Christmas List

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

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

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"

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.....

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

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

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.....