Much joy lately. My allergies have given me sweet relief, partly due to the rain that fell a couple of days ago. Also, the heat has reached a reasonable level, making the fans we borrowed un-needed. The one night though, they were much needed, and worked perfectly, so much as to force my under the covers or I'd freeze my arms off (the fan was blowing directly across the top of the bed). I finally got paid for the demo we did a while back. Holy shit, talk about pulling teeth to get some cash! With some of the stuff I want to play around with (subversion, bitkeeper, oo-perl), I can now play with that for the ultimategalaxy project without feeling like I'm working for free.

cat5 (the guy too lame to make his web page :) got back from hawaii bearing many stories and stuff, but came back to toe surgery. Ouch! I amused him yesturday and introduced him to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Gotta share the love.

You'll have to excuse me now, I have a big black cat staring at me very un-subtly as he waits for me to finish my bowl of cereal so he can lick the bottom of the bowl. He's interrupting my mousing as well.

Oh, the allergy hell. For some reason this week has been just brutal on me. I'll go through phases of sneezing, itchy throat and stuffed-upidness, and it'll come and go. I was fine for half the evening, and then just a few minutes ago it started again. At times it's been bad enough I went to a doctor! Course, he turned out to be a quack, basically saying "we can't cure allergies" (I didn't ask him to, just if it was possible to "do something about them") and that the best plan was to rotate allergy meds every month, suggesting a bunch of expensive stuff to use (did you know that an 18 pack of clariton (which does nothing to help for me by the way) is $24!!!!????) and that cats could be a problem (totally ignoring my objections that I've been around cats all my life, and my hay fever only affects me in the summer, and the rest of the year I'm fine). Hell, even scoobyD's main squeeze had a suggestion that sounded better (something about stinging nettles, or tea or something, not sure). I ended up heading to the health/natural food store on Brad's suggestion, and getting some natural hay fever stuff. It seems to be slightly more effective than the clariton and cloratripolon (sp?). Of course, that could be just changes in the weather or voracity of the evil plants.

Speaking of the scoobyD, apparently lilo and stich is good. You heard it here, second, or maybe third.lilo and stich is good. You heard it here, second, or maybe third.

Played around with gnome-2 a bit today, and in fact am using it now, via cvsgnome. It seems pretty nice, though not nearly as slick in some aspects as it should be. The new Nautilus file manager is slick, and it appears, usable (!!!). Pango renders nice antialiased fonts, nice new icons everywhere, and things overall are nice and speedy, but the look of the panel for example, sucks. Also, the lack of ability to change some keyboard shortcuts, and that you have to know black magic to change your window manager from metacity to sawfish (or back), or change your metacity theme (there is a meta-theme program, that will change multiple themes at once (nautilus, gtk, gtk2, xmms, sawfish) and that's cool, but it doesn't work completely yet).

I did some vaccuuming the other day to try to get rid of some dust for the allergies, and it has gone a little too far now. At first it was just a quick once over, next thing you know I'm asking Firefly to wash the walls as there's a new loveseat (well, "new" isn't exactly the right word.... "matching the couch" is probably a better description) coming. I've been madly organizing shelves, books, and magazines for the last couple of days. I was a total slacker today though, I didn't get half the things done I wanted to, other than finish watching the directors commentary for Mallrats. Oh well, more cleaning tomorrow as well as work on the resume to use some suggestions people have sent (thanks to cat5 and cat5-sis) and make several versions of it to tailor a bit more to the jobs I'm applying for. I need a perl-resume, a c-resume, a sysadmin-resume, a general-computer-resume, and a would-you-like-fries-with-that-resume.

Other thing of note was tonight was the farewell Sushi Monday for the old crew from Merilus. Bspudd, Foz, Engel, Cuv, myself and Firefly were all there at Nikkos in Abby (best california roll ever claim some, though their tuna roll is substandard compared to the fantastic ones I got at Sumas Sushi the other day... I've been eating a lot of tuna based on K's workout/diet page). Foz as you may or may not know, is heading back to Kentucky to search for work in a more... "budget-friendly" environment (living off the parents). He's been up here for what, almost two years now, and it'll be sad to see him go. Hopefully he'll be back up here again soon, or at least on this coast, working in Seattle or something. I'll miss you my friend.

Morning Cat Story (because I'm bored)... Woke up this morning around 8:something hearing what I swore was the cats closing and locking us into the bedroom. I got up and found that the door was indeed closed, but not all the way. On top of the bedroom door stood a very cute, but un-nerved, grey kitten (this one). She had jumped onto the top of the door and it swung away from her jumping point (the shelves by the wall), so she couldn't get off. I stood under her and she mewed at me a bit, and then I remembered she didn't like scratching people (though I have a scar on my arm that says that sometimes she mis-calculates where peoples body parts will be). I got my bathrobe on and turned back to where, and at that point she happily jumped from the top of the door onto my shoulder, and then onto the bed and floor to make her escape.

Echoing test of what hackers guy are you I took the "which buffy bad boy are you and discovered something not really surprising:

Which Buffy Bad Guy Are You? Find out @ She's Crafty

As for which Hackers guy am I?

Which Hacker's Character Are You? Find out @ She's Crafty

(That test is a bit slanted in it's questions though, making it pretty obvious what the outcome will be).

Anyway, good morning to ya'll, and howdy to WB and his journal!

My cat is so bad... he waits until I get up from my chair and is on my way back to it before he jumps up and looks cutely at me while spinning slowly around. Grrr.....

Still no go in the job search. My resume probably needs some working over. I'm thinking more professional and less verbose. Bah. Oh, yea, by the way, the last few days have absolutely sucked, but I'll get to that in a second, after the fun thing I did.

The fun thing was heading down to Seattle wednesday to hang out with Jim and head to the SPUG meeting, where they talked Perl and it was cool. Part of the beauty was that since it was more focused than a Linux group, where you're assured of having a wide variety of knowledge and experience, the Perl group was pretty focused, and had about 10-20 people in attendance (they boast 400 on their list). They had a talk on two Damian Conway modules, Lingua::EN::Inflect and Getopt::Declare, both equally cool. They have a strange, almost cult-like obsession with Damian for some reason. It's quite disturbing. He's actually going to talk with them next month, and I'll try to drag Cuv and Yohimbe out there for it, and have some guys to Geek out to Perl with.

Yea, the last week has sucked though, as my allergies have flared up far more than normal. Coming back from my run this morning I hoped for death, and in addition to being itchy eyed, plugged up, and scratchy throated, I had lovely blotches on me. The doc said basically "nothing we can do, take allergy meds and change them every month so your body doesn't get too used to them." *sigh*. The Real Life Chief has a garden party tomorrow I'd like to go to, but right now the thought of being outside, in the sun with plants all around me fills me with fear. We'll see how drugged up I can get tomorrow though.

No, I'm not dead yet. Lots of interesting things have gone on lately though, keeping me kinda busy. Had some awsome salmon at the folks the other night with my uncle Peter (whom mom used to work with), and I found out (and this may or may not be true), that I'm a direct ancestor of The Blood Countess. Uncle Peter has a flair for the dramatic of course, but he's also big into geniology, so who knows. Kinda cool if it were true though, then I'd understand where my urges to slay all the annoying little teenie boppers comes from!

Was taken out for Father's day by my father a couple of days later, to some good good sushi, where I tried to make it as interesting an evening as possible, and introduced my parents to dessert eel.

Been messing around with the UFies.org site, and moving the old movie reviews over to a new site. Hopefully it'll shape up a bit more soon. I also spent the last hour writing the last review, part of the reason this is so late!

Silverstr thinks the only way to get my list of requirements for the perfect job is to be my own boss.... a fair idea, except that I really hate working for me (I'm a bastardly boss), and having me working for me (I'm a slacker, and hate the boss). Oh well, guess I'll keep revamping and advertising my resume and hoping it draws bites.

Speaking of other blogging friends (and no, the order on the top of the page is pretty arbitrary, though weighted slightly by lenght of time reading, newness to the list, and amount of updates... might be time to put it in alphabetical order though), seems scoobyD is still blessed with a small furry critter, sadly not a cat (though one would help at this point). My advice via FireflyMom was to use the Walmart live traps, but make sure you check them often.

Random linkage. It's 30megs, but well worth it. Typical Male Robot Behaviour (avi, divx) is funny and true to life, and wonderfully animated. Grab it from http://www.cronimation.com, along with The Geek and the Fu, his other short video. Trust me, they are both worth the watch, and I do mean full watch, as the credits are just as good as the video.

A warm welcome to the blogging/journalling/weblogging world to scoobyD!

The job interview went really well, but sadly, no call back :( (they said they'd let the lucky winner know tuesday night or wednesday, and it's thursday today). I really figured there was no chance of them not calling me back, as I was perfectly qualified, and my answers to their questions were brilliant (I was told I had "the best answer yet," to "tell us why we should hire you."). The rest of the people they had there were ASP and photoshop weenies who considered themselves "web programmers." Bah, bunch of little ankle-biters. Guess I just have to keep on looking for a job that I want.

To that end, here is what I'm looking for in a job:

• Make my own hours
• Not have to worry about the boss getting on my back
• Able to watch springer in the afternoon if I want
• Do what I enjoy
• Have as much time off as I want
• Travel all paid for
• Have gobs of money pour in while all this happens

That's not that much to ask now is it?

Been doing a bunch of riding lately. Not long, but with lots of up hill and downhill around town. This morning I saw that scoobyd was up at the college helping out at the grad ceremony, and figured that was as good an excuse as anything. Didn't find her until she was on her way out, but it was enough to get me a bit winded, sweaty and scorched from the sun, so I came home to my multiple fans, fanning me with all their might!

First of all, a big happy birthday to mom, the best mom in the world!

Got a job interview today with Nemesis Creative down in White Rock. They called me up sunday to say that I had a spot at noon today, so I gotta try to make myself look hirable. The work seems to be contract, so we'll see. I can't find out that much about them, but the guy who emailed me was using a mac, and they seem to need linux people...

Put in the new hardware on the ufies.org box last night, curtesy of Fred. A screaming dual 1.13Ghz baby, oh yea. Minor problems cropped up when the kernel didn't support the new hard drive controller, but that's a minor thing. Had problems with the new SMP kernel as well, but that was resolved with the help of a boot disk. All in all, it went well, and things are going mucho fast now. I'll have to pop by to properly secure the new hard drive sometime, and replace the video card (I had a AGP card i there, but the new MB doesn't have an AGP slot!). Minor details that led to a bit of extra time spent, but like I said, all is good now. Now to find those mounting rails....

Sent this off to info@jobwavebc.com after finding a nice job on their site, that I would fit quite nicely in thankyouvermuch.

Hi there. I have noticed a couple of problems with the jobwave.com website. The first of all is the info@jobwave.com link at http://www.jobwavebc.com/contact.asp is broken, you've forgotten the mailto: part of the link.

Second is a bit more of an issue. I am using the latest version of mozilla under linux (best known as the new netscape release), yet your site tells me I need IE 5.x. First of all, this is the sort of prejudice that destroys the purpose of the internet, that is, access to information. I understand not allowing or giving warnings for old versions of software, but not against the newest versions of browsers (note that IE 6 works fine, though you specify IE 5.x).

I've accessed the site under IE and see nothing IE specific that would prevent mozilla or netscape 6 (or any browser based on mozilla for that matter) from accessing it. FYI, mozilla (www.mozilla.org) is a fully CSS 1 and 2, HTML 4.x compliant, and is on par with IE 5 and 6 as far as it's ability to render pages.

I'm sure that it is something like a test for "mozilla" or "netscape" without a check for version number. If this could be modified so that people with non-windows browsers had access to your site, life would be much improved.

Hope you understand my request.

Regards

I hope they listen to reason and stop their wicked ways.

Wow, I was almost productive today! Finished watching the second disk of the Buffy Season 1 DVD, dropped my resume off at a computer learning center up the road (think I could fake my way through being an instructor?). A total outside chance, but who knows... I have (in my opinion anyway) more than enough knowledge stored in my rusty gizzard to teach people basic office applications.

I also got a jabber server going on ufies, with icq, msn, and aim transports, meaning that I'm down to one client for all my instant messaging systems (well, there are only two I use), and have the ability to send messages semi-securely (gotta love SSL). Hmm.... what else... updated my resume a bit more, didn't apply for a 3D programmer job at EA that required me to have at least one game published. Oh well...

I even got around to updating the hair page with some CSS, tig would be proud. Course, it displays pretty well mostly correctly under fucking-netscape-4.x, so he'd be pissed off at that :) Of course, I do now understand a bit more about the hell it is for compatibility (f-ns-4.x understanding border, but not separate "border-top", "border-bottom", etc tags).

BTW, I'm looking for a good WYSIWYG HTML editor for windows that will be easy for a newbie to grok. Any suggestions?

First of all, mucho sorry for the lack of updates. I had something that I wanted to tell everyone about, and wanted to make a separate page about it before I said anything. Course, as I'm a slacker, it took me till now to get the page done.

Anyway, remember that talk of hair a few days ago? Well, I did it. Hit the all new super wonderful awsome with clickable images hair page for the full story.

That out of the way, a huge Happy Birthday to Firefly, of Relaxing Touch chair massage, who turned an undisclosed youngness today.

Had a great party up at Iambe and Engel's last Saturday, with lots of people. One of the things that was supposed to go on was to talk about going to phase two of the Ultimate Galaxy demo that we finished. Sadly, my squid god friend and his wife didn't arrive until the party was well under way, so the "lets meet before things get going" turned into "lets run away in the middle of the party". This sucked, but had to be done. Seems like most of the problems we had encountered and were there to get resolved were, which is a Good Thing. Towards the end I stole off again, to go for "just one drink" with K, tig, nateflex, and a couple of others, as I wanted to talk fitness with the fitness freaks. One drink turned into at least two pitchers being consumed (hint: not by me). I did give my body and mind over to K and her bro to let them mold me into the chisled god that I know is hiding inside me somewhere under the soft marshmellowy coating. Nateflex is supposed to get a hold of me so I can wander to the gym with him and let him show me how to work out "properly" (I think that's code for "hurt me and make me beg for mercy"), but alas no word yet. I don't really want to go to the gym without him, only because if I go in the morning and do a workout, and he gets a hold of me at noon or something, that'd suck.

Fred managed to get me some absolutely awsome new hardware for ufies which I've been... uhmm... burning in lately. I ripped apart my second windows box (named Garfield) and put the new supermicro board, dual PIII 1.13Ghz chips and 512 megs of server quality ECC ram. Oh yea baby. The raid card didn't work out to work like we'd hoped, so it was replaced with a matrox PCI ide card, allowing another four hard drives to be added to the system (and allows me to put in a hot swap for the raid5 that is currently running on it. The box cracked SETI@Home for a few days, and gave me a good idea of what to expect and what was needed when I replace the current system's motherboard in a couple of days. Wish I could keep it for myself though... man that's a nice system, and seeing your kernel compile with "make -j3" makes me ponder selling a spare kidney for a sweet system like that for myself :)

<rubs lint that has collected on his velcrohead>

Hmm..... 2am, bed time..

Not dead, delayed. Will update properly tomorrow. Honest.