Recent blog entries for chrislea

Madness in my life. I've finished moving out of our old office, and so now I'm "officially" freelancing. That feels great.

I've also adopted a general "f@$k it!" attitude these days. It's definitely not the healthiest thing, but it's very liberating and probably what I need for the time being.

I'm planning on rewriting my calendar next week or so and it should actually be pretty useful this time.

Wow, I'd almost completely forgotten that I even had an account here but I saw the URL in a referrer log from my site.

So I haven't posted in about a year. Company and girlfriend both gone. Gonna freelance for a while then go back to school. That's about where things are.

Thanks to the folks below who certified me. I can't imagine why they did, as I haven't released any code of any sort in about forever, but I appreciate it all the same.

I'll try to make a point of posting here more often, but my site is usually the best place to go for up-to-date info from me.

More dancing last night at Paladino's. Still way out of shape, but slight improvement. Christian taught me some balboa over the weekend which was cool. I'm going to a new gym today to get signed up and possibly pick a personal trainer. Which is something I thought I'd never do, but I'm scared that I'll hurt my arm again if I don't.

Finished my C++ class and am now looking around for something to hack on. Pretty boring class. I'm trying to decide if I should take some more stuff next term or not. We'll see.

In a really bad mood and I really can't figure out why. But it's very definitely pissing me off.

Went dancing at The Derby last night for the first time in a while. I am way out of shape. Still, it was nice because Claire was able to come out for the first time since she had eye surgery.

I also got off my ass and made a hotel reservation for New Year's, so that was good.

Going up to learn some Balboa from my friend Christian in a few minutes. I'm hoping that I actually can get through some material before we break into the Guniess that I'm bringing.

Finally got paid by WROX for the work I did on the beginning PHP4 book. This is very cool, as it means I can buy a new box for my apartment. Which is cool because it means I get to shop for toys.

Having trouble getting PHP4 set up with Apache on my new Mandrake box. Seems to be having trouble loading the module because of an undefined symbol ("DL_UNLOAD"). If anyone has hit this then don't hesitate to drop me a line. Quite annoying.

So, it looks like I'm officially rather attached to the new girlfriend, based on the fact that she can now easily inspire jealousy in me. Which sucks, because I really hate the feeling of jealousy. It's altogether a very nasty emotion, especially in light of the fact that it tends to be completely pointless.

Also, my friend Rich is yet again having girl problems with his ex-fiancee. Which is amazing, because he's been having exactly the same problem with her over and over for about three consecutive years now. I'll never understand why some people feel they should get married so young.

So, on a less wishy-washy note, I'm almost done rewriting gilbrit's e16menuedit app. I'm doing it mostly to try and get used to glade. Talk about a useful but poorly documented app.

I'm also getting ready to get my ass in gear and learn Flash 5 scripting. It looks like a watered down version of Javascript so I imagine it won't be too bad.

And, finally, I've almost finished upgrading my work box to Mandrake 7.2. I like it a lot, especially because XFree86 4.0.1 installed correctly with accelleration for my Voodoo3 card. Just need to get a keymapping problem fixed and it'll be perfect.

Wow, what a great Thanksgiving break. I actually didn't come into the office for an entire four consecutive days. And I slept a ton. Groovy.

I pretty much hung out with Claire the whole time which was nice. Had dinner at her parents' house which rocked because her mom is a terriffic cook. We went to Santa Barbara on Saturday night and played pool which was fun. Nothing like a new venue.

Anyway, I'm back now. Fortunately, I didn't even have any annoying client emails while I was away, so I'm able to get back onto things quickly. The fact that it's monday, and I have my C++ class tonight are the only downsides.

Went dancing at Paladino's last night and ended up drinking too much beer with my friend Christian. He's recently moved back to LA, so I've been able to hang out with him lots more. This may ultimately turn out to be complicated, as he is the ex-boyfriend of my current girlfriend's twin sister. (Think about that again, I promise it makes sense.) However, he did promise to help me out learning Balboa and a couple of ballroom dances if I would help him out with some "geometry for architects" type stuff. This is very cool, as he's a truly badass dancer.

Also in the news, I have received my new watch after several months of searching around. My first eBay experience seems to have been a good one.

Okay, after like six months of not touching this diary, I've decided to keep better records. So let's see... what's happening.

• We moved into a new office in Venice, CA.
• I wrote the XML chapter for this PHP book.
• I have a new girlfriend named Claire.
• I'm about to learn how to do Flash 5 scripting.
• I went to Hong Kong for a few days to swing dance.

That's probably about it. Working on that book for WROX was really fun. I may end up working on the next book in that series which would be really cool.

Just joined advogato and it seems really cool. The peer certification thing is as it should be.

Started learning vim yesterday in an attempt to wean myself away from xemacs. I'm still not sure if I like the whole two modes of operation thing. Of course, I can remember saying similar things about always having to type "Ctrl-foo" in emacs, so I'll probably get over it.

Anyway, thanks to Tom Gilbert (gilbertt) for giving me his .vimrc and related files, as well as some pointers on where to find vim documentation.