S’Been A While

I think things are getting a lot better, all around.  I’m somehow managing to keep my apartment AND put food in my belly!  Granted, my main diet has consisted of peanut butter and sometimes jelly sandwiches, tuna salad sandwiches, and ramen (with ingredients, like peas and carrots and potatos and cheap sausages/hot dogs; so I’m still getting important stuffs and not wasting away on terrible food), but I figure a budget of $40-$50 a month for food for a poor college kid is NOT a bad deal.

Sold the Lumina.  Somehow we got $1500 for it instead of like $200.  That’s how I’m gonna survive the rest of the summer, and then excess money from student loans plus work study should help me out quite well each semester. 

Why things are getting better, I think:

• I’m able to monetarily survive the summer.
• I’ve got my own apartment, where I can do my own things, and cook my own food, and lounge around petting cats and watching Conan on hulu.
• Nicole’s cats are freaking awesome.
• My new computer (by need, remember?) is performing great and is allowing me to catch up on some much needed gaming.
• I’m getting back into Animal Crossing (on the Wii now).
• Hanging out with good friends (Casey, Jeremy, Amber) quite a bit these days thanks to the Tai kids.
• Helping out again with the Taiwanese Cultural and Academic Exchange program.
• Got my first above 3.0 semester GPA this past Spring.
• Because of that, I am still allowed to attend IIT! :D
• My beautiful girlfriend comes back to Chicago in less than a month!
• In six days we’ll have been together for four months (this still surprises me immensely, to be perfectly honest).
• She’s bringing her ferrets back with her and they’re going to stay at my place! (this has me extremely excited for some reason :razz: )
• She is learning German and this is the perfect reason to brush up on my skills with the language!
• I bought a game for the first time since… forever.  I honestly forget the last game I bought prior.  Last weekend Frictional Games was having a sale on the Penumbra trilogy (a survival-horror/puzzle/adventurer series).  It was $5 for all three games and they were on Linux.  This is not something I could pass up.  I love survival-horrors (as much as they get to me), I love puzzle games that make you think (as much as they frustrate me), and I love supporting developers who release their games natively on Linux.
• I’ve been following the Hundred Push-Up Program and, while I’ve had to repeat two weeks already, I already notice a HUGE improvement in my strength and muscle mass (then again, any muscle mass is a huge improvement over none :razz: ).
• Because of this I have a greater confidence in.. me and my presentation.  It’s kind of surprising, really.  I wasn’t at all embarassed when I took my shirt off at the beach the other day, for example (I’ve always been kind of self-conscious about my extremely skinny and muscle lacking body, but I’m actually doing something about it now, which itself is also a huge improvement).
• Summer is flying by, despite every day being pretty much me sitting in front of my computers doing nothing productive.

I apologize that this summer isn’t nearly as post-heavy as last summer.  I believe there are reasons for that, though (mostly lack of generally interesting stuff to talk about that hasn’t been outlined above and lack of boredom at work.  Boredom at home leads to me dicking around on the web.  Boredom at work led to me writing because I couldn’t dick around on the web.  Well, led to.  Since I don’t have work this summer.).  I think it’s also due to a lack of.. doing things.  If I’m in a doing things mood I tend to think about updating the site more often.

Things with Sarah are going pretty damn well, I’d say.  We had a couple of misunderstandings or little fight-type things near the beginning of the summer, but definitely nothing too serious.  I’m more excited for her to come back than I am for the ferrets to come with her, than I am for everyone else to get back in the city, than I am for James to move out, than I am for.. a lot of things.  I try not to let my mind think about.. much beyond the next couple of days, but sometimes it’s hard (nothing more than like.. a season or two…  I’m having thoughts of us just cuddling up on the couch under a blanket drinking hot drinks and just hanging out in the winter, for example.. perhaps after ice skating or something (I can’t ice skate, by the way, Sarah.. It could make for hilarious times)).  It’s a mental defense I’ve set up thanks to previous relationship failures.  And, really, why think too much about the future?  Obviously one has to have goals and stuff for school, work, general life things; but one does not live in the future, one lives in the present, they’re living NOW.  I try to focus on what’s going on now and make the most of it.  No point in worrying about the future or lamenting the past (as much as things tend to pop up and try to distract you, it’s just something one has to deal with).

It’s been really nice to get out of my apartment for hours at a time last week and this.  I am going to be kind of sad when the kids leave and I really won’t have a need to leave my apartment…

Anyway, four fourty-eight is kind of a late time to finish up a post and go to bed..  My sleep schedule was good for like.. a total of two weeks this summer.. not even consecutive weeks at that…

I dunno, ever since the car sold I’ve just felt really good about things.  That lifted a huge burdon from my mind and now I’m looking around realizing that I have quite a few good things going on.  I am immensely happy I asked her out.  It almost didn’t happen, but I forced myself to NOT think about it and just see what would happen.  It was a twofold decision, really…  On the one hand, it was kind of like an experiment.. in that whole “can I actually get a date with someone that I barely know? (as opposed to having been a friend for some time)” way, and on the other it was a necessary step forward, to move on.  It seems like kind of a weird way to look at it, but that’s how I’ve rationalized it out in the time since.  And I’ve had a lot of time to think about it (four months worth, to be almost exact :razz: ).

Gah, five oh-six.  I really need to get to bed.

…I mean it.

Posting from ophiuchus

Pulled all the data off AndrAIa’s 250GB and onto ophiuchus’ 320GB.  Not much of a space upgrade, but whatever, I need to be conscious of the amount of data I’m hoarding anyway.

Took pretty much the whole day to get ophi set up.  Well, Linux anyway.  Building him and installing / setting up Win7 was mostly painless (just a few CDs lost in the drive…) and that was the day prior, surrounding Casey’s meat party (not gay).  The onboard audio is nice in only one way: It has a headphone jack on the front of the computer that plugs directly into the onboard audio card.  This is actually only half of one way: The headphone cuts out the back speaker port in Windows (as it should).  They both run in Linux.  OK, that’s not so much of a problem, just a minor annoyance.  I don’t even feel like moving my speakers over to the computer yet anway, might just keep them hooked up to the Gamecube.  The onboard audio sucks in that alsa won’t give me built in bass/treble sliders for the card.  It did for the Sound Blaster PCI512 and the Audigy ZX.  I just popped the Audigy into ophi and, while it detects that the card is plugged in (lspci), alsa doesn’t detect it.  Oh well.  I’ll probably just let it sit there, or rip it out later and ebay it or something.  Even though the Audigy would put out such better sound, I dont really feel like fighting with anything more right now. 

Jeremy might give me something for the GeForce 7600GT from Andy as well. 

I found a software equalizer solution, and the settings given on the Arch wiki are a lot better than it normally sounds, but I need to learn how to play with equalizers and what each band means / effects (I’m just given numbers that correspond to each band… no sliders for me).  Also, the software equalizer eats some CPU.  With only Opera, mpd, and the equalizer running, both cores are idling around 4%.  Without the equalizer, with Opera, they’d both be at 1% or below.  But hey, at least the cores are being used, yeah??  I see it fluctuate between three and six percent on the first and four and five on the second.  I love seeing two arch logos on boot representing the two cores and having two percentage/usage bars in conky :D

(03:47:16 AM) Jeremy: you put about as much time into switching arch around as i do my windows, its just a matter of what your primary os is

Sort of.  I spent most of the day just trying to get shit downloaded and installed on this shitty stolen wifi (cocmast dude comes on Tuesday).  Afterwards I spent a lot of time fighting with sound and a couple other things (why does gnome-settings-daemon set my background on the laptop but not on the desktop?  Both machines start it when openbox runs, so they should behave the same).

I think it’s just about done.  This means I can go about looking for jobs again.  Or playing Team Fortress 2 with Casey, Matt, Sarah, David, or whoever else come Tuesday.  I think I might have a “Happy Real Internet Day!” party on Tuesday.  I think I’ll have been stealing wifi for nearly two weeks by that point!

Anyway, fucker is orange.  See the bottom part of the white section?  The dvd tray pops up VERTICALLY FROM THERE.  LIKE A GODDAMN TOASTER.  HOLY SHIT IT’S AWESOME.  Except when I lose the teeth that are supposed to hold the disc in and drop a disc or two IN the drive.  It’s a pain in the ass to get those fuckers out of there.

• Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.8GHz
• 2GB DDR2 PC6400 RAM
• Geforce 8800GTS 512MB (with free copy of Call of Duty: World at War, normally a $50 game)
• 1 160GB SATA II HDD
• 1 320GB SATA II HDD

I think that’s all the important stuff?  Clearly decidely a mid-range machine.  That’s all I need.  It’ll play TF2 beautifully.  It was only $500.  Andy was $800 when I bought her years ago.  The motherboard is your standard microATX motherboard.  I was originally planning on going for a smaller case (similar to Mom’s new one), but most of them don’t hold graphics cards, let alone beasts like the 8800 and above.  My case is not as deep as most, though, so it is still easier to carry around and it just feels lighter that both andy AND Mom’s new one (thing is DENSE!)!

I’m using andy’s old 19″ display in the middle of my desk.  Got Sarah’s 19″ off to the left and am displaying the laptop on that.  The laptop itself sits on the elevated laptop stand to the right, but I couldn’t read the display from there.  It serves as a place to set things for now.

Got synergy and hamachi all set up, had to change a few aliases on feldspar’s end and change the synergy config, but otherwise it was pretty easy to migrate from andy to ophi. 

Somehow in playing around with oss (not much better than alsa for what I want) and reinstalling alsa, I got sound working in Doom3.  The standard Quake3 engine maxes at 1000 frames per second, but refuses to give sound (not able to map /dev/dsp for whatever reason).  Even though I set the cap at 9000, the game hardcaps at 1000.  I think with the 6600GT (never tryed the 7600GT) I was able to get around 300-400 frames.  If I uncap the frames from 60, my character constantly looks at the floor.  If I cap it again, I can only look up or down.  If I restart the game and keep the frames capped at 60, I can look around like normal until I uncap it again.  The ioquake engine refuses to run, giving some OpenAL (like OpenGL, but for audio, derp) error that I don’t feel like dealing with yet.

I, sadly, deleted UT2k4 quite some time ago.  I would love to play that game right now.  I need more native Linux games.

I opted to put Openbox on ophi instead of going the XFCE+Compiz route.  I would like to have the flash of Compiz, but since both Openbox and Compiz are window managers… that can’t happen.  The main reason I switched was because XFCE 4.6 no longer has customizable right-click menus (on the desktop).  Since that is my main method of launching programs, I’d rather have a menu that has only what I need instead of the generic crap that the new XFCE menu gave.  Customizability > eye-candy.  Plus Openbox is light.  XFCE was already light for a desktop environment, but Openbox ain’t even that.  Just a straight up window manager, nothing more.  Shit is snappy on the laptop, it SCREAMS on the desktop. 

The case is really pretty.  I love it.  The blue power light on the front has a red LED in it for HDD access.  I just LOVE the way it looks.

I think the most CPU intensive game I have under either operating system is actually Dwarf Fortress.  For some reason the Windows version through wine runs better than the native Linux one..  I haven’t actually ever run the game under Windows.  While it doesn’t take advantage of multi cores, the second core should at least prevent the game from grinding my system to a halt.  I could barely browse the web on andy while playing dorfs.

Shit yeah it runs well now.  I wonder how many people get new rigs just to run dorffort well.

I should also figure out sleep/hibernate under linux. 

It’s ten in the morning.  Sarah woke me up by calling me at four in the afternoon…  My sleep schedule is so nasty right now.

I was all type type type for the longest time with this post.  Now I’ve run out of steam.  I think it’s time to call it a day.

Also, six days from now marks seven years of journal-y-ness.

Posting from Wii

AndrAIa dead.  Feldspar no X (few sites work well with links), flaky stolen wifi. 

Ordered Ophiuchus.  I hope.  Money I need for rent.. newegg/Charter One constantly declining my card.  Newegg claims C1′s fault; C1 newegg.

CMC still hasn’t approved resume.  Cannot upload files (to monster.com) from Wii.

Dumb.

I miss Sarah.

Semester might not turn out as well as I had originally thought?

Eh.. it happens.  This was just one of those semesters for me…  Though I’ve think I’ve been saying that for every semester since I started here?

I need to keep myself busy over break, get myself in the habit of doing things.  Hopefully DMing a campaign will help, I should also really REALLY start on a programming project of some sort this break.  I know I said I’d do something like that over the summer, but I never… did.  I just need to kick myself in the ass to get started and it should be fine.  Depends what I wanna do: implement the shadow color changer in xfwm (this would definitely help my understanding of C and GTK+; nevermind the fact that contributing to an opensource project looks damn fine on a resume), or finally do that mpd music client I wanted to do (which would allow me to learn Python as well as require me to read up on the various licenses as I would most likely opensource the project (which would probably also look damn fine on a resume)).  I’ll have to see if I can start a decent workout regimen over break too, I’ve a) been slacking lately and b) got nothing to really work myself extra hard unless I go to Keating (which I’ll try to do next semester?). 

So I totally slept through my night class today.  It’s the last class before the exam, since the class meets once a week.  It’s UNIX/Shell Scripting, though, so it shouldn’t be all that bad, yeah?  All of my classes are salvageable, with some work.  And by salageable I mean I could get a C, possibly a B.  I really need to stop this consistent 2.0GPA every semester.  It’s really bringing my overall GPA down.  I’ll start working on that next semester (hah).

I love having two computers.  I get the increased productivity and screen space of having two monitors, but everything on the second monitor does not touch the first computer’s resources at all.  Granted, this means I can’t drag windows between monitors (though the guy(s?) behind synergy are looking to do that.  Would that even be possible??).  It’s really nice to have my assignment up on the right screen and be typing my paper on the left.  No need to alt+tab to look at the next bit, just glance to the right.  Productivity soars.  Or, at least, it does when I don’t have other distractions.  Such as the D&D 3.5 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide.  Glancing through the DMG is giving me ideas for my campaign.  Ideas I really shouldn’t be thinking about until next Thursday at 1PM.  Glancing through the PHB is making me remember my old Bard and Druid. 

My exam schedule is as such:
Monday:
   10:30-12:30 ITM440 Data Networks
   17:00-19:00 ITM302 Unix/Shell Scripting
Tuesday:
   17:00-19:00 PSYC3?? Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Thursday:
   10:30-12:30 CS351 Systems Programming

The two ITMs are done with right away, and they should be easy ones anyway.  Then I study my butt off for the final AND cumulative exams for Psych (back to back), and then I study my ass off for Systems.  This could work.. sort of.

I imagine AndrAIa will get very little use at home.  The majority of the time I’ll have no where to put her, and when I do she’ll have to be horizontal so that I can lay the fan on top of her graphics card (the fan on the card itself has been dead since sometime during the summer of ’07), this takes up a lot of space…  Though the LAN Party really wouldn’t be the same without her… 

I’m getting some favorable responses to the D&D thing, but over on Facebook.  Looks like about four or five people are interested right now and I think it’s pretty safe to include David and possibly Brian in that list.  This could work pretty well I think. 

I really need to stop sleeping funny, my arms are always sore when I wake up. 

I’m working on my Data Networks paper right now.. it’s all right, just gotta generate wordcount.  Thing needs to be four or five pages long, single spaced. 

Then I’ve got both a dynamic memory allocator (oh god, why couldn’t this one be easy to figure out like the shell we had to write?) for Systems as well as a random password generator (easy peasy, just time consuming) for Unix to write by Wednesday night.  On Thursday I’m presenting, with my group, our project.  Fun stuff.  I don’t look forward to any of it.  I can’t wait for this semester to end, but at the same time I really enjoy it here and don’t quite want to go home… :/ Plus, how will I play Call of Duty 5 over break?!  I’m borrowing Corey’s Wii copy, but he’s going to take that home with him :(

I’ve also got a ton of Data Networks homeworks to get done, but I should be able to whip those out in a couple of hours or so.

I swear I’m working on my paper…

This is why I love Linux/Opensource

Jeremy was playing around on ShinyCat trying to get Compiz installed for some nifty orange glows around his windows.  Well, ShinyCat has crappy integrated ATI drivers and we couldn’t get any of the drivers properly installed so Compiz kept giving stupid errors.  He was kind of bothered that we couldn’t get this to work, so jokingly I said “The xfce compositor does shadows, just change the color in the source code.”

That joke turned into the project for the next ten minutes which included hunting down the XFCE Window Manager source code and finding where in said code the color for the shadow was defined.  Jeremy now has orange “glows” around his windows and pop up menus without the bloat and resource eating that Compiz would bring to ShinyCat.

It was fun.

On the todo list for the window manager is “selectable shadow colors.”  I’m pretty sure I could patch it so that it accepts arguments from the command line for colors, but I wouldn’t quite know how to bring it into the GUI (though maybe I should attempt that over break?  If it’s still on the todo list (which is only a couple of months old?), that possibly means that someone hasn’t submitted a patch to implement such a thing yet?).

The changelog for the latest 4.6 beta (current stable release is 4.4.3) says that they’ve implemented changing the opacity value but not color yet. =P

Before (on white):

After (on black):