Lazypud
Ok! so yeah, I have been busy and unmotivated for the past three weeks. Work has been going well. The semester has finally slipped into finals making the days much easier at work. Professors + students + busy = staff gets left alone.
Speaking of finals, I have one this entire afternoon. Taking classes and working full time is no good. I respect the people who are able too constantly take courses while working or with more classes - it's difficult not having any time for social obligations.
RANT: Taking honors physics has scared me away from pursuing an intense higher education again (PhD!). Being out of college for a few years then going back - it's way more difficult for me to be modivated. I already know exactly how much I don't use the majority of the classes. I'm even more aware at how friviolous group projects and examinations are and that their intended concequence is to force someone to study. Taking tests and silly projects may help me learn the material a little better - but it really makes it difficult to enjoy the material. There's no time to focus on very interesting points in the material due to review days and constant examinations. I loved the occasional class period where my 'aged and wise' professor stepped forward on an aside to discuss things within his field of research - mass extinction events caused by nearby high energy gamma ray bursts or his personal thoughts behind some of the universe ending hypotheses. The tight schedule of examinations prevented many of these asides - he'd literally say "oh no I cannot go into that, we must finish this."
These tests and assingments are, so far, the best way to assure that students going into a critical field know their shit. I want my pharmacist to pass a rigiorious instruction in chemistry and biology. I don't think someone dabbling in physics for personal interest and use needs to be treated to the same 'fail out' course intensity. Higher education should spend some resources focusing on a more casual scientist - someone who's interested to use the material in their garages and back yards, but isn't smart or modivated enough to pursue a true scientific career. I think it would lead to some neat innovation or discovery. I guess this whole attitude is the same reason I dropped out of Mechanical Engineering so long ago.
MEATSPACE: Not much has changed. The city of lawrence has decided to rip up the street infront of my apartment 6 days a week - making me very thankful that I can sleep through a bear attack. The improvements that the city is throwing into the street right there makes me believe that the old "historic" building I reside in's days are numbered. The building's new neighbor - a huge hotel, presumabally for rich sport fans, is about 50% complete. I'm expecting a developer to come in and level that corner of campus when it's a bit closer to completion. I would have said First Management's (the worst fucking management company ever) refusal to fix anything inside the apartment was an indicator - but they don't fix shit anywhere. ever.
Otherwise all is good. My teeth extraction was kosher - I had a great 5 days laying around playing GTA4 and Dwarf Fortress while dead to the world from codine. Oh! So earlier the week I got my teeth out, some kid got put into a coma because he went without oxygen for 5 minutes. Aparently whoever setup the NO2 tubes in the surgeons new office didn't properly setup the oxygen feed - the kid only received nitrus for about 5 minutes and still hasn't woken up. I only heard about this from coworkers and couldn't find anything on the web, but still! Kinda cool to dodge that bullet.
VACATION: I'm looking at scheduling a Vegas trip with some buddies in the stead of the usual trip to Burning Man. 4 days in luxury, huge buffettes, free drinks and showers sounds more enjoyable (this year) than 10 days of dust, drugs and MREs. I'm also trying to rope someone into going to PAX with me afterwards.
I am planning on taking some time this fall to take a handful of weekend courses:
SIG SAUER - Armorer and 101 courses
On-Point Tactical - Basic Scout
Urban Excape and Evasion
Oh, and I can't forget the yearly snowboarding trip to Durango. Purgatory and Telluride are high on the list!
School Days! School days. fuck the fuck fuck golden rule, fuck.
Meatspace:
So I'm a student again. Just part time, a 4 hour class during my work hours at the university, but I'm a frickin student again. I'm taking an honors section of Physics - and I'm pretty much the dumbest person out of the small group. However, I also care the least so won't be suffering from 'oh noes other people watching me do stuff ayee *fumble.*' After the first day (I was nervous, shutup, I've been out of classes for a while) my uncertainty eased greatly - now I'm thinking that I'll really like the class. As long as I don't think about having homework after a long day of work.
Oh speaking of homework. This class requires you to have an online account with some 3rd party company "WielyPlus" that is the most convoluted, amature, poorly crafted peice of shit I've ever witnessed. 75$ for this thing. The ecommerce portion of the site to check out with? Only works on IE with a WINDOWS native PC (not a virtual machine... had to use my laptop on the 4th try of getting that thing.) To top it off, it's a 75$ access code which "includes a digital copy of the book!." So essentially I had purchased a 99$ paperweight from the bookstore.
Returned that shit then just purchased the access code & online edition. Still alittle sour about it.
Work Work:
I'm busier than shit. Work is pretty much nonstop for me right now as I adjust to the change of schedule & additional time lost for class 4 out of 5 days. Hence why this blag has been lacking - I just haven't actually had a moment at work to sit down and blather something out - must less catch my breath.
Videogames:
Tony, Drama and I have just started a ritual of Tuesday night game night. Playing games at a regular schedule is something I always look forward too (DOTA from the past, at like 6 every damn night) and I sincerely hope that this one sticks around. XBOX live makes it significantly easier, as I can sit in my love sac 2 feet from my tv under an afghan. Hard to beat. We powered through some Halo 3 - then I played my newly aquired Rock Band drums until about 1am. (to the shegrin of my downstairs neighbor)
Vacation:
At multiple times I had made plans to publish photos and such of my snowboarding trip around colorado. Someday!
Projekts:
I added some 30" 4x4s and some support struts under my desk and gave it a smooth double coat of "Ace of Spades" black. (I still really enjoy painting. gonna have to do that as a side job through grad school like I did in college.)
It's considerabally more comfortable leg-room style and quite sturdy. Has plenty of room for me to jam my workstation(s!) under and still nets plenty of legroom. I'm gonna screw some pegboard to it and do some better cable management when I get the second workstation built, but for now it's all routed happily out of the way.
My stereo is setup and I reprogrammed my remote (in a 2 hour process) to fully automate all of the source switching. It's pretty pimp. Oh, part of that 2 hours was getting fuppes to work with mp3s accross the network. There is some 'colla' typo in the code that prevents me from indexing my entire mp3 collection (it's 60GB, I don't think it's necessary to have stereo access to that anyway) but for particular folders it works. It's ok, I only really listen to classical and NIN - Ghosts style shit on those speakers. Everything else is too abrasive for the antiques.
Sold the 101 disc changer for a hella deal to a local guy! Still gotta list the receiver and laptop corpse, I may do that this weekend.
Puter:
I'm going to order my new puter parts this weekend if my budget evens out where I think it will. I should have it all by next friday and have plenty of time and modivation to tear apart the watercooling system & assemble the peices where they belong. I'm eyeballing adding a gigabit & 802.11n router to the purchase ... because I think it's cool to transfer movies at a frickin gigabit.
Lazy chris-mas
Izzard & Conan - paraphrased below.
Conan: "Are the British, you know Europeans, this crazy with christmas too?"
Izzard: "oh. oh yes, they're crazy but not so much as here. We're celebrating the birthday of Chris afterall!"
That about sums up my view of the "Christian" pagan holiday which is giving me this awesome 5 day weekend.
COMPUTERS: That's right, I installed vista on a macbook air. This was mostly out of spite - OSX cannot handle use by an impatient, mostly ADD, raised on comptuers DBA. Whenever I work on a computer, I spend a maximum of 1 second waiting for something to load. If this time is exceeded I fire open a new tab and search for something else, open a simple game and play through it, find something to read out on the blag-oh-mah-sphere. OSX doesn't seem to be built to handle this type of impatientness.
Aside: I don't know if I'm more impatient than anyone else, but I feel I'm a fairly accurate representation of the "counterstrike kiddie" generation. I've singlehandedly brought development applications to their knees by simply using them like I use everything else. There is no 'gentle' or 'waiting for loading screens' bullshit. When I see the link I want to navigate too next, I fucking press it as fast as possible not caring that all of the onpage ajax hasn't finished loading yet. And dammit, when I do that, it'd better work. Program your shit fast enough to keep up with me, isn't a comptuer's decision stream measured in billions of yes/no's per second? How hard is it to make your software fast and NOT SUCK?
Anyway, the process to install Vista, native - not through the bootcamp or VM shit, is remarkabally simple once you figure out the magic mac keybuttons/hold commands on boot.
- throw in XP CD, hold down 'c' on boot to boot from the CDrom (this works either with the superdrive, or to my shegrin, off a virtually mounted iso shared from a linux box)
- boot into windows XP's terrible 8bit install process.
- wipe out the existing partition information. Vista will NOT touch your OSX partitions - you can't even wipe them out with disk utils. It's sorta crap. format NTFS
- reboot, holding the mouse button, pull out XP cd, replace with vista, again holding c to boot from it.
- install pirated vista, throw in the first macbook air disk, install the bootcamp utilities. (this has drivers, multitouch, iSight, makes the function keys work, and even installs some of the better mac-sounds.)
- Update the intel broadcom & chipset drivers to the newest version. (fixes the close-the-lid sleep issues with the supplied drivers.)
- casually post to twitter about how much faster it is than OSX
- enjoy the hate mail
Keep in mind, I fucking HATE microsoft. Macintosh has never "wowed" me either. I enjoy linux, but it provides alot of challenges that I don't want in a "check the weather, blags, and shop online from under my covers" comptuer. In this instance, on this hardware, it is my opinion that vista is simply the better operating system for my type of use. It's crap for development. It's awful for photoshop. It's unstable in the hands of an idiot. I know. The fact remains that I'm using Microsoft on a Macintosh and it is simply better. (Also I can play Dawn of War on it. Letsa see OSX pull that one.)
MEATSPACE: Uh, nothing really has changed. I have a few glorious days off where I plan on maintaining a state of inactivity not seen since my stoner years. Then I'm back to work for 3 days and finally off to Colorado to try for the trifecta of deaths. Hopefully I can manage to die 1. in a plane crash 2. in a terrifying snowboarding accident or 3. from liver failure. Mmm!
I don't know why university support staff don't get the same amount of time off as faculty. We're here to support the faculty! when they're not here, we sorta run outta stuff to do. Oh well, all the blags out there got a good readin or two.
Aaahh, progress!
Work: I've been productive as shit today! Like, rolled-up-dung-beetle shit! Moving right along my daily tasks, figuring out things that baffled me last week and getting them done, with 22 minutes to spare in the workday. This means, time to dick around and post on the blag!
Meatspace: I shipped my snowboard off with Liz (coworker) last thursday. She's hopefully delivering it to Bicho over yonder in colorado instead of pawning it off and spending the proceets on blow. Who knows. Anyway, I have a full week of work this week - followed by 2 more days of work, 3 days off for some guys birthday, another 3 days of work, then I'm off until January 11th. Mmm. I'm looking at lift tickets and shit online, looking like an average of $55 or so per, so I'm planning on 7 days total of boarding. Should be good for the body to be pummeled that much!
The rest of the time will be spent drinking, hanging out with sister Katherine - Bicho - Shana - daddy and drew, getting various blood tests (daddy's a blood tech!) to see what STDs and various other viral hitchikers I have, and playing silly games on my laptop.
Totally looking forward to the christ-day long weekend. I'm skipping family visits due to religious... obligations and pretty much hanging out with jess at her place. The rest of the time I intend to work on my survelliance project AND play a retarded amount of video games. My only bummer is we don't have a fireplace to sit next to during all of these festivities. Oh well!
Computers: it's fucking impossible to get the webcams I have working with gentoo, so I'm going to try ubuntu and see what's up. I have high hopes since alot of people report getting them working in ubuntu skype with some "pwc" pack of drivers. I dunno if I'm just modprobing wrong or being retarded regarding my gentoo install, but twice I wasn't able to get it working. Maybe I'll try one more time before actually giving up the ghost and throwing them on an auxillary system.
Oh yeah! I got a capital one card. One of those that you get to decorate your own. I'll spend a few minutes sometime soon and get a few images, then see if I can't whip together a vote to see which is favored.
Weather: FUCK IT IS COLD, FUCK. Why doesn't First Management invest in INSULATION for their 100 year old apartments? Stupid company. Remind me to execute them if I ever rise to a seat of power.
Giving Lans.
Computers: LAN party was fantastic. Slord (Bob), Drama (John), Wussy (Gary) and I spent gloriousus amounts of time shaming whatever others came to test our gaming prowess. Mechwarrior 4 is fantastic, Clan LBXAC20s to the FACE proved as effective against Drama's head as I remembered. Age of Mythology is also fantastic and the appetite for walls hasn't been satiated.
I've also begun to get my surveillance webcams up and into production. So far, my motion tracking doens't work and the Microsoft Vx3000 I'm using doesn't have that great resolution inside of linux. I'm gonna be looking around for a few wireless & cheap webcams to spread around the apartment. I also want to hack one to use an IR filter using an instructable I saw on lifehacker a while back. I feel my next step will be to build one of the old pentium3s I have lying around into a constant server to provide power and IDE hdd space for them - mainly to give me a use for the 750+GB of storage I have lying around of IDE and to spread out the processor & usb port abuse of having 4-6 webcams running on one workstation.
Interblags: Bartzilla posted this on his twitter. It is awesome enough to spam here:
Meatspace: Thanksgiving was pretty fantastic. Had so much food that I've pretty much reduced myself down to one minor meal a day since Thursday. Visiting with Xich and family at my mum's was quite nice, as was the lego extravaganza that followed dinner. (thanks for the idea allan! that shit was fun!)
I got my computer setup onto my desk properly this time - I had an abundance of room underneath the desk. However, I have secured an invitation to Drama's shop. I'll be taking advantage of that soon and whipping up some welded coldrolled angle steel supports for my new desk. Maybe a drawer kit as well. Definitely going to do the lifehacker 'pegboard under the desk' cable management route, and even planning on perma-mounting most of the misc device chargers I have.
Victory
If you subscribe to my tit-te... twitter, you'll already have seen my victory cries. However, yesterday I got Fuppes working (sans transcoding of .mkv) between my xbox 360 and gentoo workstation. This may not mean much to you - but let me sum it up. Basically I can now stream anything from my computer to my television and view it in high definition merely over a network. This also means that I can download entire seasons of tv-shows and watch them when I want. Same for movies. Don't get me started on how awesome the built in mp3 player is. (ok fine I'll start - playing songs can be handled from the pause menu, AND it automatically replaces the background music in any game. Furthermore - mp3's are automatically 'turned down' during cutscenes.) Basically, I was within inches of paying $50 a month to have cable tv again - now the only thing I'm missing is a sunday full of football. Just that's what the bars are for.
So that's victory. I'm gonna play with TWOLAME tonight to see if I can't get some .mkv transcoding working. Then I get to go back to grabbing/ripping 8GB+ files.
Remaining issues are:
1. Cameras - gotta get mobile working so I can snoop on my house guests & kitty from work!
2. Steam applications - I really want to get steam working over WINE, I've seen some people playing TF2 on ubuntu, so I figure the possibility is definitely there. I'm not very worried about the power needed to play tf2 with opengl as my machine's a bit of a beast and watercooled, so I can do some wicked overclocking if needed. However, frickin Left 4 Dead is coming out within the near months and I would really like not having to dual-boot into windows to play it. I'm sure it'll eat my soul for 4+ weeks as well, especially if Bicho is bored.
3. that's mfing it! Even password safe works within wine - compatible with windows pwdsafe databases.
Meatspace: Football is getting to be really fn fun. I can clearly tell that I'm getting in redic shape - all things considered. I've put on about 7 pounds (of muscle!) since we've started playing and the soreness is more bearable now than ever before. My present limp is from some cleat wearing wussy raking the fuck out of my heel instead of a pulled groin/sore muscle!
Jess is still crashing at my place - and it's great! It's good for the soul to have another human around. Also, I'll note, women are much better at shopping.
I'm getting ready to buy the bindings I need for my snowboard! Once I remember to transfer those photos off my camera, I'll spam a few of those up here. That board is the tits, I cannot wait to get onto the snow over in Colorado. Maybe I'll go out to that 'hill' in KCK and give it a try - make sure I can remember wtf I'm doing on it.
Work: its good! Sucks that it's fuckin monday.