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| 12/29/2000 -{ Back in Black }- |
So the LAN party is tomorrow, and I'm stocked. Sucks that everyone is sick. I hope that I don't get sick too, though depending on how my work hell-month of Jan goes it might be a welcome break for a couple of days.
Saw Fantasy Mission Force with Brad today. It was possibly the worst movie ever. On a scale of 0-10 (no negative numbers allowed) I give it 0.00000000000000000000001. The only reason it got that high is Jackie Chan is in it and fights well and does one or two mildly amusing things. Of course, to quote my friend Ard on IRC: "<Ardaniel> anything is good when it's not Fantasy Mission Force."
Ah well, off to cut my toenails and then bed!
| 12/28/2000 -{ Sad Songs and Waltzes }- |
Mom, Dad, you've probably experienced it already, but when you get back in expect a log of love from Scotty (cat). When I went in I accidently let one food bowl get empty and I was treated to the royal telling off, followed by a lot of scritchin', meowing, and requests for head scratches and love.
Some computer updates: I've had a couple of weird crashes, so today a nice new shiny chassis fan got added (with a bit of force I admit). That and I also now have kernel 2.4.0-test12, patched for reiserfs (and using that on all but "/"), as well as the latest nVidia drivers for the GeForce2. Still no luck with getting quake working yet.
Reiserfs was fun though.... lots of time spent watching the copying of files back and forth between scratch partitions and real partitions. Lots of fun. But things are pretty much set here I think.
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hde2 474474 45218 404757 11% /
/dev/hde5 9767184 4519748 5247436 47% /home
/dev/hde7 6835400 1005388 5830012 15% /usr
/dev/hde8 6835400 1755952 5079448 26% /usr/local
/dev/hde9 5598416 2118360 3480056 38% /var
/dev/hdf1 9765168 5113444 4651724 53% /var/ftp/pub/mp3
/dev/hde1 10231392 7243864 2987528 71% /root/dosc
Oh, and thanks for the tip cuv, freeamp is pretty cool!
Can't wait till the LAN party on Saturday! Whohohooo! Fraggin' and chicken cesear!!
Ever notice that the only times you speak directly to your toilet are
| 12/24/2000 -{ The Reason I have Pink Fur Dice }- |
So tomorrow I get to see if the various gifts I got peoples are appreciated for what they are (like the label maker I got Engel, and the freakish big headed thing I got Iambe.
Merry Christmas ya'll!
And the reason I have pink fur dice in my sports car is to do what I like to do, put the irony of a situation in front of people, and make them laugh. Or something like that. It also has to do with a Saywer Brown song.
| 12/23/2000 -{ Ho. Ho. Ho. }- |
The people that I saw all looked like they wanted nothing better to do than leave this consumer shopping hell, the Santas charging huge amounts to have some small child stuck on their lap while a picture is snapped, the screaming little brats, and the thousands of other shoppers and go home, throw their shoes off and sit down on a suck-out-your-will-to-live couch.
That's certainly how I felt. But I did get 99% of my shopping done.
Merry Christmas and all that.
| 12/21/2000 -{ You Have to be Crazy to Keep From Going Insane }- |
The new desk is working well... for the first time in a while I feel comfortable working here. Or playing for that matter. The playing part has been helped along by <another drum roll> a new computer! Thanks to a program at work, I now have two complete and wack-ass fast boxen, perfect for gaming, lan parties, etc. It's all very comforting to be surrounded by more megahertz than most third world nations. Of course, the box that this is being served from is a P133, going through a P166 firewall, but I digress.
Specs on da box:
Yes, I do like it, in case you were wondering :)
On a less technical side of things, christmas is coming. Again, I'm not ready for it. Hell, I've barely started getting ready for it and it's the 21st already. No wonder people get depressed over the holidays. I got some christmas cards out, all of which I'm sure will be late, and that's my accomplishment for the season so far. My folks are going "somewhere warm" for the holidays, and I got a couple of my gifts early. I kicked and screamed, but finally gave in and opened them early. Sheets! Duvet! Pillows! A warm and fuzzy bed is finally mine!
The spoils of war from the last week though, are still apparent. Wrapping paper, bags, empty boxes dating back to the desk are still sitting in the living room. It's 100% cleaner than it was a week ago, but still not acceptable. Since nothing is overly broken, it's probably safe to throw out or flatten the majority of the boxes (yes, I keep the reciepts). Other things, like my old desk (still sitting on the porch) will be cleaned up RSN(tm).
Things lately have been unkindly busy. Up till last night, when I got to bed around 11:30, I was up till 2 or 4am every night. More the 2am on the work nights, but there were a couple of nights where I just thought "I'm going to be tired, so what could one more game hurt?". See, not only do I have a new computer to play with, but I have a new computer that is fast to play with. And things like Elite Forces and Oni (demo) came out. I'm getting better.
In addition to the play that's done, there's also work. Things are coming down to the wire there constantly it seems, so on more than one night the 2am thing has been me sitting and playing with code or firewall rules. Nothing like telling the customers that the new [wiz bang feature] was done by a hairy hacker sitting in his underwear at 4am huh?
There was also a project to get one of our customers upgraded from out old hardware to our new stuff. It was my baby, and my performance was (IMO) less than wonderful. Basically I left it to the last minute, and reaped the "benefits" (stress, guilt, annoyance) from that. I think I need to start surfing for "how to be a manager that doesn't suck" pages out there. Some of it though, outside of it all being done at 5:30pm the night before, sucked in general. The hardware that was given to us as "working" for putting the system on was a Compaq rack peiceshit, with SCSI only hard drives (we don't support SCSI), and an IDE CDROM. No, you can't put an IDE hard drive on instead of the CDROM, it doesn't work, sorry. One of the guys at work, Brian, spent a fair chunk of today fscking with it before I told him to forget it and told the customer that we didn't have the time or resources to screw around with his hardware, and that our requirements were that he provide working hardware. I didn't say it quite like that (though I was told I should have). Part of not being a hardass manager I guess. It's not that I like people and don't want to be mean to them, just part of that shy personality (and the incredularity that I be put in any place of authority... I still consider myself a "kid" you know).
We get next week off, so aside from doing code that needs to be done, testing, and general mucking around trying to get things checked off my todo list (as well as enjoying christmas and happy crappy stuff like that), I get free time! I think maybe I'll try to work 8 hours one or two of those days, but from home and on my own time (start at noon, end at 10pm sort of thing), and see how that goes. Maybe it'll work better than this "wake up early" thing.
Along those lines, I found http://www.dbeat.com/28 which describes what would be great, or interesting, or just plain stupid, I'm not quite sure which yet....
So I'll sit here a while longer, sipping my green tea, downloading the patches needed for reiserfs, nvidia GLX drivers, and truetype fonts that don't suck, and then go to bed, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow is going to suck more than any other day of the year, as it's the night I plan to go christmas shopping.
Wish me luck, and if I don't make it back, please bury me with my new box :)
| 12/11/2000 -{ Ah, the weekend life. }- |
It took till 11pm or so to get it all setup (head to go to the gym etc) but it's all there and looking cool. More importantly, it feels cool. The problem with my previous desk (sitting on the porch with a big "free" sign on it) was the way it was configured it just didn't have the right comfort feel. I'm still debating adding one of those roll out keyboard trays, we'll see. The only thing that's missing now is the drawer space I had before, for storing things like pens, manuals, etc. I was looking at one of the rolling drawer units that fit nicely under the desk, but couldn't justify $219 for it. Maybe next paycheck.
The solution to the lack of drawer space is lower tech (and lower price), and in the form of a box that I threw all my stuff into.
The workout sat, btw, was arms. I was quite happy too, 3 reps of 185 lbs free weight (and I think I did 3 reps of 230 on the machine). Arnold watch out! The treadmill here at work came in today so I'll be able to run after or before work (after until the showers go in I think).
Moving on, Sunday had a small (though I think 1 or 2 people more would have been better) LAN party at Derfs. A little Q3 (even with Cat5's problems with hardware :), a little excessive, and lots of fragging.
| 12/05/2000 -{ The team with the most Visors win }- |
Got back from my little trip ok, came back to loving cats and a far warmer bed than the I stayed in. Got some good code done today... we have the intricacies of SSL worked out and now it's just the "knobby bits" to finish up. Fun with pointers :P
| 12/04/2000 -{ Notes from elsewhere. }- |
Last weekend was spent doing stuff. I finally fixed a problem in some of our code (not my fault, you silly missing "_"!) and then did some linux installs/setups for some friends of mine. I even was foolish enough to say something along the lines of "I'll get it all ready for you"... oh woe is me. Oh well, it'll be relatively fun, when I have free time that is :)
So without divulging any company secrets, I'll tell you what I am doing over the next day or so: I was sent over to [CENSORED] to help [CENSORED] [CENSORED]. I'm [CENSORED]ing him get some things [CENSORED] for [CENSORED] with my great skills. Well, attempting to anyway :)
Hope that helped. Needless to say the [CENSORED] over was beautiful, but very noisy. Oh, and they only have 1 ply here.... this is made up for by having the extended cable channels, so I can watch things like:
I'd like to officially submit my annoyance to TLC for putting "Robot Wars" on at the ungodly hour of 11pm on Sundays. How the hell am I supposed to get any sleep to prepare for a monday morning when I'm up till after midnight watching cool british TV (hosted by Lister of Red Dwarf!). At least they have the curtesy to put "Junkyard Wars" on at 9pm-11pm on Wednesdays. Sure, I'm still up till 11, but at least it's a wednesday, so there's not much chance of me getting any worse than I already am.
I'm lying in bed, thinking I should be either going to sleep, starting to read Enders Game, reading my SSL manual(s) (gotta love 800 pages of light reading), or producing something more interesting on this laptop of mine than sitting in a text editor and writing my journal. I should probably be writing reports, code, or something more resembling of real work.
Remember a couple of weeks ago I wondered out loud who creates us. Who is our soul the product of. This sort of thing is not a religious question, but more of a philisophical one. I know that certain bits of my current way of doing things, saying things, etc, are taken from people from my past, my parents, relatives, little actions or gestures or ways of saying things that I thought were funny, interesting, stern, or something, and have slowly integrated them into what and how I say and do things.
Now in that, are these bits of other people still them, or are they part of me. What happens when we remove the little motions? Can I wittle myself down to what is "truly" me? What would I be left with? Perhaps just the little dreams (well, demented ones judging from what I remember and write down) that we all have are some sort of insight into the pure and unblemished "you". Or maybe it's when you lie comatose, between sleep and dreams, with nothing going on in your mind at all. Maybe that's the real you, because everything else really belongs to someone else.
That said, it's 1am, the alarm is set amazingly early, and I have some dreams to catch up with.
