Older blog entries for Phoon (starting at number 43)

advanced case of bleary-eye

Yeah, yeah, yeah... so what if I got up at 5PM yesterday, and didn't sleep at all since? So what if I can't focus on anything further than two feet away? So what if... *yawn*...

Seriously, though, my screwed-up circadian rhythm is really beginning to become a hassle. Strangely enough, the more work I have to do, the better my rhythm is... it's like the constant obligations keep me out of bed when I'm not supposed to be there. Normally, I get home at about 2PM, fall asleep, wake up at about 6PM, hack/study/etc, catch a couple of hours at night, then wake up at 6AM to start the whole process over again. Drag.

But I promised myself I wouldn't cut class unless I were actually sick... and I'm not sick. Yet.

so, how long until "chopsticks"?

Absolutely no piano work. Two hours per class, one night a week, is the wrong format for a piano class. It's the wrong format for almost everything.

linux hassles

The first problem was that klogd took my CPU time to 100%. It's a low-priority thread, so it didn't affect performance. I didn't notice it until I noticed my load average being higher than 1, instead of hovering at 0.02.

Then, when I switched keyboards in X, apps stopped recieving Meta-Q and Meta-Tab. No idea why.

Finally, X went haywire and sucked up all CPU time. I had to ssh in from my firewall and kill X.

I googled for information on all three problems, but on the first all I could find were bugs with 2.4.x and I'm currently running 2.2.18. No help there.

Just as I begin to get frustrated, I reboot into Windows, blow up a few bots in Descent 3 (yeah, yeah, windows version... got it for free with my hub...), begin to appreciate the stability of Linux again, and start working with a new vigor.

archmagi anonymous

Whoopee. I'm addicted to Archmage again.

I don't know how it started... someone posted a link.. I remembered playing the first time, and how good it felt... and before I knew what was going on, I had created a character and had already started beating the snot out of someone.

Then Armageddon hit.

I'll see y'all in 48 hours.

I saw an ad for "Swordfish" today. Finally a movie got the terminology right.

"The best crackers in the world can do this in sixty minutes"... halleleujah.

Now, getting back to hacking... what hacking? Absolutely nothing's going on.

Possible places I could work:

• Gateway Country. Fairly convenient location... haven't been inside, though.
• Computer Renaissance. Same, and same.
• One of the myriad computer stores my dad is convinced exist in this area. Trust me. I've looked. There are very few computer stores around here, and those are mom-and-pop stores, or a guy running a business from his garage.
• Some random grocery/hardware store. Tolerable, but not my first choice.

I hope I'm forgetting about some. I'd really like a job working with computers.

I miss my PS/2 clickety-clack keyboard. It's hooked up to my firewall right now, so it's not really gone, just not accessible.

I wonder if PS/2 keyboards are hotswappable.

I actually sat down and counted out all the change I've been collecting. It came out to about $47, with $17 of that in pennies.

There was a study a number of years ago that claimed the average family has $20 in pennies. It's surprising, though, how small $20 is, and how heavy. Copper is more dense than one tends to realize.

I'm also disappointed in the "golden dollar" the US Gummint has been pushing recently. First, IMNSHO, it should have a president, or a Founding Father, on the face. Second, it's too small and hard to distinguish from a quarter. Third, the golden plating wears off fast.

Supposedly, the Polk County LUG is talking with Polk Community College, trying to arrange a Linux course. I hope it goes through. I hope I can test out of it, since I probably have more Linux experience than any professor they could arrange to teach it, unless they can bring in a LUG member to teach. I've already insulted one of the "computer science" professors by showing him how little he knows. (Read my first few posts to hear me rant.)

Spanish is going fairly well. Aprendí mucho en esa clase. Me gusta español.

I'm still working on the webpage for the International Circle. I have one question, though... in a "club roster" page, what's a reasonable size for a portrait? I have them set at 144x192, but that seems kinda large. However, 72x96 looked too small.

I've nearly forgotten that I have piano class. Once a week is already too long, and skipping a week makes it even stranger. (No, I didn't cut class. The professor had a prior engagement, so she couldn't be there.)

"Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." -- Steve Ballmer

I think we've reached a milestone here. Microsoft has failed to stop us with mere "twisting" of the truth, and must now resort to outright lies. We have them running scared.

edited when I realized I had used a feminine demonstrative adjective with a masculine noun.

edited again when I realized I had the movie quote wrong.

job hunting

Yeah, it's me again.

The job hunt's been fairly futile. I applied at Circuit City, and they seemed interested to have a warm body actually interested in the job. I learned why when someone told me about their pay system. I'm not going to post anything here, in case what I was told is wrong. If I were to be offered the job, I'd probably accept it... even with the pay system. Crappy commissions are better than nothing at all.

The Best Buy across the street from said Circuit City isn't hiring. Shame, since that's where I really wanted to work. I'm not really interested in sales; repair is where I'd like to be.

Radio Shack is hiring. That might be an acceptable place to work. I figure I could peddle cheap consumer equipment... even *gag* MSN...

And I refuse to work in fast food if there's any alternative. I would rather shovel manure at a farm than flip burgers.

My dad thinks that every store's hiring, and that companies are just begging for people. That's true, except in anything remotely interesting, and especially computer-related jobs. All the companies that are hiring (except for the aforementioned) are hard, backbreaking, manual labor. Either that or burger flipping, and I'd rather take the manual labor.

hacking

I wrote my first Gtk-Perl script the other day. It's a wrapper for LoserJabber, which takes an ithought entry and passes it to LoserJabber's text frontend to be uploaded to LiveJournal.

Simple, but not bad for a first script.

Not much else going on... once I get a job I'll probably buy an iMac to run OSX and LinuxPPC on.

Can a Mac dual-boot? I'd like to be able to play with both OSes without having to own two Macs.

appropriateness

Is there a requirement that diary entries must be relevant to open source? If so, I'd like to know before I go on breaking it.

A portion of my previous entry has been moved to my LiveJournal. I mean, I forget that a majority of users here don't care whether I manage to gather up the courage needed to ask someone out.

Even if I don't post them here, if you still want to hear about my romantic exploits (or lack thereof), they will still be posted to the Web... with the URL changed.

If you have an opinion, let me know. If you have an opinion and the authority to enforce it, let everyone know.

teaching

I've been trying to teach a lady in my campground how to use her computer. I've been failing miserably.

Does anyone know of any guides to computer pedagogy? I have a hard time explaining things to people who aren't near my own level of experience. (In other words, they have to have a clue to begin with... I don't wield the cluebat, although I'm sorely tempted sometimes.)

I'm also tempted to start a computer-repair business out of my own home. I need to find out what that would entail. I'm tired of working for donations. I'd also like to increase business.

Also, what's a good rate to charge for computer instruction? The one lady I'm teaching gives me $8 per hour. I feel like I'm getting ripped off. At least it's only once a week, and is flexible.

reading

Read Starship Troopers today. It's infinitely better than the movie.

Also made headway into The Hitchhiker's Trilogy. It's amazing how many in-jokes I missed the first time around.

semi-computer-related things

Yeah, it's been a while since I've posted anything. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's just a sign of how boring my life is. I don't know.

I've been appointed webmaster for the International Circle, a new club starting at my school. The good news: since the site doesn't exist yet, there's no cruft I have to work through. The bad news: They may require me to use *ick* FrontPage. If they want me to use that, they can find themselves a new webmaster. It's bad enough that it's probably going to be hosted on a NT machine without Perl or PHP (as if I knew PHP).

Anyway, I have a prototype site up (created with Bluefish and GIMP), but the location is semi-secret. Even if you find it, there's not much there that's even remotely interesting. We don't even have a logo yet, for crying out loud.

I've also been hacking on ithought, trying to see how I could pass a value back from a plugin into the main program. It's a little more difficult than expected, with the current plugin framework.

life? what's that?

[ This portion of my entry has been moved to my LiveJournal. ]

In other news, I've been trying to find a job. No such luck. It's not like I'm not qualified... it's just that I don't want to whore myself out for minimum wage bagging groceries when I could be... I don't know, at least selling computers, if not repairing (or sysadminning) them. I can't take most jobs, because I can't work standard 9-5 hours and still attend school. And you have to understand that school is my highest priority.

Overall, the whole situation sucks. Right now, I have plenty of time, but no money. If I get a job, I'll have the money I need, but not enough time to spend it, especially with school.

Anyway. I'm going to go get something to eat, then I'm going to grow some cojones and ask my friend out. Wish me luck.

[ The remainder of this entry has also been moved to my LiveJournal. The Cliff's Notes: I couldn't ask her out because she wasn't there. ]

divx ;-) project idea

I've been struggling with aviplay's dismal performance on my (admittedly old) system. (Frankly, it runs like a pig on quaaludes.)

But it gave me an idea. Why not create a DivX ;-) to MPEG-1 reencoder? My system's certainly beefy enough to handle MPEG-1. And especially since many... well... "adult" video clips are now being distributed as DivX ;-), and I'm tired of rebooting into Winblows to play them with any reasonable speed.

Besides, with avifile, not only could I handle DivX, but ASF too...

rerun?

raph: I suggested a few things earlier... check out this entry. Again, most of the ideas come straight from LiveJournal, and some have already been implemented, but the rest would be nice to have here, too.

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Yes, there was a real entry here. No, it's not here anymore. Yes, I intentionally removed it.

Move along, nothing to see here.

woot

Just got my grade report:

Calculus II: A.
General Chemistry 1: A.
First Year Spanish 1: A.

I'm proud of myself.

file dumping

I wrote a small module for ithought that exports an entry to a filename the user selects. It works, but it has some problems. For example, if you enter a filename you can't write to, it crashes ithought. (This could be fixed with stat(), but I've never learned how... time to go RTFM...)

It's a module we really need, though, so I'll keep learning.

"intellectual gang-rape"

tripp: I agree heartily with your analogy. It makes things easy for the uninitiated to understand.

The remainder of my entry has been deleted. It was inflammatory and was not appropriate for Advogato.

credit where credit is due

kgb: I notice you referred to it as "phoon's ithought stuff"... as a matter of fact, virtually all of the credit goes to voltron. He started the project, wrote 90% of the code for the original version and all of the code for the rewrite, plus he handles the Web side of things, and maintains our SourceForge presence. I just submit changes here and there (in other words, I'm just a code monkey).

But I'm a very proud code monkey. ;-)

vicious rumors

vicious: "me and yakk found out that the americans actually won the vietnam war."

Uhm... no. We Americans hauled ass from Vietnam on 29 April 1975. While we may not have lost, we certainly didn't win.