enrgeeman.com

Well, ok, it has since I switched out the motherboard, but now it’s got a new keyboard, and can function properly.  My hinge came today as well, but I’ll probably wait until later in the week to install that.  Now I’m just waiting on the extended battery.

I’m still somewhat confused as to what to do while on leave, so I’m trying to do as much as I can with my computers, and play a whole bunch of video games.  Church has become boring for me.  Too bad, because I’m no longer needed with the audio/visual/presentation aspect of the service.  So, I’m spending this week expanding the capabilities of the presentation computer, hopefully remembering to log what I do as I’m doing it.  Including putting in the new hard drive, because the thing must still be able to function.  I’ve also got to program an interface for making the slideshows controllable and such.  Linking them and whatnot, while finding a way to do multiple video inputs simultaneously.  Thing is, it looks like I’ll be doing the programming in Java, something I haven’t touched since college, or earlier.  Hopefully I can make good things happen, especially considering how close Easter(IMNSHO, the most important holiday) is.  My only hope is that I don’t get bored while there.

I like contacts because of the more full vision, plus the fact that dirt doesn’t collect like on glasses.  I don’t like putting them in when I’m not fully awake, however.

Enough rambling, it’s time to get back to work.

Home is nice.  Got to see my people, take care of some stuff.  Too bad about my car, though.  It’s broken, too broken to keep now, so I’m half looking for one.  Getting back to the timezone is a little harder than I thought it would be.  It sure is nice working on my computers, but I may have too much to do for this short amount of time I’ve got here.  Also, it sucks when you rip a contact.  That’s it, for now.

Almost out of Korea now.  I’ll be back home soon enough.  It’s been a year, and I wonder how much has actually changed, but people don’t want to tell me about.  Ok, so I’m not worried about that.  I’m more worried about the 50minute flight being boring, and not sleeping enough on it.  After all, I’ve got to function properly right from the start.  I’ve got all sorts of toys and goodies, and clothes lined up to be there when I get there.  I’m going to miss my projection screen, though.  This wall sucks as a screen.

More and more tetris, as I’ve caught up on the main comics I read.  Overcompensating was a long one, with a rather large backlog.  At least now it can go in akregator, until I find a better feeder.

So far, Twilight Princess is awesome, but I won’t be able to play it without that screen.  The wall sucks that much.

Home by the end of the week.  Nice.

It’s march now.  I’ve been packing most of my nonessential stuff away now.  I’m also finding that I don’t use a lot of it, which is kind of weird, but not surprising.  I’m still in this bit where I’m reading webcomic archives.  I think it’s scary how I can read the news posts that accompany them, and remember most of those “big” things they’re writing about.  This weekend has been mainly the Overcompensating comic.

As much as I like new stuff, I’m trying to decide how much of it I will actually use, and how much is just little gimicky things I think are amusing.  I wonder because I noticed all of this stuff that I had intentions to do stuff with, but I still haven’t gotten around to doing.  It’s somewhat disappointing.  Looks like I’ll wait until I get home to play Twilight Princess, at this rate.  I haven’t even touched the Wii except to see if it’ll fit in my bag.  That’s right, it’s been a while since I’ve played any video games.  I’ve been distracted by life(work, mostly), and a bunch of reading things.  Also, I’m debating on whether I should get a haircut before I go home or not.  On one hand, it shouldn’t matter.  On the other hand, I don’t care.

I wonder just how little I will actually need.  Toywise, I mean.  Clothes are something I know I’ll use, but if I were to have too many shirts in one place, I may take too long on deciding which one I want to wear.  The two things I want to get but probably won’t, are a car and an assault rifle.  The car will pretty much be a small manual transmission, and the assault rifle will probably be either a civilian M16 or M4.

Anyway, life advice(from the internets?).  Don’t care.  It doesn’t matter.  It works for me, YMMV.

Time for icecream.

Ok, so a lot has happened.  Field, equipment layouts, driving, more layouts, blah blah blah.  I’ve been spending a *lot* of time reading Questionable Content, a great webcomic.  I’ve gone through almost the entire backlog in less than a week; I’ll be finishing the last couple hundred today.  Yes, I’ve been on my bed reading them on the projector, because it’s pretty sweet.  My roommate’s been out, so that leaves me the room, so I can just chill, and got my music going.

I bought an (ugh) ipod shuffle, 2GB.  I thought it would be like my old 1GB one, the little silver second generation.  My problem with the old one was that the dock broke in transit.  They should’ve just made a cable, this dock looks retarded, and is easy to break.  Anyway, My old one never had a problem crashing and playing music.  This one has crashed 3 times in the span of 5 days.  Green amber, green amber, screw you.  Luckily so far, I’ve been able to “fix” it by taking off all the music and putting it back on..  But it worries me that I can no longer trust it as an “appliance device.”  I can’t just depend on it working all the time, because it’s proven that it’s a turd, and so now I have to think about what to do when I want to listen to music and it doesn’t want to play it.

So my long lost n810 has been found, by a guy who was checking to see if I had his gear.  I still don’t know why I would’ve put it where it was, I never use that bag.  Proof that it was my bag, awesome.  I’ve still got an open pandora box on order, but I’m impressed that this thing still works after over a year.  It’s been dropped so many times, it’s a tough little guy.  Anyway, I’m glad to have it back, and will be reading books on it once again.  I have a backlog of books I need to read, anyhow.

The only thing that stopped me last night was the power going out.  Again.  I feel bad for the projector, but at least I went to sleep.  Dunno when, my clock was off.  I just know it was before 0400, because I woke up to see ~0345 on the clock.

Long post, because it’s been a while.  My explanation of the facebook situation I have.  While out in the field, through my RSS I read about the change of Terms of Service for Facebook.  I was all, “What the eff?  They can shove that in a dark place if they think they can own *my* stuff.”  Sure, because a lot of people complained, and asked questions they decided to revert back to the older one, which I agreed with when I signed up.  That basically meant they could use my stuff while I used theirs, but not after I leave.  The change  was akin to my bringing a ball to the playground, them playing with it, and when I want to go home, telling me I don’t have the rights to my ball.  Ok, so they changed that back.  I’m still angry that they changed it without so much as a notice to me.  Twice.  I let them know that(not like they’ll actually read it), so if you see a cool Dune reference of me that I didn’t put up, them’s be going down.  Or at least getting nasty emails and phone calls, because that would be fun, too.  It’s no big deal, I didn’t really use my facebook.  The most useful part was something I’m not sure how I did, because I couldn’t find a link for it.  I had a “friend’s status message” RSS feed.

Last thing, my TX1000.  It lives!  The new motherboard came in the mail, I put it in, and it lives!  Symbi will rise again.  Well, I still need to buy another keyboard, the one on it currently is shot.  I’m debating whether it will be too late for me to get it shipped to korea and have it before I leave, or if I should just send it home home.  I’m leaning towards home home, like my pandora box.  Also, full disk encryption is sweet.

Well, I’ve got “work” to do, so I’ll get on that.

This is following in the steps of several people, I’m going to put this here so I can remember it later when I need it.

Projector + Laptop, is done with randr with a virtual desktop, to save having to do an X restart. arandr is the little gui bing used to do such.  Eventually I may set a keybinding for it, but one step at a time.  Well, that’s not a problem, but my laptop has a higher res, and aside from that, I want my panel on it, not my viewscreen.  Turns out, that a setting in kde, so open kcontrol, under desktop, panels. From there it’s just the xinerama screen of 2, because of the layout.  It will fix itself when the projector is removed, but will still need to be corrected afterward.  A script would be nice on this, so I’ll look into it.

nat out.

So, my screen finally arrived, but I’m still waiting on my other parts.  All of them.  Parts to fix my T1k, parts to fix a pair of headphones, parts to build a hardware controller for mpd..  It’ll make sleep a little easier.  Yay music so I don’t have to listen to my roommate, or other sounds.  Trying to get customized sounds for more than just a couple things now.  Project Euler, that’s going well.  Got 3 more done today, and wrote a more efficent prime calculator.  Well, it still took almost an hour to get through 2 million, but I’m relatively sure that’s only because the time will increase exponentially.  Which makes sense.  I’m sure I could’ve optimized it a little more, like making sure even numbers aren’t even a thought.  As it is now, it’s only an extra couple steps, but that can add up quite quickly.  It’s still a prime generator that starts at 2, so arbitrarily deciding if a number is prime or not will either take a while to build up to the number, which would be fine, and quicker if there is a list of numbers that need to be checked.  However, I think I should improve it some more, or at the very least, thread it onto multiple processors and speed it up that way.  Oh, and tax refund is going to net me another computer.  I think I may be able to keep that as an annual thing, but I know that won’t happen.  The best I can hope for is that I don’t do 3 a year again.  Would’ve saved a bunch of money if I’d preempted my laziness, and my hardware loving self.  But that’s for another rant.

Yes, I’m still alive.  Problem is, korea still sucks.  I’ve been occupying my time with not WoW(I’ve quit.  Again.  I’m sure it won’t be the last time, I’ll probably end up with another month of it just so I can hit 80 and be done with it.), but with project euler.  I’ve been coding to get answers to math questions.  I’ve been playing tetris, and I’ve been thinking.  I’ve got parts en route to fix things, and even though I’ve still got time here, it’s approaching it’s end, and I’m trying to get ready for it the proper way.  Yea.

Thought I’d make a post about it. Yea, I know, but I must complain. Facebook, a social aggregator of information, used to track people and who they know, as well as what they look like, and what they do, is a crap site.
Check this out. Not only does the status/mood/tagline message not work, I also get this:
You’re using an old web browser to browse Facebook. To use the full version of Chat from within a regular Facebook window, please upgrade your browser.
OLD? WTF.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux 2.6.26.5-anamality; X11; x86_64; en_US) KHTML/3.5.9 (like Gecko) (Debian package 4:3.5.9.dfsg.1-6)
That’s my browser ID. Yes, it’s a custom kernel, and no, it’s not the latest. But it’s close, just a couple revisions old.
“Please switch to Firefox”
NO. I’ll use Iceweasel, which you have no problem with, but I won’t deal with the branding. How about instead of complaining that I’M the problem, you code to standards, and if I really don’t have this one feature that you absolutely need, degrade gracefully? Hmmm. Maybe I’m asking too much. Maybe korea’s really getting to me. (It is.)
jeez.
And yea, konqueror’s my primary browser. up next is links2, and then iceweasel.

I made a mistake. I specced out another machine, and I want it. This could cause complications, as I’d be then going from one to three computers in less than a month. I didn’t go to HP today, I was too tired. And now I may have gotten too much sleep, because I have a headache. Maybe I’ll find a balance someday. So many things I want to get done, but I just don’t feel like doing them. Perhaps without WoW I can get this stuff done? I’d be playing WoW right now if it weren’t for the fact that I can’t seem to get it to like my intel video card. That’s why I need the tx1000 working again, nvidia ftw. The 2500z has an ati radeon in it that is real powerful. That’d be sweet to have. And it works well in linux. I knew rushing out to buy another machine was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. I know that if I buy it, I won’t be able to get anything else while I’m here. But hey, with 3 machines, an n810, a ds, and pandora’s box on the way, I should be set. Plus I’ve got a bunch of electronic parts here.
Mupen64plus is a pretty sweet n64 emulator. Ah, and I have that dreamcast, too. Sorta makes me want to buy the 2500z, and then just not touch my account. In fact, I’m now trying to convince myself that that is not what I want to do. And I’m afraid it’s not working.