always get worse.....

2005-04-16T01:53:00.000-04:00

One of the worst periods of my life, no, the worst period of my life was when my mother was sick and my parents divorce which her sickness led into. It's a whole long complicated story, but there are two major points to take from it. First off is that a persons experiences good and bad are what shape them. Sounds obvious, but you have to bear in mind that when you meet someone and like them, it may be some tragic events in their life that formed them into the person that you like. Second off, and one thing that I will always stand by, is that no matter what happens to you, things can be exponintially worse.

I apologize for this blog becomeing more and more personal, but I use it to basically cover what is on my mind.

Anyway, I went to my future brother-in-law/coworker/friend Alex's house after work today to check out his MAME box, then came home around 1AM. Not long before I got home I noticed my car was pulling right. I figured I just need to get it realigned. Then I heard a rumbling noise. So I pulled off the road and saw my front passenger side tire was basically on the rim. Luckily there was a service station about a 1/4 mile away so I went there, got air, but it was quickly loosing it, so I bought fix-a-flat, used it, and it was still making the lead sound. I figured I just wasted $5, but since I was near home I filled it back up with air and drove home. Figured I could just put on the doughnut in the morning and take it to get it fixed.

I got home, and it wasn't making the noise as far as I could tell, and actually had a decent amount of air in it, so it might just be the way that stuff worked. The directions did say to drive a short distance after using the can. I will know in the AM.

So anyway, not a huge deal, but sucked. The biggest problem was being alone at a service station at 1AM. I get home and my friend Martin is on IM. I haven't talked to him at all much in the past 6 months, so I said hey. He tells me his brother's 22 year old fiancee died suddenly today. She had some heart condition, but they were just riding to McDonald's and she turned blue, they rushed to the hospital but by the time they got there she was gone.

I don't really know how to end this post. It's crazy how life works. God has his hand on every movement and every moment of our lives, and has total control over it all. The real lesson, I think, is to remember that this kind of stuff happens when we get so strung out on the little things in life. You have to enjoy what you have, who you are around, and who you are when you can. Most things just aren't worth getting upset about.

new toy

2005-04-13T04:33:00.000-04:00

this is definitly wicked. I can now sit on a bench in the park and post to my blog! How liberating! It means I can just get away from it all, and... um, get back to it all?

At any rate, i got a new toy: hp iPaq H1910.

The really killer part is i can use ir to get on the web with it. Basically there isn't much that i do on a computer on a daily basis. I listen to music, chat on aim, and surf the web. That is a big part of my argument for linux. It's also why this sucker can be pretty useful. I can do all that stuff and do it anywhere.

There definitly are some limits to this though.

-speed: i actually tried to do all that at once and the music got choppy. It wasn't overclocked at the time though.

-input: the onscreen keyboard won't cut it for much. I have learned palms graffiti pretty well on prior pda's, and i can use it on here, but it certainly isn't as fast as typing

-storage: absolutly not an iPod! At best it will store 1/30 of my current iPod. (i don't think this device will accept a 1gb sd card)

-bandwidth: eep! I pay cingular $9.99/month for a whopping 3mb! That just ain't gonna get me much. My 2yr contract with them is almost up, and i think the bandwidth issue will definatly play a role in what service i go with, but then again , i kinda don't think any other service is really any better.

So there's the initial reaction to this sucker. By the way, i wrote this entire post on the iPaq ;)

homeless nerd

2005-04-02T10:29:00.000-05:00

Maybe its an April Fools joke, but the same blog had a post about this guy a couple of days prior:

http://www.chrisdiclerico.com/mt/archives/001763.php

This guy drags a full desktop PC into starbucks and surfs the web during the day, and sleeps in a Kinko's at night.

Speaking of April Fool's, One thing did get me yesterday. the radio station that I listen to a lot 96rock did a special on the opening of a new amusement park, right out here in Raleigh, Mayberry USA. I was even telling everybody at work about it, and asking where it must be.

hehe.....

now this is getting silly

2005-03-24T14:17:00.000-05:00

So yeah, posts haven't been happening. I've been busy with school and work and stuff like that, but there has also been a lot going on that I want to write about, and when that happens, I tend to just put off writing until I feel like I have more time. Alas I never get back to it.

One biggy in mind right now. I used to be a Moderator at AquaXP.com. It was a site devoted to modding the Windows GUI to look like the aqua interface from OSX. Seems kinda wierd to have a whole community around, but it was something I became very interested in, and for a period of time it was a fairly major community. There was even an article in Wired.com about the site. But things got old after a while, most of us who were major players became disinterested and things sorta dissolved. The entire time we were sorta in the shadow of Aqua-soft.org, which aquaxp was almost a spin off of.

But recently I've started to miss the community part of it. One of the main reasons I really got out of the community was I quit using Windows, and then two of the guys there and I started Stylix.org, which dealt with themeing Linux, but never really took off the way we hoped it would. I then started running OSX as my main system and basically left the whole scene totally.

Well I don't really have any real intrest in skinning any more, I only do it to a minor degree, but I'd like to have some people to talk to again. I talked to Shak last night, the guy that ran AXP, and he is thinking basically the same thing. He wants to see it up again, but with a broader tech focus. So hopefully that will be happening soon. If you are interested in learning more, check in the #aquaxp channel on freenode, we are trying to get that chatroom back up, for a long time it was a really lively hang out area.

As I kinda said before, I've had a bunch of things that I wanted to post on before, but can't remember much of any of them now, so I'll bail at this point, but hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things soon.

The Shredder

2005-03-05T11:02:00.000-05:00

I just saw this one over at Engadget. It's an industrial shredder. The gears in it work just like a $15 paper shredder from OfficeMax. Make sure to watch the refrigerator and the washing machine. You even get to hear someone say "shred it!" for the washing machcine.

The Shredder

Theres also this little number. When your doctor wants to know just what's going on inside your digestive tract and wants to know right now damnit, she can have you take this pill, wear a harddrive on your belt, and a few hours later shes got her own little tunnel of love pictures.

I'll let you guess which one of these I really want for my birthday.

out to lunch?

2005-02-17T11:39:00.000-05:00

No, there just hasn't been anything good to post on lately. Nothing particuarly exciting in tech or world news, or my life. I did join the church that I have been going to. It's a great place that doesn't have so many of the hangups I see in most mainstream or fringe Christian churches.

And I got a Kinko's clock! Even though the buyout of Kinko's officially happened in May of 2004, it was January of 2005 before they finally sent us new clocks. Kinko's is big on clocks and there are about 5 up in our fairly small store, so seeing the old logo that much certainly doesn't help with brand recognition. At any rate, I got to take one home.

Of course, the front door and marquee still just say "Kinko's" but I guess thats how these things work. Along with all of our shirts......

Ah yes, I do have one link:

the phone glove

I saw this on Engadget, and of course they made some references to Maxwell Smart. This is great stuff. Thumb in the ear and pinky for a mic. Priceless!

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer

2005-02-02T05:23:00.000-05:00

Oh this is great. It just brightened up my night a little just make sure you actually read it.

I miss music

2005-02-02T04:25:00.000-05:00

So after much back and forth with Kinkos and Intrex and all that good stuff, I'm getting pretty settled into being at Kinko's for a long haul like I did at OfficeMax, which is good.

but there's something I just can't shake.

I started Intrex in February of 2003, and that was when my band broke up. I remember that becuase it was going to be a scheduling issue, then never was. Then I started Kinko's in May of 2004. Seems like I haven't been there that long, but this has been a pretty crazy few months, mainly because of my little brother and best friend. At any rate, I know that was when our band get back together came up and then split up. Because again I saw scheduling at Kinko's as being a possible issue, then it wasn't. My band in it's first form was Of,go listen to our music. It was my best friend and a couple of other guys, and we had a lot of fun, and made some decent music. I love it. I love playing music. I don't really care what instrument I am playing. I even love it so much that I love to see a band play live, even if I can't play with them. I used to go to friends band practices, basically because it's almost like a drug to me. I love how things just fall into place in a group, and the way things sound. I really loved the companionship of hanging out with those three guys. We tore each other to pieces for different stuff, both seriously and jokingly, but it was so much fun.

What drags this up.... well on a more mundane level someone loaned me a Creed Greatest Hits and DVD to go with it. I'm not a big Creed fan. I didn't get into their first CD until the second came out, at which point I decided it was about the only good thing they did. There were a couple more decent songs out of them, but after "Arms Wide Open" I couldn't stand them anymore. Not that the song was that terrible the first 6,546,983 times, but after that it got more than a bit tireing. And Scott Stapp is just worthless. He's a bad example of a Christian, which he doesn't seem to really be, but somehow became a bit of a symbol for a period of time. In the end hes just a narcissistic drunkard. I don't care for the guy much at all. And for the most part their music goes into the suck category. But there is one truely saving grace for that band: Mark Tremonti. He is one of the only mainstream shred guys we have had since Slash. He's also one of those not-lead-singer-but-lead-guitarist band leaders that I like so much, like Jimmy Page or Pete Townsend. In fact it appears in the Creed without Stapp band Alter Bridge that he is the main songwriter, and does a good bit of the vocal harmonies and whatnot. I love that stuff. And he always has the quiet cool to him.

So thats tonight and a more tangible bit. But the whole music thing is somethign that nags at me daily. I think about my grandmother that passed away almost two years ago every day. I think about being in debt every day. Its that kind of thing. I love music. I love people, then music, then everything else (including computers, by the way).

I still sorta keep up with the bass player, Ashwin. He's one of those people like Michelle Levo who I always felt could be a really close friend, but never was more than a buddy. I love to play guitar with him. Anytime he and I talk we say we need to "get together soon and play" but it never happens. I need to make it happen.

But the problem is theres not really a creative force there, which is needed in a band. Maybe if I got some guys together to do some covers it would work. But I don't know. Ashwin has done a couple of songs, but not many, and not much complete. I can crap out a song, but that's exactly what it is, crap.

Maybe now that I've whined I can go to sleep. But it's all about the guitar track in "What If." That's the stuff I love to play. I can sit here and listen to it, or I can get my guitar, wipe the dust off of it, get the tab, and play it.

P.S. After publishing a post, I reguarly go through and test the links. Well, the only link here was to Of's old website at Tripod. I hit the link and Tripod says it's not there. The main page is still up at google cache from Jan 29 2005, and at archive.org for Feb 04. This is sad.

I, Hamilton

2005-01-29T11:00:00.000-05:00

I love reading Robert Cringley. This is the second one he has done recently dealing mainly with Apple products. The article is primarily about the Gillette give away the razor and make money on the blade business model and comparing it to the iPod/iTunes deal. But he talks for a minute about the Mac Mini as a server.

"Imagine a Mac Minicluster running Apple's xGrid software. Start with a 16-port fast Ethernet switch and stack 16 Mac Minis on top. That's a 720 gigaflop micro-supercomputer that costs less than $9,000, can fit on a bookshelf, and can be up and running in as little time as it takes to connect the network cables. High schools will be sequencing genes."

Check out the rest of the article here.

Intrex

2005-01-29T03:46:00.000-05:00

A coworker sorta prepared me for it, but I was offered a full-time job at intrex.net this past week. It was good enough money wise to match and slightly better what I make at Kinko's, but it would have been mainly tech support. I'm very tired of tech support, as is seen in a recent post. I did a lot of debating, but when my boss called and said it would be 80-90% tech support, I knew it wasn't going to be the thing for me.

I promised him an answer today, and one of my coworkers last day was today, so I actually went in the office and had a brownie and told Camil in person that I wasn't going to accept his offer. Despite the fact that a couple of weeks ago he told me he was interested in me staying on staff to work a couple of mornings a week and even yesterday told me the same thing, today he said he didn't really have a need for that, and he would keep me on staff for when people need time off, but the HR person might have a problem with that.

It's a bit tough that my two biggest jobs have been fade aways instead of burn-outs. I watched many many people leave OfficeMax with balloons and cake, but I was basically kicked out because of conflict of intrest. I started hearing rumors that the district manager didn't like me working both there and Kinko's, and when I went back in a few days later, they told me that I was gonna be dropped, so I didn't wait and left that day. I was at a differnt store, that I had only been at for a few weeks, and knew some people there, but especially with such a short notice, I was just gone.

Intrex is looking the same way. In some sort of Jason being sappy and symbolic sort of way, I had two of Aaron's leaving brownies. One for him, and one for me. There really is a chance that I will stay on payroll for a long time, and maybe at some point down the road, work there more again, but I would imagine that this is probably when my path there just kinda fades away, instead of ending. What an interesting day for a hard drive to bite the dust.

companies on Jason's bad list

2005-01-29T02:59:00.000-05:00

People who know me and know my experience with my Old's Cutty Supreme would probably expect GM to top this list, but the jury is still out on that one. My first car (the spotted avenger) was a Buick LeSabre that should have been laid to rest LONG before I ever had the chance to enjoy its duct-taped goodness, but for some reason continued to run despite me showing my friends that I could spin brand new tires. I have seen other GM cars hold up fairly well.

But there was one pretty serious computer company, and a second one just hit the list. The first motherboard I ever bought new in box was from MSI. It was right when MSI started to become a major player like abit, asus, tyan, etc. I bought the board, which had a disappointing chipset on it (that was VIA's fault, not MSI) and ended up RMAing it after a few months. Then the same thing happened again. Then again. Then my year was up. No product should break 3 times in a year. And bear in mind, this wasn't the same board, it was a replacement each time. There was obviously something wrong, and MSI didn't fix it. The guy at the shop I bought it from told me they had trouble with that board. That was the only motherboard that I have ever had just die when it was still well within its lifetime. (This is gussing a 3-5 year lifetime on computer hardware. Most stuff I have encountered has even done a good deal better than that, but most stuff isn't really considered modern after about a 3-5 year period.)

So there is a new one. I'll probably upload the sound file soon. I bought a SATA hard drive from Intrex in August of 2003. I actually sold an older WD 80gig to nick at that time (which is still running) and bought a Seagate 80gig 8mb buffer SATA drive. Recently I have been having some very strange issues, that I was pretty sure were drive related. No real lost data, just issues. I run iTunes a lot, and I would wake up in the middle of the night and a song was stuck in a 1 second loop. I have wierd freezes for short periods of time, and the real tell-tell sign was when the computer would reboot, and on rare occation, not find a device to boot off of. Then last night the problems got real bad. I was running Fedora and I was getting 5 minute freezes. That was when I started hearing not-so-good noises. I opened up the side of the case to hear better and sure enough it was a squeek followed by a thump, and coming from my hard drive. Shortly after, that, I couldn't even boot the machine. Because I had things to do before going to work, I left without trying to replace it and reload the machine. I stopped in at Intrex to see if they still had the reciept, which they did, and is how I know I got it in August of 03. The good news is that I had recently backed up everything. The only thing on the drive was a totally fresh install of Fedora.

So tonight, after moving some stuff around and getting a drive into the machine, I went to seagates site to check out my old drive, and see if it was one of the 3 year warrenties, or a 1 year. Seagate's site says

Out of Warranty
This drive is out of warranty with Seagate. Repair service for out of warranty products is available only to contracted customers.

Which means 1 year. And I'm not a contracted customer.

The end result is a very expensive paperweight.

necco, target, and things that go bump in the night

2005-01-23T02:07:00.000-05:00

I love Target stores. I don't really know why, but I do. When I was a kid it was K-Mart becuase Target didn't exist (at least not in North Carolina) and there weren't any Wal-Mart's around. The K-Mart in rich north Raleigh was actually pretty nice anyway, and always had a good supply of TMNT action figures in the back, and ICEEs in the front. When I was in VA they opened a Target there and I remember going some. But it really sank in when I moved to Garner and started driving and working at OfficeMax. OfficeMax and Target are in the same shopping center that is walking distance from my house. They have good stuff, decent prices, its always clean, and easier to find what you need. My favorite store manager at Omax would always want to do stuff the way Target did it, because Target was retail done right.

So to dig somewhat deeper in this.. I'm very much a creature of habit, and have a bit of an obsessive compulsive nature. I like things to be right and to be the same way. I also LOVE Necco Sweetheart candies. The conversation hearts, but the original ones that taste like 15 year old chalk. Especially the orange ones. One of the best gifts I ever recieved was when my truly caring fiancee (then girlfriend) gave me a container full of JUST THE ORANGE ONES!

OK, so part three of this stupid journy into my sick mind. This morning was my first trip into my Garner Target since the Christmas stuff came out and the Valentines Day stuff went up. I was running in to grab some stuff before my day at intrex (more on that later) and decided to grab some conversation hearts, which I have been buying at that same Target for about 5-6 years now, and I eat a lot of these suckers. But, they only had Brach's. There was the mini-packet bag, with a bunch of individually wrapped packs, but they are usually really dry (the best Necco Conversation hearts are when they are nice and damp), and when there are a bunch of little packets, it's much more difficult to eat all the colors except orange first and then leave all the orange for last. Not to mention about 1/3 of the candy as the normal bag at the same price.

This is a major strike against Target. No person, or entity for that matter, is perfect, but this is certainly hersey in my book.

So I go to work, a bit miffed. Things are somewhat slow for the first hour or so. I put in some good time playing Super Mario 64 DS (stupid name) on my DS. Its the Super Mario 64 game from the N64 redone for the DS. I think they could have called it something different, but I guess Nintento isn't exactly winning too many wars nowadays. Then the calls begin. There weren't that many (except one at the end) that actually made me angry, but they were almost all really frustrating. It was a very stereotypical tech support day, and my only solace was from reading some BOFH and sharing my experiences with some of my Kinko's coworkers. As much as Rey complains about Kinko's (he's certainly not the only one, just the most drastic one), he even admitted that he wouldn't do tech support the way that I do.

It was just one of those days where nobody believed me, nobody wanted to actually go to their computer for me to walk them through something, and the best part was at least 3 calls I had today had the approach of "my email isn't working, why can't I receive email?!" I'm sure the neanderthal on the other end is envisioning me with my finger on a button that says "NO EMAIL FOR YOU!" with an evil grin on my face. All the while I envision someone... damnit I'm not a writer.... but inserts some witty term for some really stupid person here. The Email Nazi line was about as good as I get.

So, anyway, the way these people approach these things would be like calling a mechanic who has never met you before, never seen your car, nor knows what it is, and simply calling him and saying "my car won't start, tell me how to fix it over the phone." Then when you ask them to click with the left mouse button on the start menu and hover the little arrow over "All Programs" they tell you not to be so technical because they are illiterate, (no, they don't say computer illiterate, they really do just say illiterate) which is a whole funny, paradoxical statement unto itself.

from dictionary.com

il·lit·er·ate adj.

I.
1. Unable to read and write.
2. Having little or no formal education.
II.
1. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with language and literature.
2. Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.

Grrr. I think I am a very patient person. And I am totally comfortable with dealing with someone who is truly ignorent of computers, as long as they are somewhat intelligent in general, and willing to work with me. In fact, I would much rather the person on the other end needs explicit instructions instead of jumping ahead of me.

The good news is this is not really the norm. Most days there are a handful of decent people, 1 or maybe 2 bad ones, and a decent amount of free time to surf the web. But days like this are certainly detrimental to my ability to deal with people.

I think to close I will give a link that I had to show someone yesterday. Alex is a friend of mine at work (and my fiancee's brother) and when someone we like to give a hard time asked him how to send a single fax to a number of people (broadcast faxing) he said that she could do it with the RTFM feature. It's a phrase I hold near and dear to my heart, but have never seen a really appropriate usage of it, and Alex's execution was superb.

Cheers.

linky time

2005-01-15T11:14:00.000-05:00

So I have a few today. The best one is here. The site is in Russian, but the pics are all you need. These are fish that the tsunami drug up. I don't know if these are things we already knew about and just rarely saw, or if these are all totally new species. They sure are strange looking.

I have a couple more, probably less serious ones.

A really portable computer

The perfect vehicle for droid harvesting on a desert planet with 2 suns

Now that's a mutha fukkin toaster!

they just don't seem to get it

2005-01-13T13:30:00.000-05:00

So I posted a couple of days ago on the new Mac Mini, and the possibilities it has. This won't be a suprise, but over the past 48 hours I've seen two different external PVR setups for Macs.

But I have also heard both in person and now in a CNET article the backlash. Anytime Apple puts out a new product, there is backlash. At least since the revolution that started with the original iMac. Steve Jobs really has his hand on the pulse of the market and knows what people want, but up until these two new products, he has stayed in the higher end. But after every release the media says the new stuff is crap, then a bunch sell. One of the biggest exceptions was the G4 cube, which probably had a decent amount of good media. It flopped. The reason was he marketed the Mac Mini to the high end crowd, and it didn't work. People who want to pay $2k for a computer system want the cheese-grater G5, not something small and hidden.

Anyway, here's the article:

linky

Basically they say that you can get a PC for cheaper when you consider that you have to buy a keyboard and mouse and monitor. They compare it to deals that already come with a monitor, and also the fact that almost any computer you buy at least comes with keyboard and mouse.

Thats the point though. I sold computers for a few years. At this point in the game, most people have a home PC. Said home PC has a monitor, and in many cases a USB keyboard and mouse, (the USB part WILL be an issue with this machine, I'm glad I dont' have to sell them for that reason). This person has also heard about the iPod, and may even own an iPod or a Mini (going forward the iPod Shuffle) and notices the quality involved in Apple products. They are elegant and work the way they should.

So this same person goes to Best Buy to get a new machine. They could spend a lot and get a new monitor with it, but all they really need is the computer (which they may refer to as the "modem," "CPU," "drive," "CD-Rom," or something worse.) They will see that if you buy a monitor and computer seperate it will cost $1000 and if they buy them together it will be $700-$800. So the package seems like a better deal.

Now with that in mind, they see an ad for the Mac Mini (they have to see the ad first, which is another place the Mini might fail). It's that cool Apple brand, and its $500. And its tiny. Nothing else is that cool when it comes to size. There will be copy-cat's very soon, but because Apple managed to keep the size of this sucker under wraps until it was released, they have a chance to take the market before the copy-cats come out. They won't have the headway they had with the first iMac because everyone is watching now, but it should be enough.

The article says that people looking for a package don't want to pay so much. The machine isn't a good deal for that situation. but for those people looking for a full package, there is the eMac. Its all in one for $800. The author of this article is obviously not aware of that machine.

I am, admittedly, a Mac fanboy. But not way out there, I'm actually more of an OSS fanboy, and I tend to view these market things from a more neutral point of view.

So, kinda repeating what I said before. There is a strong possibility for this thing to be major. Lots of blocks have to fall in place. I think Apple has the name, and the engineering, and the style needed on this thing. And so far the marketing is just right. But so far we have only had the release. Computers are like cars... unless you are paying attention to the industry, you only know what is out there when you are looking. If there is a big deal around the release, but little afterwards, when Aunt Tilley goes to upgrade her machine she won't remember that nifty looking tiny machine she saw in the paper back in January. Apple has been a niche product for a long time, and they didn't really need to market. When someone had an Apple, they replaced it with an Apple. The switchers campaign hardly worked, there wasn't a product like this to switch to. The iPod has had a wave of word of mouth marketing becuase of timing. Not becuase of the Apple marketing, but becuase of the "digital music revolution."

The Windows monopoly is at it's weakest right now. Apple and the OSS guys know this. They also know that the market for personal computers that sit in the office with a monitor and keyboard is about to crash. Somebody is going to make a few good guesses and come out on top, and I would be willing to say that all three sides have an even chance at this point.

It should be interesting. There will be a made for TV movie (like Pirates of Silicon Valley) one day about the second half of this decade.

Stevie's keynote

2005-01-11T18:54:00.000-05:00

Well, Apple may have done something big. Like as big as the first iMac. We're yet to see. They have not only finally released the long called for headless consumer Mac, but at the same time the first consumer mini-computer. There are a few on the market right now but they are either by unknown brands, or aimed at gamers or some other niche. The iMac mini is 6.5"x6.5"x2." And a whopping $499. And its not the lowest machine in their line up. There are certainly faster models, but this is enough power to hold its own. And the Superdrive (DVD writer) is available.

Why COULD this be as big of a deal as the original iMac, or even the original Macintosh. The biggest reason is that people are now really longing for a highly compact computer. PC's are becoming a commodity, and people are ready to buy a compact box that works for a few years, then throw it away. The mini-pc thing is really taking off at this time, and this is certainly one of the smallest. Also people have been begging for a more affordable mac for a long time. Lots of people have a keyboard and monitor, so they don't want to pay for new stuff. This lets the PC users that enjoy their iPod go out and drop less they would on a comperable wintel machine.

But there's a lurking killer app here, and ties to the whole PC's as a commodity thing. MS knows this already. The next big thing (TM) is the media center PC. If someone puts out the proper outboard tv-tuner/PVR software combo, this thing could take off. I think even without that it will help apple increase market share, and will push the entire industry to small form factor the way the iMac pushed the whole industry from boring beige boxes.

We'll see...

stuff

2005-01-10T21:14:00.000-05:00

well, its now 2005. quite scary for me to think that 1995, which seems like some sort of dividing line to me, was 10 years ago. if i went to college full time, i would have been the class of 2005. its all somewhat crazy. and, at this point katy and i have begun to plan to get married this year.

my brother kyle on the other hand, got married in 2004. since my last post as a matter of fact. he got married a couple of days after christmas. i don't even remember what day. i found out after the fact. and his (now) wife is with child. I should be an uncle sometime in August.

Macworld kicks off tomorrow. The current expectations for Stevie's keynote is an iPod flash (something about a radio is probably in the works) and a new iPod theme
(Life is Random.) There should be a sub-$500 headless Mac also.

CES was last week, there was nothing in particular of intrest, but engadget has plenty of coverage.

And I should be kicking off a diet on Wed, hopefully leading to better wedding pictures ;)

link of the day

2004-12-23T02:24:00.000-05:00

With all the happenings of Christmas and getting engaged and color calenders at Kinko's, I haven't been posting as much the past couple of days, but here is the link of the day. It's the real Santa, and he looks a bit more like a hit man from New York than a guy that spends his nights wearing a red suit (and drinking Coca-Cola) around the North Pole.

In addition, how much money was spent on this endevour, and who was willing to fund it, and why aren't they paying for me to go to college!

did she say yes?

2004-12-23T02:17:00.000-05:00

So, when you excitedly tell someone "I gave my girlfriend a ring," or even better yet, "I got engaged," everybody asks "Did she say yes?" This is a here's your sign thing. It's funny in its own stupid sort of way. First off, I would say something along the line of I purposed, or offered a ring. If I gave it to her, she obviously accepted it, and even dumber is the response to I got engaged. Oh well.

The point is, I'm very excited about it, and I'm now engaged to a beautiful young lady who is an incredible human being to me and everyone else around her.

In addition, I didn't post it here CmdrTaco style, nor did I have it engraved on an iPod, nor did I even feed it to, or in any other way attach it to our dog. I gave it to her the old fashioned way, in private, on one knee, and with more sincerity than cuteness.

So there.

blah, blah, blah

2004-12-11T02:23:00.000-05:00

blah, blah, blah, kinkos, blah, blah, blah, glass ceiling, blah, blah, blah, smoke and mirrors, blah, blah, blah, lies, blah, blah, blah, management path at omax, blah, blah, blah, shot in foot, blah, blah, blah, sucko

Redirect

2004-12-07T01:24:00.000-05:00

I may eventually move this actual blog to my webserver, but in the mean time you can use www.laydros.org and it will redirect here. Since I got that box up laydros.org has just been the default apache page, so it's better than nothing!

Penguin and the Pebble

2004-12-06T23:44:00.000-05:00

I had never heard this before, but apparently there was even a movie about it.

http://www.penguin-club.co.uk/library.htm

When the Adeli penguin picks a mate, he brings her a pebble. If she is a highly sought after female, she may be presented with more than one pebble and has to choose. Sounds like a certain human tradition to me.

Tonight, on the way home, there was a new Motley Crue (sorry I missed the accent) song on. Decent heavy stuff, and it put me in a mood for something heavy. I came home and started ripping some of my older Metallica CD's to iTunes. I forgot how great this old stuff is. The first record came out before I was born, and Ride the Lightning came out when I was 1. Crazy to think of when you consider that the record that came out in 2003 (maybe 2004) was heavy enough that even the local rock station didn't really play it.

good morning mr jetson...

2004-12-06T01:45:00.000-05:00

Wow, some really cool science/medicine stuff is happening now. First is this:

http://www.jsonline.com/alive/news/dec04/281287.asp

They do a very invasive surgery involving putting electrodes directly on a person's brain. But after they hook them up to a computer, and the person practices, they can play pong without moving a muscle. Of course this is incredibly crude and basic at this point, but lazy people everywhere should be getting up and doing something about this! Or maybe tomorrow.

The really great thing is that a quadriplegic can now change the channels on TV, play games, and check his email. A major long term goal is to use this technology to bypass a broken spinal cord and allow someone to control muscles in their arms and legs after spinal cord injury. Pretty neat stuff.

Second off is this one....

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20041127-121143-6745r

only a few months after the death of Christopher Reeves, stem-cell work leads to a woman walking again for the first time in 19 years. I am a little bit curious as to why we didn't hear more about this, since this kind of thing hasn't happend in 2000 years, but hopefully we will hear more about it soon.

Then there is Toyota's new robots. I've never really watched Gundam (or what ever its called) but the post about this on Slashdot said that these things seemed like the first step towards big robot warriors.

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/robots/toyoto-ifoot-and-iunit-026866.php

Of course, all three things I've mentioned have been largly about aiding the mobility of those unable to get around, but the electrode one in particular could have huge implications for us. As long as that technology stays as an input device only, it could be an incredible tool for both the disabled, and the lazy. It could create a whole new level of gameing immersion.
And on another note. I intend to make this more of a commentary/cool stuff blog and less of a diary/what's going on in my life thing, but some personal stuff will probably still show up occationally.

And now for a lame post ending.

Christmas List

2004-12-04T14:50:00.000-05:00

What do I want for Christmas.....

Nintendo DS
Khaki cargo pants (40-32)
T-Shirts (XXL or big XL)
-simple stuff. color stripes or something. even funny shirts
Car stereo reciever
speakers for my car (6.5" in all 4)
best buy or tiger direct gift cards
durable/rugged NKJV study bible
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Dream Theater, Dave Matthews, Led Zepplin (not song remains the same) DVD's
Any Kevin Smith DVD except "Dogma" or "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back"
Any Quentin Tarantino Movies except "Pulp Fiction"
And Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVD sets
Any Lord Of The Rings Extended Edition DVDs
2005 Ford Mustang GT

Bookmarks?

2004-12-04T13:29:00.000-05:00

So, I haven't really been posting to this. We will see if it gets better. Right now I'm wondering about an online way to store bookmarks. I use a lot of different computers, so local bookmarks do me very little good. But there should be a quick and easy way to create a list of links, without sending an email to myself everytime. My gmail account is getting full of emails from "me." Maybe I can just create a cgi that shows them and an easy cgi that adds to the list....

Frst Psot!!!

2004-11-20T14:33:00.000-05:00

So yeah, it's blogger. Lets see how this works out.....