@Wudan07

No meaningful happiness can come when your world is built upon lies and half-truths.  You are nothing, your work amounts to nothing, an abomination is he that chooses you.

But my workbench stands anyway, maybe a few screws short.  I was supposed to be waterproofing the frame for our aquarium stand, but somehow that didn’t seem appropriate work, since I wouldn’t be able to call it finished when I was done for the day.

I didn’t want to remember today as a day I didn’t get anything done.  I wanted to run in to that garage and make a dreamcatcher, as it were.  I understand, that in our modern mythos, the garage is man’s fortress of solitude – a place where he can go to just be a man – to forge and strengthen himself.

I’ll admit I went to the garage with bitter, unhappy thoughts.  My garage is messy right now, with a dozen or more unfinished projects, littering it.  Things to be done, this is why we exist, isn’t it?

Well, I put together a nice enough work bench, it’s almost 7 feet long and almost 3 feet from front to back.  I have a smaller formica counter-top that I got for free and I’m thinking I should make a TV cart to go with my free TV.  That way I can work on projects and watch TV, or just hang out.

I also envision getting a free to reasonably priced surround sound receiver and putting speakers throughout my garage, and then it will be a true fortress of solitude.

Sukie asked me today what saw I would get next.  The only other thing I think I’d need to do would be to cut large peices of plywood (could do it with a jigsaw, but that is a PAIN to cut a straight line over any real distance), what kind of saw do I need for that?

When I was in high school I had to put together a collection of 10 poems.  Since I thought I rather enjoyed poetry at the time and had an appreciation for the depth that comes with its native obscurity, I put together a collection of poems that were each unique and good to read.

In the process I came across a book of poems by Bob Dylan, and read through several, eventually coming to this line near the end of one of his poems:

“your problem is you want a better word for world”

This single line has resonated through my life like a bell that woke me from several things.  Sometimes in the drudgery of life I recall this line, because of its depth and relevance.  I should note that I don’t particularly like Bob Dylan, but there must be something about his approach that seeks the depths of human conscience.  It certainly struck a chord with me.

What does this line mean to you?

that it has been sixtyfour days since my last blog. that i don’t rlly mind much. i got promoted, i’ve been busy and i’ve just been too apathetic to blog.

a lot has happened in this 64, hasn’t it? we got wiis, we got more stuff, we got more paychecks, and we’re ok, aren’t we?

i don’t know if it’ll be another sixtyfour til i write again, but this sixtyfour without blogging has been pleasant so maybe it will be so.

i see everyone i care about often enough, so i guess it matters not.

Old St Nick.

Well, last night Sukie was falling asleep on the couch and in her delirium she said I should go play CounterStrike, which I had picked up last weekend and have logged roughly 45 minutes playing. Well last night, I put in another 45 minutes.

I have told theorb77 that the reason I think the game is so addicting is because you get angry, so very angry, because you get pwned so horribly, and the addiction comes from wanting to break even – it’s like losing at gambling. You just want to give some of that pwnage. Well, last night, I was getting owned pretty harshly, and I just wanted to give some of that pwnage back to the community, as it were.

I can tell you don’t care, but I feel the need to convey my satisfaction at having handed out a fair bit of pwnage (not really a fair bit, I suck at CounterStrike.) So I knew from previous rounds that the terrorist tactic was to hole up in a bathroom in this resort. The only entrance to the bathroom was a door, but there was a skylight and I did know where the ladder was, so I worked my way through the resort cabin and crept along the roof (very open to any snipers), and peaked in yonder window and saw that the focus of my prey was upon the only door. If somebody opened the door they’d know, and they’d shoot at them, so I took aim and dished out some pain to 2 of my enemies, who, in the confusion, worked out where the shots were coming from and returned fire, sending me to a young and tragic death. But I at least had the satisfaction of taking out the top two players on the server, so, after an excruciatingly painful losing spree, I was feeling pretty good about it.

Well that is a pretty crappy post, but hey, it’s what you get. I’ve been feeling icky for the last several days so, deal.

Let’s cover a few things:

December has been quite a month. My mom broke her ankle (same one she broke some 12-13 years ago), I’ve actually played Wii Bowling (which is a life-changing experience, if you haven’t played one, do so as soon as possible), I’ve been making some progress with my programming, and I’m planning on going to school next semester.

What’s got my brain buzzing is what happened last night. I played Texas Hold ‘Em for a small chunk of cash.

I didn’t do too shabby, and all in all, I think I really pissed some people off. For one, I don’t play any game without talking a lot and making crappy side comments. That wouldn’t have been so bad but I was having an unusually lucky bit of winning when I probably shouldn’t have.

You know those kids in high school who pretty much thought they knew everything there was to life and seemed so confident that they had the answers? Yeah, some of the people playing last night were like that. It was very enlightening to me to think that I’ve gotten past the stage where I was impressed by that. I hope I’m past the stage where I’m like that, but some things are bound to stick with you.

I hope Sukie wins a presidency council spot in her WMAS election 🙂

Yes, I know the Jurassic Period wasn’t an Ice Age.

I don’t blog a lot. The thrill was never really there, I just had stuff on the inside I felt like externalizing, and it’s just not cathartic anymore. Maybe it is, I don’t know.

Yesterday I felt a little vindicated because my son turns out to have quite a brain on him and can read at a very advanced level. I do think this is because early on in his developement I spent time with him encouraging his understanding and recognition of letters, which kind of snowballed out of control. Anyone who knew Jabba at this time will tell you, he just started absorbing words and dropping them in to his brain like coins in a bank.

He is just amazing.

Well I’ve raked leaves, exorcised a bad oven/range, wrastled with a mangy computer, and staved off losing much data and hard work to my own horrible, horrible traps that I had laid for myself.

I had intended on doing much programming and blissful implementations of good ideas I have for my special brew of Q3 engine-ness.  I have only passed around some choice snippets  to some good people who know what they’re looking at, took some damn good pointers from more than a handful of people, but I’m still wary of releasing the entire thing to the public.

That said, with this weeks quagmire, I am thinking it is about time to start utilizing sourceforge.net.  I have seen first-hand the delightful problems that comes with keeping a work-in-progress repository open to anonymous access, with Tr3b, who is the programmer for the XreaL project (hosted on the forge), but his project adds a lot of eye-candy, which definitely reels in the … er … common folk.  Hell, I don’t like to tell people about the stuff I plan on doing, not for fear that they’ll steal my ideas, but more because I don’t feel like it needs discussion, and I like the freedom to change design and direction on a whim.  It’s how my brain works, so that’s how my projects work.  Don’t like it?  Too bad.
It’s almost the giving season, so you should know that I want tools, tools, and … uh … a set of weights.  Just 2 15 pound dumbbells would do fine, but if you want to give me a bar and a bench I’m up for it.

On a final note, I have finally gotten my Terratec EWS88MT to work with Ubuntu, my LOC (linux of choice).  In case you don’t own one of the elegant ICE1712 chip based sound cards and have tried to get it to work with Linux, you have no idea of the heartache and pain and frustration that goes with it.

After much exhausting downloading of sources and building by instruction (which were good instructions), I have built ALSA from source (that’s the sound driver), and have only found one mention of the downfall of the ICE1712 chip cards somewhere out there.  The Monitor-Out jack isn’t implemented in my particular card’s drivers, and as it turns out that’s the only thing that doesn’t work.  As fate would have it, I was able to record sounds before I could play them back (hahaha, oh so wrong), but I was able to fashion a linkage via Radio-Shack converters so that I can use regular desktop speakers (instead of having a Receiver dedicated to my PC) with my sound card.  The first time I fired up Depeche Mode’s Precious it blared out of my Family Room surround sound system (I had the volume cranked, to be sure that any sound made could be heard) I was joyous and excited.  I again tried the regular speaker jack and came to realize after examining the source it doesn’t appear that the Monitor-Out was ever implemented as a function of the Driver’s interface with the CS8404A-CS chip.  (I’ll be honest, most of it was beyond my understanding, jumping in to foreign code is like trying to read Sanskrit most of the time.  If the code is readily legible it’s because some generous and benevolent person deliberately put thought and heart in it.)  Looking at the card I can see a CS8414-CS chip as well but I think that has to do with linking up several of these cards at once.  Maybe.  I’m just glad it works in some sense.

So a couple of days ago I came home to find my PC stuck in OS-load limbo, just sitting there telling me XP is loading. It never came. Attempts to boot to safe mode were met with the BSOD, and the windows recovery console scan froze at 51%. Disk diagnostics weren’t conclusive, which wasn’t sitting well with me.

I had backed up a good deal of data and tried to install Ubuntu (Dapper Drake) and when it was trying to set up the partitions it came back negatory, 😮 ! I have hard drives to spare but none as cool as my 250 gig SATA drive. (Sukie and I have nearly identical specs).

So I says to myself, it’s time to try to just format the thing, if formatting fails, you have one messed up drive. It didn’t fail, and after that it has installed Ubuntu just fine. There certainly was a cause to my problems, but I don’t care so much now that I’ve scrubbed it from existence, and I’ve had no problems since.

I blame a few things:

1. I had never done any drive maintenance.

2. I kept my computer on ALL the time. I will probably still do this in the future.

My sound still doesn’t work though 🙂

(Update!) I got Ubuntu working with Beryl/Emerald (latest incarnation of Compiz) it’s some damn sugary sweet UI goodness. I thought I posted this yesterday but it just saved it. So here’s posting!

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has to be one of the most well written and entertaining shows I have ever seen. It’s an entertaining peice of television that has a full-bodied taste that won’t slow you down. It confronts the problems and divisions in American culture, and most importantly, it makes you think. That’s what good TV does.
We live in an age where people are afraid to confront the problems we have created. Wars, debt, obesity, outsourcing, and the overall dissatisfaction and hopelessness we have inherited as a consequence to allowing our core values to be squandered away.

We have allowed our perceptions to become easily smudged and rewritten, to the point that we don’t trust anything but a biased and slanted view. We have come to expect and demand anything but the truth.

The show itself continues to lose viewers. It is the kind of show we should want to see, and it loses more viewers every week.