Yeah, I changed up the theme because I got bored of the old one… sue me. Anyway, this one’s a bit cleaner than the last. I snagged it from www.wpthemes.info and I’ve tweaked a couple of things for now. I’ll probably toy with the colors and layout a bit too. it’s not quite the way I like it, but it’ll work for now. More to come later. 
Archive for January, 2005
Yeah, so yesterday was a pretty wacky day… I should have posted on this yesterday but didn’t get around to it. Normally I go downtown and take the express bus out west instead of riding my bike the whole way. So I have this bright idea to leave early so I have time to get out west and get my check cashed before I have to be at work at 6pm. I get downtown and sit around for a little bit, during which time I’m approached by a couple of black ladies wanting me to buy some M&M’s for a buck for their “fund raiser”. I assumed it was for their church, so I politely declined since I refuse to donate ANY of my money to a church. I’m more likely to give a bum a buck for some booze than to give a nickel to a church… Anyway, so the normal bus I take shows up but has no bike rack. Well, that screws me out of taking the bus out west. Well, the next bus shows up which actually goes about 5 miles farther than I need to go, but it has a bike rack. I decide I’ll just take it and backtrack, no big deal. Turns out the driver realizes what’s going on and asks permission to drop me off at my exit since my normal bus didn’t have a bike rack and the whole ordeal isn’t even my fault. She gets the ok and lets me off at the Cedar Bluff exit where I’d normally get off.
I go get my check and then go to the check cashing place. Amusingly there’s some stupid fucking spic there trying to pay his T-mobile cellphone bill but he doesn’t have the bill. Mind you, we don’t have T-mobile here, the check cashing place just happens to take payments for them. The dude doesn’t even have his bill or know where it is! Needless to say, they can’t take the payment because he doesn’t have the bill and the poor woman spends 15 minutes trying to explain to him what’s going on but can’t quite seem to get through to him because he speaks almost NO English! Sorry, buddy.. you’re in my fucking country and if you’re going to do business with us you need to learn to speak fucking English. Finally one of his friends shows up who speaks English assists with the situation and the guy understands that he’s more or less fucked… nice!
So after cashing my check, I go to McDonald’s and get some chicken nuggets. I pay the girl and somehow she’s run out of $1 bills so I have to wait for my change… in the meantime, some nasty lookin bitch with fucked up eyes and missing half her teeth orders something that’s like $0.98. She pays in PENNIES! Not only that, she hadn’t counted them so the poor girl had to count out all 98 pennies and give the rest back to the bum-lady. Finally I get my change and my food and leave and come to work. Turns out the girl gave me FIVE hot mustard packets for ten nuggets. wtf? That’s one for every 2 nuggets! crazy shit.
So I sit at work for 8 hours and decide to go to Waffle House… I forgot it was Friday night, so all the drunks were gonna be out and it would be packed. I got in and got a seat just fine, but that’s when the fun began. I actually had a cute waitress for a change! Problem was, the cook that was there did something to piss the other cook off and he walked out, leaving just one cook. I ended up having to wait about 30-35 minutes for my food to show up on my table. My bacon was burned pretty badly but the eggs and waffle were good. By the time I was done, the waitress said not to worry about the bill since I had to wait so long. Pretty cool if you ask me. I wasn’t even pissed off about having to wait forever for my food. I tipped her $5 and ended up going over to my friend’s house and spending the night due to the bad weather. Woke up this afternoon, STILL raining! I had to ride to work in it and ended up getting soaked. 
Well, I just downloaded the MSN Desktop search beta the other day and I must say I’m very impressed. I don’t search my computer very often, but when I do I like for it to be quick… and this definitely fits the bill! It doesn’t integrate into your browser like google’s desktop search does. It integrates with the existing indexing service and gives you a nice little deskbar with which to search. You can also dock it as its own standalone toolbar or integrate it into your windows taskbar. It makes a great replacement for the address bar since you can also make aliases to launch programs with a few keystrokes. For example, I type “fx” and it launches firefox. I type “weather” and I have it set to go to the weather.com page for my zip code. Adding aliases is incredibly simple. All you do is type the @ symbol, then what you want to be able to type to make the alias (like “fx”) then a comma, then an equals sign, then the path to the program you want to launch. My firefox alias looked like this: @fx,=”c:\program files\mozilla firefox\firefox.exe”. Pretty simple if you ask me. I have aliases setup for quite a few things and I love it. I have the deskbar floating, but not always on top so it doesn’t get in the way. I hit CTRL+ALT+M and it pops to the top so I can type in it. You can also search the web with it along with your own desktop. It comes with an IE toolbar, but I don’t care about that since I never use IE. I’d recommend checking it out. I’m not a big fan of MSN-branded stuff, but it seems to work pretty well so far.
So yeah, I decided to get a new monitor for myself. I splurged and got a 19″ LG Flatron 1910BK. I have to say I absolutely love having a huge fucking flat panel monitor sitting on my desk. It gives me so much screen space it’s not even funny. Oddly, it runs @ 1280×1024 just like all the 17″ panels do. I kinda wish it did a somewhat higher resolution, but it sees to me that all 19’s are 1280×1024. Anyway, it’s great because I can literally see a ton more text and windows on screen but it’s not so small that it’s impossible to read. LG claims a 176 degree viewing angle and I’d actually believe it. I can stand at almost any angle and not have any trouble reading what’s on-screen. Brightness on this thing is outrageous and I’ve actually had to turn the brightness down a LOT from the factory default of 100. I have it set @ about 40 and it’s fine for me. Color reproduction appears to be perfectly fine. I can’t really tell any diference between it and my CRT. If anything, the colors seem a bit more vivid than on my CRT. A big complaint a lot of people seem to have with LCD’s is the fact that black isn’t really black. It’s more of a dark grey. Well, I’ll admit that the black is ever so slightly lighter than the black on my CRT, but not by much… and it’s most certainly tolerable. It has a 2-port USB hub in the side of it, which is kinda cool but I don’t really use it seeing as how I have 6 ports on my computer as it is and the monitor’s USB hub takes one of those anyway. I have it hooked up via DVI since my video card supports it and I figure if I’m going to spend $400 on an LCD, I’m going to use DVI by god! I’m still running my 17″ CRT as my 2nd monitor because, well, I can! No reason not to, even though the stupid thing takes up a ridiculous amount of space on my desk. I haven’t watched any movies or played any games, so I have no idea if ghosting is a problem. I’ll have to check on that in the next day or so. I doubt it’ll ghost too badly due to the nature of the type of panel that it is, but we’ll see how my theory holds.
Setting up the dual monitors in Linux was more trouble than it should have been. I had to change the primary display to the LCD then kill & restart X. Then I had to enable dual head and set the 2nd monitor as my CRT.. then set the resolution on the CRT. After that, the 2nd monitor was placed by default to the RIGHT of my primary so I had move my mouse off the screen to the right to get to my 2nd monitor even though it was physically to the left of my main one. At this point, there’s no EASYway of doing this, so one must edit xorg.conf by hand and change the relationship of the two (just change right to left, no biggie) then kill and restart X again and login. Poof! All working properly! I booted back into windows to set it up and it took all of 5 seconds. Windows detected everything and automatically enabled both monitors. Then I just went in and dragged them to their correct positions and I was done. No rebooting, no logging off and back on, nothing. So yeah, windows is easier in that respect. Plus in windows I can drag apps from one to the other easily. In order to do it in Linux, it spans the desktops and my wallpaper sits in the middle spanned across both. UGH!
I’m still booted into Linux though. There’s nothing I have in Windows that I can’t find an alternative for in Linux. Everything works fine in Linux so far. Plus it’s a learning experience. I like the idea of knowing the ins and outs of more than just Windows. Oh well.. that’s it for now.. I gotta get SOME sleep.
So yeah, I really like the way OSX looks… so I themed Metacity to look like the brushed OSX theme. It’s sleek as hell. The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t really theme the gnome panel. Outside of that, it’s a pretty nice reproduction of OSX. Here’s a screenshot of how it looks. I managed to find a GTK 2.0 theme that themed the buttons just right, a window theme that made the window borders look the way I want them and then an icon theme that’s a pretty nice representation of OSX icons. My GTK2 theme is called “GNOMetal2″, the window border theme is called “RPanther Classic” and my icon set is “Gnometal”. I also managed to find a mod for GAIM that changes all the pixmaps to clones of the iChat icons. The GTK theme, icon set and GAIM mod are available here. You’ll also need the Metacity theme to round out the OSX look. Unfortunately there’s no way to completely mimic the finder interface with the toolbar at the top of the screen and the dock at the bottom, so it’s far from perfect… Still not too shabby though.
Well, so I’m still booted into Linux… I’ve had to reboot a few times, but I have yet to have a need to boot into windows. There are still some goofy quirks I haven’t worked out yet, but at least now I’ve managed to get my soundcard to play more than one sound at a time. Previously, if I was listening to music, nothing else would play sounds. Thanks to the forums @ nforcersHQ I found out how to enable software mixing for my sound card. Even though the drivers available from nvidia enable hardware mixing, I couldn’t get them to work so I had to make due with this workaround. Needless to say, I’ve found Linux to be mostly usable with the exception of no Yahoo or MSN webcam and the extra buttons on my mouse don’t work. My webcam itself works fine (Logitech Quickcam 3000 Pro), but Yahoo for Linux doesn’t support webcam yet. There’s an alternative client called ayttm that seems to do yahoo webcam. I haven’t tested it out but we’ll see how it goes later when I get a chance. So far I’ve found a Linux alternative for nearly every windows app I used often. I don’t really game much but I’m keeping windows installed anyway since I’m not really sure I’m going to be able to get the nvidia drivers to compile properly to enable digital out on my sound card. At some point, I plan on getting a surround sound system that will support digital input, so I’ll need the digital out on my sound card. I think for now, I’m going to get a 19″ flat panel since I’m still using a shitty 17″ CRT @ 1024×768.
First off, it’s January 12th and it’s 68 fucking degrees outside… What the HELL?!?!? It’s supposed to be like 30 in January, not 68! Ok, wait, that sounds like I’m complaining. I’m really not, I’m just confused as shit. It’s not even supposed to get below 50 tonight. Our weather has been so wacky the past month or so, I never know what the hell it’s going to be like until I step outside that day. We’ve had tons of rain off and on, really warm days and nights followed by bitterly cold days and nights. It’s no wonder everyone’s getting sick; our bodies can’t figure out what the fuck is up. Today’s a great riding day and I’ll probably go cruise around a little bit before I have to be at work (6pm). The only shitty thing is that I woke up so late today and now I don’t really have a chance to get some really good riding in as it’s almost 5pm and I still haven’t taken a shower. I need to get my sleep schedule back on track and start getting up earlier like I used to (earlier = 1pm).
Also, as far as the blog goes, I still have losers trying to spam my comments. Thankfully they just get dumped into the moderation queue and never get seen. Oddly, I got a comment on a REALLY old post from this Dru chick I used to talk to off camwhores.com. I have no clue how she found my post at all, let alone one that was made in May ‘04, but it was kinda neat to see she commented. Basically I’d made the remark that she’s actually a pretty nice person and not completely stuck up like most really hot girls I talk to. Apparently her site isn’t up anymore but should be back up sometime soon she says. www.dru-model.com was her old URL and I’m assuming it won’t change.
I’m still running Linux (Fedora Core 3) and it’s not really all that bad minus the one problem I keep having with X. Basically I have to use the text boot option instead of graphical boot and I can’t logoff, I have to actually reboot. Outside of that, I’ve had no real issues. I can even read my NTFS drives with a kernel driver I found. Linux still doesn’t include the ability to write to NTFS drives simply because of the amount of work involved in doing so. NTFS is setup kinda like a database, and writing a driver that can properly write to an NTFS drive and upate its “database” is apparently a lot harder than it is to make one that can just read from the “database”. Pretty interesting stuff but overall I’m fairly happy with it so far. There are a few downsides like no webcam on Yahoo and no MSN client outside of GAIM, which is very limited in its MSN functionality. Also, the kernel driver for my soundcard (nforce2 soundstorm) doesn’t support hardware mixing so I can only play one sound at a time. The nvidia driver might, but it’s not a big deal and I don’t really feel like breaking something. I’ll continue to report back stuff as I find it. Linux is interesting, to say the least.
So now that I’ve had my love sac for awhile, I can say I absolutely love it. I like the fact that I plop down on it and it conforms to my body however I decide to lay… I can move it around my room to make space wherever I need it and if I want I can buy more covers for it and change the way it looks on a whim. Yes, they’re expensive (normally over $400) but try buying a nice bed for that price, especially a memory foam mattress. Now that they’ve tried it out, some of my friends even agree that it kicks ass and they’ve thought about getting one. They say it will comfortably fit 3 adults and I can say that’s absolutely true. My two roommates and I managed to lay 3 abreast on it comfortably and watch a movie. They were even talking about replacing one of the couches with a love sac because it’s so comfortable. The only bitch is that it comes vacuum packed in a block of foam that you have to break up by hand. It took 4 of us 30 minutes to just get it broken up.. then you have to jump on it, roll it, flip it over, etc to break up the foam further and get air into it. It took a good 2 days to grow to full size. Needless to say, that fucker is more comfortable than any couch or bed I’ve ever laid on. I should get another one for my room just for shits & giggles… but I can’t say I have a use for a second one. 
Now I just need a nice computer chair and I’ll be all set.
Well, I’ve had FC3 installed for a good little while now, but I finally decided to boot into it and dick around with it. I’ll admit, Linux has come a LONNGGG way in a short time, but there’s still quite a bit of improving to do if it ever expects to make its way onto the desktop of the average user. One thing that shocked me is that even on my nforce2-based AthlonXP system with a Radeon 9700 Pro, it still detected every piece of hardware without incident. Heck, it even recognized that I have a wireless MS keyboard and mouse. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s still a nice start. For whatever reason, I can’t logout. I have to actually reboot. I think it has something to do with the display driver because my monitor clicks off when I logout or when I use the GUI boot screen. Minor problems, but still annoying by any stretch. The one thing that annoyed me to no end was that Fedora, for whatever reason, has decided to disable mp3 functionality in XMMS (a media player like winamp). Whenever you try to play an mp3 in xmms, it comes up with an error msg saying something about licensing agreements requiring them to disable mp3 functionality. I ended up having to download realplayer 10 just to listen to my favorite streaming radio station, xtcradio.com. Also when I went to install realplayer, it complained that I didn’t have a required dependency, libmp3lame. While this is acceptable for the power user, the average user won’t have the fortitude to go to rpmfind.net or even google and search out the required package. All in all, while I think Linux is “neat”, it’s not really ready for prime-time.
Some applications still require configuring from the command line or compiling from source. The average user isn’t going to take the time to learn to do these things. For example, enabling java in firefox was not what I’d consider easy. Installing the actual Java runtime environment was simple… getting firefox to actually SEE the java plugin took some work. I had to open a terminal window, “locate firefox” to figure out where it was installed.. then cd into that folder… once inside that folder I had to create a symbolic link (ln -s) to the full path to the java plugin, which was in the folder where java was installed. To Sun’s credit, the instructions are on their website, but all that works shouldn’t be necessary. A shell script could easily be written to tun at the end of the install and create the required symbolic link. Installing Flash was much easier in that the installer only asked for the path to firefox and copied the required files for you. Compare this to Windows where both installations just ask which browser you wish to use with the plugin and it does the work for you. I think Linux just leaves too much work up to the end-user. While I think the ability to compile software from its source code is a great idea, I don’t think it should be the ONLY option available to install a given piece of software.
Overall, Fedora comes loaded with most everything you’ll need to have a fully functioning system. It installs GAIM, which is an open-source messaging client that allows you to connect to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, IRC, and a couple others. It does also come with the Linux version of Yahoo installed, but it doesn’t support webcam.. It comes with Firefox and Epiphany for web browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail, x-chat for IRC, OpenOffice for office apps, and gimp for graphics. Obviously there’s tons of other stuff installed, but those are the basics that most people will use most often. For those windows users stuck on Photoshop and MS Office, they’ll find that GIMP & OpenOffice take a bit of getting used to, but they’re nearly equally as powerful (though GIMP lags behind Photoshop quite a bit). As of yet, I haven’t found Linux to be worthy as a full-time only OS, but it’s nice enough to use a fair bit and keep windows for gaming and a few other purposes.
Wow… now I’m getting comment spam from someone spamming beastiality, incest, rape and other stupid shit. Thankfully I have a huge list of spam words that keeps them from ever being displayed on my blog. They go into a nice little queue and all I do is make two clicks to delete them all. Takes about 15 seconds and I’m done. I’ve also managed to increase the time required between consecutive comment posts to 5 minutes since they seem to make about 1-2 comments a minute. The spammers seem to use scripts and open proxies to do their work, so IP banning doesn’t do much good at all. Luckily wordpress has a pretty nice comment spam filtering system. Also, there are quite a few pretty good comment spam reducing plugins out there for wordpress as well. Kitten’s Spamwords seems to be the most popular one to use at the moment, but only seems to work on comments that have already made it into your blog. The good thing is that you can go into mass edit mode and delete the ones that are spam… then once you do that, any comment that looks similar to the ones you’ve deleted as spam get dumped into your moderation queue. Alas, permanently denying them access to your blog doesn’t seem possible at the moment, but this will do fine for now.
Links
cycling
Friends/Other Blogs
Funny/Kickass Shit
Music
techie stuff
