Recent blog entries for rjp

behold my diary entry.

Saw Cake, De La Soul, Flaming Lips, and various filler bands Thursday night; really good show, although the Cake front man was just as aggro and angry as he was when I saw them last year in Berkeley. Still, good show.

Work: boring as hell. I know now that the only way it won't be boring drudgery for me is if I let myself care about it. I can't do that unless I decide that this company is definitely what I want to do for the next few years. One or two is easy to see - much beyond that, I just can't. Grrr. I need to be able to give a shit to want to be there, and right now I'm just having trouble with that.

I am discovering, in bits and pieces, that I am an emotional wreck. The events of the last couple of years have left me with much to process and understand. The dotcom boom and crash put me through the wringer; caring for my grandfather while he slowly died is something that will take me years to figure out. What do the last two years of my life mean to me? What will it mean to me in five years?

Hmmm, a pgp/gpg filter for Pine: nice. It works more reliably than the enigmail/mozilla combination, that's for sure ;) Hey I haven't used Pine in ages - I think I'll give it a try for a while, although I have a friend that swears by mutt.

Work: boring and demoralizing. My problem? I crave an early-stage environment. A code maintenance monkey I am not. So, maybe it's time for a change of focus in my work . . . I just don't enjoy development unless I'm doing something original.

Hmmph - one of the code reviewers (supervisory) said not to work too hard this weekend ;) I just can't win - I want to be mad, but how can I be now? Well shit, it's a beautiful day: marine layer burned off early, it's noon and already sunny and warming up. Ocean's blue, palm trees green, yadda yadda.

Shit, kaffe doesn't like my Qube.

So I've been waiting for more than a week for some code review from two people . . . code goes to QA Monday . . . Friday the reviews come in. Thanks for waiting a whole week to respond and thereby totally fucking my weekend! Yay! Too bad much of it was "well I suggested you do this but now I don't like it." Great, now I get to undo, refactor, and re-test all weekend long.

So I finally set up the Cobalt Qube 2 at home - the web and email servers are now running there instead of on my workstation. Crap, sendmail is a pain in the ass. The Qube 2 actually has packages for MySQL, PHP, (old) Java, etc., which is super cool. I'm slowly updating it though - I guess the original distro was based around an old Red Hat version on a 2.0 kernel . . . thank god for GNU.

Enigmail, a nice PGP plugin for mozilla, works nicely if not perfectly. The problem (as ever) is key management. Grrr.

Palladium: sheeyit, what nonsense.

Long time no entries. I think I'll set up a log/diary on my own server, I might have more motivation to keep things up to date there . . . or not. Whatever.

So we've been in Santa Barbara since early April. It feels good to be here - things are just generally nice. The beach is great ;) and the water's getting warmer.

TOOLS conference here this month. Bummer, it's all about .NET and Eiffel - two worthless (in my opinion) technologies. Worthless because . . . well, Eiffel's a polished turd, and .NET's just evil. Miguel de Icaza evidently will be giving one of the keynotes. His inexplicable fixation on .NET is just sad. So, here's a conference in my own backyard on a topic I'd ordinarily like (the object orientation and all that), and the focus of the conference sucks.

I just started using my new Kinesis ergo keyboard . . . my typing speed has returned to the realm of mere mortals . . . it will be days before I am used to this well enough to code acceptably. but it does feel nice . . . good thing I got one for work *and* one for home. I already remapped alt and ctrl - the good folks at kinesis, I think, are not X Windows users, or vi users ;) But geez, having enter and space right next to each other, both using my big fat right thumb - that's really getting me. Numbers are going to be a problem.