Older blog entries for bma (starting at number 30)

dancer: The Debian X maintainer is working on 4.0.1 packages, so long as no one files release-critical bugs on the 3.3.6 packages. Only a matter of time, now...

Been a long time since the last diary entry. Haven't really been busy, just haven't had anything interesting to say, or didn't feel like writing one. But I'm still alive.

The Good News: I did a lot better this session of school. A- in English, B in Astronomy lab. Still waiting to hear on my grade for Astronomy lecture, but I just took the exam yesterday. My GPA doesn't look quite as bad now...once the lecture grade comes in I should be off academic warning, which is good...

The Bad News: I have the payoff amounts for all my school loans now. All told it ends up around $18k . Add up the loan for my truck and my credit card bill, turns out I'm over 45k in debt. Whee =) And I'm looking at buying a townhouse...heh heh.

Been very productive at work so far this week. Whacked out a lot of perl for the interface to the company LDAP directory. Net::LDAP's sorting routines are broken, so I wrote some code to do it for me. Slightly slower, but oh well. The day flies by when I am coding. I didn't realize how much I missed it - I have not done any serious long-term code projects for some time. Set up mod_perl on the webserver the interface is running, so it isn't dog-slow loading up anymore. LDAP is pretty nifty once you start to get the hang of it...of course, having one of the OpenLDAP developers as your coworker helps immensely :-)

My boss has given me the additional job title of "Keeper of the Munchies". Depending on the day, you can find mass quantities of Twizzlers, peanuts, various candies, Triscuits, and more. It keeps people coming to my cube and prevents me from getting too lonely. Right now I am down to just triscuits (I think I am the only one who eats those.) I bought a big bag of M&Ms at Price Club (Costco Warehouse to those of you who didn't know of it before the name change) and a ton of Gatorade. I have about 40 20oz bottles in my little fridge right now, I think the poor thing is going to have a coronary. I didn't see any twizzlers in obvious sight, so I guess I'll stop by Giant tomorrow morning and pick some up.

I was getting ready to leave work the other day when my boss came by and asked if I had a half hour. I said I was planning on leaving in about 5 minutes, then he asked me 'Do you want a raise?'. I made the half hour. :) Don't know how much yet, but very cool. Hopefully I will know when I get paid this Friday, but probably not. My mother has taken to calling me the 'little shit'. But she's happy for me. :)

Tomorrow I have an appointment for my new doctor. I haven't been to a doctor in over a year. I've had this guy appointed as my PCP (HMO, no PPO in this area for Cigna) since January, but I kept forgetting to make an initial appointment for a checkup. I fear what dire news he will give me. I'm horribly overweight and my blood chemistry must be aweful. Maybe he'll actually offer some decent advice. I hope I like the guy.

Went to the eye doctor's for a checkup today. I went two weeks ago for the annual exam. Cool thing is, with my new Vision insurance, I was able to get the two-week throwaway contacts instead of the 4 pairs a year deal, for about the same price. Today went in to make sure the new contacts were working ok. There was a new person there who was being trained. I don't know why, but every single employee in this office (other than the doctors) is an attractive looking woman. This one was no exception. My mother and the neighbor joke about how guys go there wanting to get their vision corrected so they can see them better.

Got my copy of Terminus over the weekend. I was one of the first 100 to pre-order so I should be getting a nifty poster soon. It was delivered Priority Mail and the box was mashed up quite a bit (they used one of those flimsy envelopes). The Terminus people are looking into what they can do (this is not an isolated problem). Installed fine under linux, when I went to run it, it crashed X. Turns out I need XF4 and DRI. I have it compiled, just need to install it and set up a new XF86Config. Installed it under Windows, too...looks pretty nice. Haven't had a chance to play it yet, though.

mazeone: :P

My fiancee's house was robbed last night.
Broke in the back window, stole her mother's purse, keys, cellphone, walked to the front door, unlocked it, drove off with their blazer.
I hate the human race.

Threw out my back yesterday morning. It is finally almost back into normal shape. Makes you realize how much you take your health for granted.

sleep(28800);

joey: A friend of mine had the same problem a few months back. He finally found some at a Staple's (not sure if you have those out west. They are fairly common here in the DC area). Every other place he went (Best Buy, CompUSA, etc) was totally sold out. You might have better luck shopping online for them, or trying to shoot for one on eBay.

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Tuesday
Long day. Mostly spent in classes. English from 9:30-11:35, then go to work for about 3-4 hours, then come back for a 6 hour block of Astronomy. Astronomy is going to be a fun course, I've always been interested in space stuff. We got out of lab early since the lab was a review of simple math like scientific notation. Since it is a 100 level course we have a lot of freshmen in the class.

Wednesday
English in the morning. Had a rough draft of a paper due, summarizing a biology article on bacteria in the stomach. It's English for the natural sciences (required for my BS degree) but 90% of the book gives examples of Biology and the other 10% of astronomy and physics. Hello, I'm a CS major, none of that possibly applies to me :)

Finished hooking up the netbench array at work. Installed distributed-net on all of them, boosting my keyrate by about 4MKey/s :)

Wednesday night my fiancee and I went to Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic Mobile) and got some new cellphones and service contracts. Before I was using Splint, but I hated the service I got (both customer and signal-wise). Crystal clear, indeed. Piece of junk, that's what it was. Verizon didn't have many phones that I was interested in, though...ended up paying for the (very expensive) digital StarTAC 7868, but after a few days of using it I really like it. The battery life is good, despite the horror stories I've heard. It's also a lot more comfortable and clearer reception than my old phone (Qualcomm QCP-2760). So I'm happy. The service plan is good as well, 200 minutes for $29.99/mo (with Splint it was 300 for the same amount), and free nights and weekends, which is when I will be using it the most anyways.

Thursday
Very long day. Nothing exciting happened.

Friday
We had a huge meeting, out at this really swank hotel (Westfield Marriott). Decent continental breakfast, then sat and listened (read: played with Palm V, like everyone else in our group) to management for a bit. We've been running into some real problems with the Palms lately. It's the exact same problem for everyone, too. You'll turn it on, and get a Fatal exception error, with a restart button...which doesn't react to when you tap. So you soft reset the Palm, which then sends it into this infinite loop of flicking the Palm logo and a black horizontal bar. The only way to fix it is to hard reset the Palm. It happened to me on Thursday, then Frank's did it again later that day, then Geoff's did it all day Friday during the meeting (poor fellow. :) So I think I'm going to try to track down more information on this problem... I'm backing my palm up every day now (full backups, not just a hotsync). At lunch most of us left for home, since all that was left was about 20-30 minutes of 'Final words' and after that work was closed. Went home and cleaned my room, feel much better now. Also defrosted the fridge and the 3" block of ice my freezer had become. Whee.

Went out to a local bar and grill with some friends around 9pm, turns out there were bands playing there. It was cool seeing all our friends from high school, first time we've all been together in about 4 years. I was DD, so didn't drink any, but man, everyone else got smashed in celebration of my fiancee's graduation a few weeks ago. I'm glad I wasn't the one holding the tab. One thing I didn't really enjoy was all the smoke, you could see it hanging in the air anyways, good thing I was wearing my glasses, would have had a rough time with contacts. I was sitting at a bar table with my fiancee and our friends when this girl who had been dancing on the floor came over, laid her head down on the railing (it was about her height) and asked me if I wanted to dance. Ha! I politely (I hope) declined, so she went and asked the other guy at our table, with similar results. At first glance she appeared young, but I took a closer look and she was easily mid 30's-40's (I'm 21). She could have been my mother! Anyways, maybe you just had to be there, but I found that highly amusing. First time in a long while (at least 5 years) that I've been hit on. Perhaps the funniest thing is that my fiancee was right there next to me getting a real kick out of the whole scene.

Today
Slept in until about 10:40, which was nice. Went back to the Verizon store to exchange my fiancee's cigarette charger for her phone. Then swung over to Best Buy to get some stuff for her parents. We were going to go to a movie, but I guess not, since she's now sleeping on my futon (thus giving me time to write this very long diary entry, I've been slacking). Finally, I can just relax for a day or two...I love holiday weekends.

On Thursday I worked from home while my truck was getting nerf bars put on. Got a Dodge Ram 1500 as a loaner, glad I didn't buy one of those. It drove alright, but I felt it was an uncomfortable cabin. Picked up the truck around 6 only to find that they had put solid black nerf bars on, instead of the chrome ones I had ordered. D'oh.

Friday I called up the dealership and of course they were apologetic and embarrassed. They're ordering some new nerf bars for me, so maybe they'll be in sometime this week. Friday was kind of a slow day, half our work was still out at Austin, TX (or on their way back). Discovered I get to go to some wonderful meeting this coming Friday (school didn't get me out this time, no friday classes, drat). Got my final grades for the spring semester on Friday. Very depressing. Out of four classes, I failed 3. So I signed up to take them again next semester. I did get a B+ in my CS class. I think it was just a matter of not spending enough time on classes...too much time was spent visiting my fiancee over the weekends, which is basically my only real freetime. Now that she has graduated I won't be making 300mi+ round trips. These are the first courses I've ever failed in my life...before this, the lowest grade I'd ever gotten was a C. So I guess if this is the worst that happens to me, I'm doing alright =)

Long weekend. Went out and basically bought myself a new wardrobe so I don't always have to wear a T-shirt and jeans (there are days when I don't ... jeans are so uncomfy when it's humid out). Went around looking at different cellphone plans. I currently have Sprint, maybe it's just my phone (Qualcomm QCP-2760) but it's total crap. I just got the phone replaced on saturday though, before people couldn't hear me even with a full signal and I could hear them perfectly. Oh well. Right now me and my fiancee are looking at Vorizon and Cell1...not sure. Vorizon doesn't have a family plan, but I've been hearing rumours about Cell1's customer service sucking and phones being cloned...dunno. Also finally got to read some this weekend... I just finished Peter F. Hamilton's 'Emergence', which is the first book in the Night's Dawn series. Good book. Now I need to go buy the next one.

So I was reading the diaries this morning when I came across this post that was pure gun-nut...thinking, "oh god, /.'rs have found advogato", then I look at the name...*grin* Hi Benson...ever get your Debian box working again?

Summer school starts today. Astronomy should be fun, I am not looking forward to English (but it is my last english class I have to take! Yay!)

apgarcia:
I mention where I go to school in my personal info...namely, George Mason University

lilo:
Erm, I've lived on the east coast my entire life, and we change our clocks just like everyone else...spring forward, fall back...so I'm not sure what you mean by us not following Daylight savings.

joey:
I think San Mehat put it best with 'I hate port 80' :-)

The network has been flaky since yesterday. It keeps randomly dieing. I'll be lucky if this posts. I may end up going home where at least I can establish a reliable network connection.

I hate status reports.

Got half of my grades in. B+ in CS 3 (which is basically third-semester C++), and failed my Matrix Algebra class. Waiting to hear the news on Physics and Calculus 3...may be retaking those too. Bleck. At least school should go more smoothly now that I won't be managing a long distance relationship and driving down to my fiancee's college every weekend, since she just graduated on Saturday.

egad:
There are probably no good crypto interfaces from PGP to Perl because PGP isn't really a well-designed UNIX program, it's originally a DOS program...as far as needing RSA compatibility, you can do that with GPG. All you need to do are install the IDEA and RSA (RSAREF if you're in the US) modules, check them out ftp://ftp.net.lut.ac.uk/pub/gcrypt/contrib/ and http://non-us.debian.org/~jgg/ - I can read/sign/encrypt with RSA keys just fine.

Exams are done. Thank God. My first summer class starts next Monday, though - yeck. Grades have not been posted to the system yet, Grrr.

Saturday we had quite the storm go through. Had power blink out a few times for a second at first, the firewall kept on chugging due to the UPS but the modem in it apparently got fried. So I've been without much net access since saturday evening...time to play catchup today.

Traffic was horrible on the way into work. It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to get in...usually it takes about 30 to 45. Oh well. At least the weather is so perfect outside this week (mid-70s, it was about 50 outside this morning, mmm, cold weather, I love it) so I got to enjoy that along some tunes.

Most of the people in the office are heading out to Austin, TX this week to go to some IBM thing. On Thursday I'm bringing the truck in to get the nerf bars installed and get the undercarriage coated (or something). I wonder what kind of loaner car I'll get.

I think I've seen Die Hard 2 about 4 times in the past week. Gotta love HBO :)

Ryan:
Yes, Kinder Eggs do rule. My fiancee loves them. I recently ordered about 20 from Australia (damn USA does not carry them, grrr) - only to find out that yes, Canada does have them. Oh well, they were not outrageously priced. A friend of mine from the UK is supposed to be mailing me some 'Big Kinder Egg' they had during Easter...and in return I'll mail him a couple of the many Linux-related tshirts that I've acquired.

Bryce:
I had a Ford Taurus until a few weeks ago when I bought my F150...there weren't that many buttons to push/pull/whatever...I never had to look in the manual while driving :) Then again, though, this was a 1997 model, and not a very high-end one -- so the one you had may have been vastly different.

Tooks some pictures of my new truck today. I know that probably no one cares, but I'm not forcing you to read this =)

Off to take exam number 3 now, Matrix Algebra...goody. I thought it was at 4:30, showed up, turned out it was 7:30...so I went to Best Buy and bought the new Bosstones CD and then went back home.
Well, I get there at 7:30pm only to find no one there...so I recheck the syllabus, it says "7:30-10:15", I go and check the online exam schedule, the damn exam was at 7:30am this morning...so right now I hold the title for dumbest fucking person alive :P

My finacee graduates college tomorrow with a BA in English from Longwood College. Yay. Will be fun getting up at 4:30am to get ready and drive down so I can be there at 8am.