Could it be?

Yes! It is! Another post! Holy Hell! This is incredible! Actually, I think I'm getting into a groove in the morning... Wake up early and have a little bit of time to myself. I know it cuts out even more sleep, but it's worth considering how much time I get to sit around and relax. What was that? You want to know why I need extra time to relax? Well let me tell you; the three times in the past week and a half that I wasn't working, socializing, or sleeping I spent my entire time posting in this thing called a blog. Yes, that's right. You can see exactly how much "time-to-myself" I've had by dividing the number of blogged words by my average words typed per minute. So waking up a little earlier works out well considering how much it has increased my time to not have a breakdown. --Start Geek Stuff-- When I was at Bush's the other night (not the president, but a friend) I had a neat idea for all those times that I feel like a console junkie. I took the "startx" script, fiddled with it to use a specific xinitrc file, so that I can start an X server for a specific game. So it works like this, I type cg.jk into the console and up goes X and Jedi Knight II. When I exit JKII, X shuts down and I'm back at the beautiful console. "But Dave," you ask, "why not just start up an X server and run JKII from a managed environment?" "Simple, dear reader, as there are several reasons for my odd ways." A.) My ADD won't allow me to settle on a specific interface for more than a couple of weeks. Usually, when I tire of Gnome, Fluxbox, etc, I go into console-junkie mode for a little while, happily shunning X whilst I start a session of: B.) Sceen. Yes, it's just that cool. C.) Messing with the startx script, and passing a couple of options to X itself is a relatively new learning experience for me. Learning is one of the main reasions I use linux. I don't want something that "Just Works." I want to understand what's going on in the OS. To the average user windows is kind of a magic trick. "I press the big button on the computer case and in a few minutes this monitor will light up with this purty screen wheres I can git online and check mah e-mail." Joe User doesn't usually think "Holy crap, considering that the only numbers this machine can deal with are 1's and 0's, there is some insanely complex math going on here for this thing to interpret mouse movements and draw what I'm doing on the screen!" Nor does he think "Holy hell! My computer is transferring craploads of information to and from millions of computers which are all hooked into one giant network!" The average user only wants to do certain small things without knowing the background. Like an animal or machine, they only operate without understanding what they are truly doing. D.) I don't know how feasible this even is, but I imagine that I get better framerates as more system resources are free. So, as you can see, pepperoni is _clearly_ better than ham. Thank you. --End Geek Stuff-- Oops. --Start More Geek Stuff-- There are many small reasons for my creating of scripts for running games out of the console, and I may not even use them that often... but I know that they're there, and that makes me feel good. Oh, by the way, use slackware. Just do it. I'll help you out and answer your questions if you need it. If you want to look at the "gears and inner workings" of an OS, go with slackware. Other Linuxes (read: Redhat and Mandrake [lindows is not linux... because I say so.]) are geared towards making linux work so Aunt "I moved the taskbar without realizing it again" Betty can figure it out. Enjoy the freedom Linux was meant to have. Enjoy Slack. --End Geek Stuff for Real This Time-- So that sums it up. Mebe I'll post more that I have a little more Dave-Time built into the day... we'll just have to wait and see. -Dave

Hey look, another one!

Yes folks, I somehow was able to scrounge up enough time to (shudder) dial into my ISP and append some nonsense to my blog. Amazing. --Start Geek Stuff-- So I finally had the notion to post my various project ideas up here for the world to see. As of this writing, I only have three to speak of: A gnome-alarm clock Maybe I'm just missing something, but there doesn't seem to be any application that integrates with the GNOME 2 desktop. The only ones I can find are gtk+ or worse. I would like to create an alarm with a fairly simple interface that would sit happily in the panel waiting to perform it's simple purpose. Ideas are as follows: -Gnome HID compliant -A preferences window where you activate the alarm. Here there would be some options that Joe Windozuzer could understand. i.e. A check box that would show whether or not the alarm is set (also the icon on the panel should change to reflect this), and various radio buttons that read "At x time, I would like my computer to play this music file." "At x time, I would like my computer to beep." "At x time, I would like my computer to play this movie file." etc. -An "Advanced" tab in the preferences dialog that allows the user to specify a command to be run at the given time. -A count-down timer. They are _really_ nice for naps and laundry and naps. I think this will be the program that should get me a little more into programming. It's not terribly in depth, but it is something I think a lot of people would use. The next project idea is definitely one which I hope to get started and introduced into the world. (fanfaric music) PieWM2! For those of you who aren't familiar, piewm was a proof-of-concept window manager that introduced "pie" (circular, radial, etc) menus. This hackjob windowmanager based on tvtwm was written by Don Hopkins almost a thousand years ago. Ok, maybe not a thousand, but still long enough for piewm to be unusable with today's programs. Hell, if you get it to compile on your system you really need to update a few things. The current version of bison isn't compatable with pie. As it was a proof of concept wm, once Mr. Hopkins got it up and running, it fell to the wayside. I used it for almost the entire time I used FreeBSD as my main OS. It's ugly, it's not compliant with most anything, it's not terribly stable, but the speed and efficiency of the menus was absolutely incredible. I was able to navigate through various levels of menus without even watching the cursor/menu. Once you get familiar with where things are on the menus, the speed with which you can start the program that you want is impressive. I'm half debating about grabbing slackware 1 or 2 to install and a little partition just long enough to compile pie for slack 9.1... and I hate using binaries. (i.e. I compiled and installed Gnome 2.6 by hand) Anyhoos, before I rant myself into oblivion, I'll get to the point. I want to rewrite piewm from scratch, (or at least fork a current, efficient wm) and create a compliant, beautiful, bug-free implementation of pie. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please post them. I also have another project I'd like to talk about, but the impending work day is growing ever closer, so I'll leave that until later. --End Geek Stuff-- As for myself, I'm tired. There's not enough time in the day, and in order to do the things I want to do, I'm now beginning to cut into sleep. It's not fair that other people can exist of 5 hours or less of sleep a night. I try to do that and now I'm getting sick. I'm working 7 days a week, 50+ hours, and still trying to find time to relax, time to practice, time to spend with my friends, and time to sleep. It's really not working out very well. I'm almost hoping that I get violently sick so I can take a sick day to sleeeep. I'm beginning to dread work because I'm not exactly "Captain Speedy, the happy worker" in the first place, and now I'm dragging even more than ever. Stupid mistakes make for prolonged and boring projects, and I'm sure none of this is sitting to well with my employers; my Dad and Step-mom. We're way behind, and I'm not helping as much as I should. I need a weekend. And sleep. Speaking of work, it's time for me to finish getting ready for another 8+ hours of fun. Whee. I meant to post three days ago, but haven't had the time to even set up my computer... speaking of which, I'm posting this from my mother's laptop. How sad. I hate windows. Ta-ta to my 1 or 2 readers (if that). -Dave

Ta-da!

Well, now it's time that I joined in the fun that is blogging. Unfortunately I've not much interesting to say. At the very least, I don't have much to say in regards to anything that would interest anyone who doesn't speak geek. I'm trying to become an audiophile, but am stopped short by a lack of funds. So that leaves me in this stage where I know that all my equipment sucks, but can't do much about it. I can walk into stores and gawk at all the nifty stuff... realizing how nice it would be to sit back with an expensive system and enjoy music the way I want to. Of course, all I can do is shake my head and return home to the hodgepodge of "equipment" I have. Being an audiophile is depressing. I'm trying to become a better musician, but I'm stopped short by a lack of time. So I'm at this point that I know I do some things well, and am able to realize my many faults. I can listen to myself and say "I need to work on x and y and I need to just get z a little more under control.." but I don't have the time to correct these problems. So I go home and try to practice enough to at least maintain my current ability. Being a musician is depressing. I'm trying to become a better worker, but I'm stopped short by incredible laziness... Being a good worker is depressing. For now, I'm going to go watch some of my *ahem* slower friends graduate. Once I'm done with that I'll prolly try D&D for the first time with a couple of my friends. -Dave