FJ Blog

2009-01-24T11:56:00.001-06:00

Test

I don't think my sftp account is working.

test.

2008-10-14T16:32:00.003-05:00

work sucks.

I'm taking one class this semester.

School is going ok.

we've been fostering rats.

Bannas at Hy-Vee are 39 cents per lb. This weekend only.

$100 rat scrotum

2008-09-03T13:04:00.003-05:00

working at wal-mart full time while trying to go back to school sucks. Working at wal-mart sucks by itself. Paying tuition also sucks. Trying to sell my tahoe.

Free on campus wifi on the Park & Ride bus.

Still cant belive vet charged us $100 to fix wilson's scrotum after his neuter. They diddn't do it right the first time.

No wifi after the hill,...

2008-01-31T07:34:00.000-06:00

I don't know if I'm happy. Mostly this past month I have not been, I've been.. complacent. Allow me to explain, I've been depressed, In an attempt to not be so depressed I tried to accept some of the things that get me down. This moves me from "oh f#$^@#$ I just want to die" to "eh I guess I get by this way". The problem is that I'm still not happy or content because I'm not living the life I want to live, the life I used to live, or a life that's particularly healthy. I have woken up a bit to the fact that I've really let myself go, both physically and mentally this past year, or so. If I do not fix my health, education, and job problems, it will kill me. It's also completely unfair to my significant other.
--
It has become clear to me that Britney Spears is an agent of the US Federal Government, or if not the government then at least some political entity like the GOP, or heck even "Big Oil". Her job is to distract all of us from the war. What war? why the one in Iraq that you don't hear much about these days. I oppose the war, and I'd like to know if progress has been made. Are we near an end? Are we killing fewer civilians? Who knows? All the "reliable" (and not so reliable) news sources are still taking about Britney Spears.

2008-01-01T07:00:00.000-06:00

I only made two posts in 2007. Amazing.

I'm not where I want to be at present. As I mentioned in my previous post, 2007 really sucked. I lost a good job, I found my self in a spiral of despair and rut. I turned to working nights in retail, and I remain there to this day. A combination of a poor circadian rhythm, laziness, and depressed outlook continued to hold me back for the last several months. Recently I've began searching for answers. Prayer and meditation have brought me nearer to a better mindset, now I need to take action and find a better job. I've applied and been accepted as a transfer student at KU. getting a degree should do much good in getting back on my feet. It will take a while but I think going back to school might be a catalyst or springboard I need to be more productive in general.

Here's a year in review. Not in chronological order, One of the great things about having a blog is that you can look back on important events. This only works when I update regularly, I'll remind myself that in 2008. My ... intention has always been to have one post per week, 50 post per year should be par.

I had a good job, and I lost it. Bad luck? Bad choices? Doesn't matter now, for some time and even now on occasion the turn of events haunts me.

I became an uncle. My brother and his wife had a baby. When the baby was to be baptized, my brother converted to Catholicism. I was quite surprised. Before he and his wife were married, he seemed quite adamant about not converting because he didn't believe in the dogma and mysticism. (side note; "dogma" and "mysticism" are not words in my brother's vocabulary.) I felt that he was either selling out, or his principals never meant that much to begin with. Some time later, I mentioned my surprise to my father. He explained to me that during the pre-conversion counselling, that my brother was taught that he need not follow the catholic traditions, in which he didn't agree. I thought it was a bit sacrilegious to convert to a religion "à la carte". (Interestingly, some time later, some one had told me, in a way, that I'm not a Christian. Because, according to this person, you have to take an all or nothing approach to the Bible. To shorten a long explanation, and give example, I don't agree with Paul when he states that women should be silent in church (1Co 14:34). The point I'm trying to get to is that I realized that I was perhaps to quick to judge my brother in his denominational choice. I still dissagre with his course of action, but I realize that from another person's perspective I've done the same thing(s).

I moved into a new apartment, and out of that horrible place that was the retirement community. We should have moved much earlier than we did. The arrangement there paid our rent, but we're much happier with the independence in our new place.

I adopted a new rat. Vernie and I have rats. We've had rats for over a year now. It's really a shame I've not mentioned them before in my blog because I could have gone on and on about how great a pet that rats can be. The first two were adopted when Vernie had a rat lab in one of her classes. The first rat, Stu, was Vernie's rat for the lab, and the second one, adopted a week or so later, (which we named Rowan) was part of the same class assignment. All three of the rats we have are Sprague-Dawleys, and live in a home-made cage kept in our office. When we introduced Stu and Rowan to each other it was a pretty peacefull encounter. There was some challenges of dominance, but nothing to cause concern. With the third rat, Wilson, we had some problems. We kept Wilson separated from the other two for a few days as recomended on various rat care websites. However, Stu and Rowan were not very receptive of Wilson. Thankfully there's been few serious injuries and nothing long lasting. Rowan had a bite on his belly that became infected and required a trip to the vet. The three rats mostly get along pretty well, though there's still occasional scuffles. As far as we can tell Wilson gets a little jumpy if he hasn't had his out-of-cage exercise and becomes more likely to cause problems with the other two, who are now over the hill and sleep more than they did when they were a year younger at Wilson's age. (side note; Stu and Rowan still wrestle a bit as rats naturally do, however now that they're older it resembles a couple of old men trying to one-up each other at basketball or some other sport that neither of them can really do any more. It once resembled Greco Roman Wrestling but now it's quick exchange of hand-slaps with seemingly mutual truce, as if they tire quickly and need to catch their breaths.

A lot happened in 2007, The year of the pig is wrapping up, I say good riddance, though there were many positives sprinkled throuout, my path was mostly in the wrong direction. The year of the rat is approaching, that sounds promising.

2007-12-06T10:01:00.001-06:00

it's snowing.
I'm not dead.
Occasionally I succumb to peer pressure, and post to my blog.

2007 really kicked my ass. I'll be glad to see it gone.

I have to go to the bank, and wal-mart, and the post office. but don't want to leave the comfort of my chair.

To summarize, my family is crazy, my job sucks, temp agencies are a joke, gas is expensive, my ears still don't work, water is wet.

2007-02-24T22:06:00.000-06:00

New couch!

2007-02-21T13:23:00.000-06:00

I can never find time to post it seems...

I started a post about a week ago and diddn't finish it, I think it's saved as a draft but I couldn't be bothered to go and edit it, I have a mere ~5 inutes left in my lunch break.

It snowed for Valentines day .. and it snowed again a few days later. and today it's over 60º. Vernie has stated that she is not fond of the way the temperature flucuates greatly from day to tday in this part of the country.

I got her some organic free-trade chocolate truffles this year, sthey were about a week late because I had trouble ordering them. (Valentines day landed on a wednsday, they shipped from CA and I can't call long distance from work. .. oh and I tried to save ^$ by phoning in my order rather than going online) Anyway they finnally arrived and Vernie sees to love them.

In other news my old friend The Captian, expressed that he is joining the Army. He's nuts, yes. I am not going to talk him out of it, he hasn't been able to hold a job.... ever, and this might be good for him. He is currently too overweight (but just barely) to join, and I havn't heard from him in over a month so I have no idea what his status is at this point.

Veronica and I have had several discussions about what his problem is, I try to tell him but it's clear that from his perspective he's doing things right. Things will work out for him eventually, so I don't intend to critisize him too much, yet it's irritating to hear him complain (mostly on his myspace blog) about the same sort of thing over and over.

Most of his complaints deal with women. All of his frustrations can be broken down to two source problems.

1) he dosn't know what he wants. This is quite common among all people and all items of desire. But it's especially true in young people and potential mates. There is nothing wrong with not knowing what you want, but understand that you';re not going to get it untill you can define it. "I'll knw it when I see it" is not going to get y ou anywhere you want to be for any streach of time.

2) He's fishing in the wrong end of the pond. He does not realize the patern forming. The only type of woman h4e will snag are the crazy bitches he's accuired in his previous two relationships. A woman who wants some one like him will not be found in the places he's looking unless she's a crazy bitch.

A third potential problem, is that he's playing games but loosing them. The games are based on rules he's set up for himself to facilitate finding some one who won't burn him with her own games. But I belive that deep down, it stems from items 1 and 2, He's reaching out for something that feels right without knowing what he's after (or at least not defineing it) and hew's not yet aware that he was burned by crazy bitches. In the unlikely event he finds someone , who like himself, is fishing on the wrong end of the pond, and is looking for someone like him, he will probably shove her on her way with a anti- crazy bitch game.

For Auld Lang Syne

2006-12-31T21:45:00.000-06:00

It's the end of 2006. We've seen a lot this year, I quit my job at the hospital. I moved to Kansas. I worked at wal-mart for a bit. I got a new job. My buddy the Captian got divorced. Brittney spears got divorced. The croodile hunter, Steve Irwin, died. Brittney spears showed the world her naughty bits (*shudder*). Gerald Ford died. Saddam Hussien was excecuted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006

Wikipedia has everything.

I think over all 2006 treated me well. I diddn't update my blog much this year, but for once the huge gaps in my blog were because I was preocupied with other things, not because something was wrong with my head.

I think 2007 will be more of the same... and while that's not ideal, ther's something to be said about not wishing for huge improvement.

And this concludes the last update of 2006.

2006-10-15T21:01:00.000-05:00

I survived the first two weeks of my new job. Survived is a little strong, it was nice. I don't want to imply that my new job is easy, it's not. However it does suit me much better than the old job at the Hospital in Nebraska. I won't bother to go on about how much better the new job is than wal-mart.

Vernie and I have been in a relationship for two years as of this weekend.

Time has a way of getting away....

Job, good.

2006-09-16T19:37:00.000-05:00

I put in my two week notice at wal-mart last night. it felt good. I have a new job for a better organization, I start the 2nd of October. My new job is a lot like my old one but this time no helpdesk, thus no phone, so it's much better. I'm sure I'll have to use the phone on occasion but it's not a primary job requirement.
Wal-mart has been burning me out. My .... escape, is timely, I don't feel that I could have taken much more of it. I'm not sure if it was the over night shift, or the borring repeitive work that gets to me. Part of it is the fact that no one at wal-mart cares about what kind of job you do. You can do something half-assed or wrong, and that's ok, as long as you follow orders without question. Chances are they'll tell you to do the wrong thing anyway, so you'll have to do something over. It's job security I suppose, you'll always get your 40 hours per week that way, but I can't help but wonder if they could pay us more if the workers were more effecient.
A couple weeks ago I read an article in the paper stating that wal-mart was raising wages through the state, but not here. Why? I can only suspect that it's due to the large number of college students willing to work for less. "Oh you won't work for $6.40 an hour? Well, we have college kids lining up outside the door that will."

I won't miss wal-mart.

2006-09-02T20:46:00.000-05:00

The gaps in my blog get ever longer...

long due for an update... where do I begin...

I've been working at wal-mart. The wal-mart in lawrence has been converted to a super center and the grocery section will have it's grand opening in two weeks. I can't decide how I feel about the job. I realized the other day that i miss parts of my old job. Though there are some parts I don't miss. I know that when I leave wal-mart there will be more that I don't miss than what I miss. I won't miss the low wage, the contradictive management, and the P in the A co-workers.

The living arangement/job is ok.. We feel like we were given a bit of bait and switch. This job is not quite what it should be. Many of the residents here require a level of care that this facility does not provide. On top of that the boss is a pathalogical liar. If this place were what it shold be it'd be great, but it's not. Another downside we've recently discovered is time off, or lack thereof. We've had no problem filling in for others by coming on duty early or helping the regular shift, but when we want just a couple extra hours on a saturday evening forget it. A case came up recently where we asked if we could come on duty at 9:00 instead of 6:00 on a saturday so that Vernie and I could attend a school related social thing but, no, not a soul is willing to stand in for us. It's not a hard job, just sit and read, watch TV, play some dominoes with some old ladies, or all of the above. You have to answer the phone when it rings and lock the doors at the specified time. Anyway, there are some issues here and it's possible that Vernie and I will find something else before she's finished with her masters program.

Recently I got a letter from a certain car insurance company. Oh no, I thought this can't be good news. I was surprised however to find out that now, more than 8 months later, the claim that totaled my jeep is finally wrapping up. It seems like time and time again I try to do business with a company and they end up owing me or being real headache or both. I am being compensated somewhat for the corporate incompetance, redtape and whatever else has dragged this out.

If you like getting F'd around by a company just go buy something with a rebate attached to it. Vernie wanted a new computer for school and I helped her with it.
She gave me a price range and a general idea of what she wanted in a computer and I set out to find a set of parts with which to build a nice machine. I went with a mid priced intel socket 775 motherboard and a 3.2Ghz PentiumD processor. 2GB of dual channel DDR2 SDRAM, 320Gb SATA hard drive, a DVDRW drive, a PCI-E Video card with a Geforce 7600 on it and a 17 inch LCD monitor. I picked out a 500 watt powersupply and I helped Vernie pick out a case that she liked. We saved money buying the case seperately, though when we got it I could see why it was only $20. The only advantage gained from a more expencive case is convienience when swapping hardware. At the most we'll just be adding more hard drive space, and this case has plenty of empty bays. Also, it's some how easier to justify doing case mods when it only cost $20. Vernie had said something about case mods earlier but I really doubt we'll "pimp" her case any time soon, if ever.

So all the parts came, Vernie wanted to do the actual work of assembleing the computer so I walked her through it. Mounting the CPU and CPU fan was very different than the previous generation of CPUs, and now thanks to SATA, airflow is a lot better inside the case. Once the PC was assembled it was tough getting it to load an OS. Linux liked it just fine but winXP diddn't want to see the hard drive. I threw out my last floppy drive when I moved to KS, and we diddn't have any means of loading the Intel RAID drivers. I diddn't think that should be nessicairy since we won't be using the RAID feature and long story short, a BIOS upgrade should have fixed the problem. Well, we upgraded the BIOS and when we tried to install windows, we got a blue screen before we even got as far as formatting the hard drive. It turns out that it's impossible to install winXP unless the disk has SP2 slip-streamed onto the install disk. Luckily it wasn't too hard for us to find one of those and I diddn't have to make one myself. So far everything works great now that we have the software and drivers installed.

When we bought the parts for the computer, there were about $160 in rebates divided among 3 parts, all purchased from TigerDirect. Long story short I don't think we'll ever get that money. I went to the onrebate.com website and filled out the online form as instructed, and that's where I reach a dead end. I'm required by the terms of the rebate to submit the rebate form within 30 days of purchase, but they won't give me the rebate form. I searched online and I'm not the only one with this problem by far. So, If you ever think about buying something from TigerDirect or any of their sister companies, automaticly assume that you will NOT get the rebate. TigerDirect has a good selection and some good prices, but their rebate system is crap.

land of the burning sun

2006-06-21T19:03:00.000-05:00

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post was that the tires on my tahoe were shot.

I knew that the tires would need replacement soon, but I diddn't expect them to fail suddenly like they did. I drove Vernie to the airport, and knew something was wrong with the starbord stern tire, by the way it was handeling... got to the airport and dropped her off, and went to the nearest gas station to evaluate the tire. It was flat. I filled it with some air but had a bad feeling I'd be getting out my spare that afternoon. So, I'm driving along the interstate and thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump- -- BOOM! the tire exploded. So I pull over, turn on my hazard lights, get out, say a bad word and start getting my jack out of the back. I put the spare on with minimal dificulty. Just as I was about to lift the spare on to the whatever it's cdlled, One of those white pickups for tourist assistnace pulls up behind me. A guy steps out and starts talking to me. He's on my bad side but it sounded like "you sure thats the right one?" I give him an odd look and he dosn't repeat himself so (I don't read his lips) I continue with waht I'm doing. as I was tightening the lug nuts anothher truck pulls up. They stand and watch me for a little while, and then go on their way as I'm putting the jack in the back of my vehicle. I was filthy at this point so I drove to Cabellas, which happened to be very near where I pulled over, so I could wash my hands.

A day or two later I noticed a buldging crack in the port stern tire. I definately need some new tires at this point but I don't have the funds. About a week goes by and we discover that tire is also flat. The buldging crack is now a hole. We were going to go to wal-mart but we were referred to another place here in Lawrence. I was really impressed with their service, They let us borrow a used tire so that we could get back home, and had 4 new tires for me the next morning. (walmart would have taken 5 days if we order them, or we could press our luck and see if the truck brings what we need). We payed more than what we would have paid at wal-mart but we paid a fair price for the tires we recieved.

This past weekend my parents came to visit. It was, an adventure. Vernie and I had some long talks about how my parents seem to be crazy. They're good company and enjoyable to be around most of the time, but wow. For example, I asked them what they thought of the shelvess I had altered. We have some partical board shelves which are great but are only 4 feet high. I got an idea in my head, went to Home Depot, bought about $5 in supplies (including a drill bit), and turned two shelves into one 8 foot tall shelf. since it worked out so well I went back to home depot and got what I needed for another shelf. So now, instead of four short particle board shelves, we have two. Anyway, I ask my parents what they think and my dad says something like "did you do that from a kit?" I guess I'll take that as a compliment.

Over the weekend we went swimming at the pool at the econolodge, I got a little sunburned but not bad, On Monday I was feeling pretty lousy. I had a bad cold by Tuesday and it's just knocked the crap out of me. ugh. I suspect the sun exposure lowered my imune system or something. I havn't been sick in over a year.

I don't have a job yet, though I have an interview on friday morning (they'll get back to me about time) and I have an interview at wal-mart tomorrow. Sounds like wal-mart might be eager to higher me as a temp worker. I hope I can start on Monday. That would be nice.

tires.. and tired.

2006-05-31T22:42:00.000-05:00

Another month?!

Ok. Vernie and I moved to Lawrence, KS. We are living in a retirement community. we get rent and utilities in exchange for serving breakfast, and being on call in the event of an emergency. it's a nice gig.

I still havn't found a job yet. I'm a slacker.

Vernie went to michigan for a week to visit her friend, who will have a baby soon..

I miss her. she comes back on tuesday.

2006-05-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

It's the end of the month so I guess I should update my blog if I want to get one in for April 2006.

Vernie and I will be moving to Lawrence, KS in about two weeks. I'm anxious about it. If I sit down and think logically about it I decide, to myself, that "yes, I want this!" but my emotions are all... crazy. I seriously need a change in my life and things are falling into place very well.. with one eexception. I don't have a job yet. It's all my fault, I was avoidant of the reality that I needed to job hunt back when we started getting the ball to roll, and more recently I've .. I dunno can't make myself do things.

I got written up at work a couple weeks ago. "Performance transgression" they call it. You can F@#% up all you want but let me tell you something, the stuff that will get you fired is the stuff that you'll have very little control over.

I've been seeing some one via the EAP where I work. I used my 5 free visits and I have one more. I saw a family practice Dr in town per the councellors advice and now I have a prescription for an SSRI. Wellbutrin to be specific. I've felt a little jittery since yesterday. Tomorrow I start the full dosage. I'm concerned about insurance and everyting. I'll be giving my two week notice at my job at the hospital in the morning. The thought makes my stomach do flops.

I should go to bed now.

...like programing.

2006-03-20T00:29:00.000-06:00

bleah.

Just past the ides of march and a man updates his blog. oh wait, it's the 20th allready .. um

Just about a week past the ides of march... and .. a lot of things have happened so far this year. Let's have a look:

Back in December an individual of questionable ability to pay attention to her driving struck the back of my vehicle at excessive velocity. I was hurt slightly but it was just a pulled nerve, a little numbness but no long term injury. The other driver was cited and blah blah .. Long story short no more jeep. :(

The jeep was a pre-savlage so the [bad word]insurance company paid a pittance for it. If you're going to get into an accident, don't let it be your fault. It sucks pretty bad when this accident was no fault of my own, I'd hate to be on the other end of this stick.
Flash forward to two weeks ago, my dad who recently got a deeler's license, found a new vehicle for me. It's a red '99 Chevy Tahoe. 140,000 miles on it. I'll be paying for it for a while. Money will be tight, but I like my new set of wheels. For several weeks I got to drive a '05 Jeep. The insurance company gave me a rental, which I was going to have for about a week, but horray for the insurance company not having their act together and I had it over a month. I just had to pay for the gas I put in it. I wasn't terrbly impressed with the jeep. It had a lot storrage space in the back but was terribly small in the driver's seat. I had to hunch over to see out of it properly and there was a terribly huge blind spot, I nearly hit a pedistrain, (horray for ABS and I hope that woman found some other pants to wear that day.) I suppose SUVs are like women... If they're big in the rear that's great, but it's the front that..... and if you could see Vernie's face as she reads this you'd see that cute thing she does with her eybrow.

Other things that have happened.. I built a print server. I took a flakey 400mhz celeron system and hooked it up to the Brother laser printer. I used this:
http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/
I had looked into this project a long time ago, but for some reason it seemed horribly complex. When I read the site over again recently it seemed very strait forward and easy. It is a very easy project. You just find a network card that uses a chipset listed, I just happend to have two 3com cards lying around. I had a 32mb stick of ram which is more than enough, (again just sitting there not being used). I did also have a floppy drive lying around but I don't have a floppy drive installed in Chimera. I loaded a virtual floppy drive and made the disk image that way, then I took a copy of nero express (oem) and made a bootable CD based on a floppy image. I popped the CD into the server and started it up. There was a hangup. The CD booted just fine but it couldn't load any settings, it was looking for hda or something.. and there was no hda. So I install a floppy drive in Chimera, find a floppy (I was surprised I had one, I think it's one left over from high school), make the disk, and transfer the disk, drive and all, into the server. Fire up the computer again, the computer starts to boot off the floppy, and gives me an error, GAH!. I reboot, got a little further.. hmm reboot, got a little further that time. reboot got a little further hmm... reboot.. nope this just isn't going to do it. Then a light bulb came on.. I put the CD back into the cd rom drive, booted off the CD, it worked, then it looked for the floppy, found it, and loaded the settings from the floppy and the server launched!! woot. It was a satisfying achievement, We can print from any PC on the lan, and with Vernie's wifi laptop she can print from anywhere in the apartment.

I started talking to a therapist. I've not been ok lately. Yes, that's vaigue. I took advantage of my employer's EAP program. I get five free sessions with a mental health professional. Good mental health is not for the lazy. I've got one free visit left.

Also Vernie wants to go to KU to further her education. I'll be going with her. I'm anxious about it and I've been avoidant, I've tried to not be so much lately. I wish I could be hypnotised like those guys on TV that cluck like chickens.. only instead of clucking like a chicken I could clean the apartment, do laundry apply for jobs, etc, heck the hypnotist could erase my memory of doing that and blame it on gnomes. My weekend was kind of a blur anyway. not sure what's wrong with me.

The Nebraska game and parks comission has stocked several lakes in the area. There's a lake south of Norfolk that was stocked and being the clocest one to me I will probably make a trip down there. I don't know how badly I want to get a license, There is a weekend out of the year where you can fish without one.. but I'm not sure when that is. Anyway, they've stocked the lakes with fish. With Trout. Isn't that great, lots of fish, makes it easier to catch them happy little fish. Heh, not for long. It turns out these trout are a cold water fish and won't survive the summer. So yeah, catch them or they'll die anyway.

2006-01-26T23:27:00.000-06:00

Love is when your girlfriend sends you a love note by printing "I love you!" on a full page on the laser printer next to you from her wireless laptop in another room thanks to the print server you'd just built.

2006-01-22T05:40:00.000-06:00

Stuff.

Right now I'm at my weekend job. This is my last night here. I'll miss the money but not the lack of sleep. My day job is starting to feel the pain of me working 60+ hours a week. I guess I like te weekend job, it's easy. Do some laundry, and make sure that none of the other staff have sex with the residents. It was great at first but I'm beginning to suffer burnout.

durring the first week of december some bimbo rear-ended my jeep while I was on my lunch break. Her insurance paid for a rental and they actually provided a rental for about a month. I had to turn it in yesterday. The jeep I had been driving was totaled.

other than that things have been about the same. I've not been in an optimal mental state.. I'm seeing a therapist sometime next week.

2005-12-31T23:08:00.000-06:00

2005 needs one more post.

Things.. so many things.

So, my jeep is totaled. long story. I'll be driving a rental for a while, luckily it's being paid for by the insurance company of the bimbo that hit me.

Vernie is sick, I took 3 days off of work and we went to Omaha for her dr visit. I hope she starts feeling better. It seems as soon as she stops feeling bad from one thing, something else takes a swing at her, right now it's a very bad cold and possibly a ear/sinus infection.

I'm at my weekend job. somebody thought it was a good idea to let these (insert derogatory word here)-ers stay awake untill 12:15. Bleah.

2005-11-29T19:36:00.000-06:00

I'm going back to windows this week. I had reformatted my hard drive a short while back and installed Ubuntu. Ubuntu is nice but it dosn't do everything I need. I need to get some particular things done and Windows is going to do it for me.
People have told me that Ubuntu "just works" No, it dosn't. I don't know what I caused it but I've been locked out of folders I should have access to (like my desktop) and there have been a lot of other oddities.

Services like Apt and the gui for it in Ubuntu are really nice. The fact that Ubuntu allready has a large user base makes it easy to find information on installing things that aren't in apt, like the latest JRE from Sun.

the Gnome desktop runs fine on my 550Mhz PIII with 512MB of RAM, I'm guessing If my video card were a little better I'd be able to have a desktop image instead of a solid color. I really like the Weather Report accessory to the gnome launcher. I wish there was a windows version of it. (WeatherGopher is a Freeware windows program that's pretty good though)

Linux is ready for the causual internet browser. In fact, a customized LiveCD is just what a lot of people need. No hard drive, just boot off the CD (or DVD) if you fowl something up just reboot. Now of course you need something that will save your bookmarks, and other settings, maybe that could be stored online. If you just upload a RAM disk to the server as part of the shutdown/reboot process.... hmm

I'm going to be a little risky this time and not back up anything. I have my adblock filter list and lots of other things allready backed up, All my email is on the server, I havn't used a desktop email client in about a year now. And last time I reformated my hard drive I forgot to backup my iCal files. :'( So I'll have to re-build my callendar anyway.

Vernie and I had a good thanksgiving weekend. I love her more than I know how to describe. I'm looking forward to Christmas, I think she'll like the gifts I'm getting her. I have a box that's in plain sight that's out of her reach in the Kitchen. I'm afraid it's a mild form of torture for her that she now know's it's for her and not just more of my junk. We have a tree in the apartment now so I should start putting presents under it. (I'll post pictures later this week or so). The only thing that I really want for Xmas is for everyone else to be able to have the same feeling I get when I think about the fact that I have Vernie and I feel like I have everything. Of course none of you can actually get me that, so you will just have to make substitutions with fancy shiny things. ;)

Well, I need to get some stuff done. I have dishes to wash, laundry to fold, a shower to take and a hard drive to re-format.

Howdy, Pilgram.

2005-11-26T03:49:00.000-06:00

this past week I spent a good ammount of time collecting some open source and other free software... I knew about the "OpenCD" but saw that it was out of date... well guess what. they just updated it. I could have just downloaded the ISO and had over half of what I needed.

For a while I've wanted to create an "Everything Disk" A cd-rom crammed with about every must-have program and utility. Everything must be free, preferably open source.

So far I have the following

Open Office 2.0
PDFCreator
FireFox (I have 1.0.7 but I'm wondering if I shouldn't have put on the 1.5RC3. When the 1.5 comes out in a couple weeks I'll replace it)
Thunderbird 1.0.7 (@#$%@#$^!!!!! I just realized I burned two CDs and forgot to include thunderbird. blah!)
Audacity
TheGimp 2.2.9 (and the GTK+ toolkit it requires)
7-Zip

Other free ware but not open source:
Adobe Acrobat Reader 7
Ad-Aware
AVG Antivirus
MS Office 2003 Word viewer, Excel Viewer and Powerpoint Viewer
Picasa2
Smart Recovery (an excellent program for un-deleting stuff from flash cards)
DeepBurner
DeepRipper
WeatherGopher
Sun JRE
--
In my opinion those are the must haves.. in addition I think I'd like to include IE6SP1 (for comptuers pre-XP - For those of you thinking "but they shouldn't use IE they should use FireFox" you're right, but did you know that windows update dosn't run properly without IE6? and it can be a huge download),
SP2 for XP (having a career in information technology it's hard to imagine that many people havn't upgraded to SP2; but it's true),
HijackThis!,
Maybe TweakUI ? A few winXP power toys (like the ALT+TAB enhancement) ?

Am I missing anything?

-
My Aunt from OKC is up for the turkey day weekend. I'm fixing her comptuer. So loaded with spyware, It was unfixable via her lousy dialup and TightVNC, horribly bogged down with WeatherBug and multiple browser hijacker/toolbars. (yes multiple as in more than 2). I cleaned them out, updated her anti-virus, scaned for virueses, Installed FireFox (*Side note. I had not installed firefox because the last time I had physical access to her computer firefox was not stable, and when I origonally built her computer I don't belive I was aware of FireFox (SP4 for win2k had just come out so, it was a long time ago) The reason I've not installed FireFox untill now is because I wanted to be at the computer to monitor the install and make sure everything works correctly*) (I had tried the Foxie plugin a couple months ago hoping that would keep her computer clean, nope. ) Configured FireFox and imported all her bookmarks and cookies and such, then whiped up a VBS script that, every 10 seconds, checked if IEXPLORE.exe was running, and if so kills it. (*side note: I can't take credit for the script, I found it on google groups about a year ago. it's a very simple and strait forward script though, the intention of the script is to kill any program specified. I edited it to kill IE. and before I give it back to her I might make it kill the Weatherbug installer too)

Since she likes weather bug, and likes it well enough to keep installing it (though you could probably sneeze and re-install weatherbug, it's pretty sneaky that way) I found an alternative called WeatherGopher. It's a wonderful program. I also installed the ForcastFox extension for FireFox, I'm not terribly happy with it. the status bar stuff it displays is nice but when you click it, it takes you to a website overloaded with Ads. I spent a good 20 minutes updating the Adblock list to take care of them.

And I think that will do it, take out Weatherbug, and prevent IE from running, I installed MessengerPlus! with the stuffplug plugin so that MSN messenger opens firefox, I installed the flash and shockwave plugins... She's going to get high speed internet at the end of the month so it's a good thing that I'm doing these updates. I put on version 1.0.7 of Firefox I think I'll upgrade her to 1.5 via VNC once it's offically released.

--
Tomorrow I'm going to Beemer to have "thanksgiving" with the family. My mom is making "...four different kinds of soup!" and there will be sandwiches. I think that on Sunday Vernie and I are cooking a somewhat traditional Turkey day dinner. she'll be roasting a turkey, I've declared that I'll make mashed potatoes, add a tub of coolwhip and a Pie from Wal-mart and we're good to go.

--
So what am I thankful for? I'm thankful for Vernie, the Internet, my weekend job that pays me to do nearly nothing (and the paychecks from that job), I'm thankfull for long weekends. And beer.. I could use a cold one.

some people get paid for it

2005-11-13T05:09:00.000-06:00

Time to update the blog.

This is day two of weekend 3 of my new weekend job. I've finished all the duties that I need to do and now I get paid to post to my blog. It was definately a smart decision to pick up this weekend job. Not only that but I told them I'd prefer the over night shift. another smart move. Once I complete my job duties, I can do what ever I want as long as I'm quiet. I have to get up every half hour to do a room check but I'd be getting up that often anyway. One of my job duties is laundry, but tonight's coworker is on top of that, at most I'll have to help him fold towels or something. There are a couple of things that I also need to do but really should wait untill near the end of my shift. So, to summerize, 8 hour shift, 1st half hour spent reading communication log looking over todo list, next 3.5 hours spent doing other tasks. Now I just have to stay awake for another 3 hours and I have about half an hour more of tasks to complete.

with Getting this job I told myself that I'd get a lot of work done on various projects and websites and soforth. Well, I think I'll try to actually do some of that this morning. Not sure where to start though

with my day job, things are going ok. There was an issue with a particular end user reguarding customer service. It is my "unofficial" opinion that the person involved is a total and complete bitch hell bent on ruining my week, but I did learn a lesson which will greatly help in avoiding situations like that in the future. I like my day job, but there are times.... I think I have about 50 hrs of vacation time saved up, I plan to use some around my b-day next month.

Vernie and I rented "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" The other day. Aparently it's more true to the book than the first movie based on that book. Critics also claimed that it was "darker" than the earlier movie. I diddn't really notcie. One thing I think most people will agree on: Johnny Depp is a creepy willy wonka.

Things that don't Kill us.

2005-11-06T06:02:00.000-06:00

Work has just sucked this weekend. It's week two of my new weekend job. Last night I tried to learn the long and complicated series of tasks that must be done. Vernie is a good teacher, but she can be critical, and tonight she obviously wasn't feeling well and getting through some of this stuff was stressfull. I became frustrated with her and angry durring the course of the shift. I love her but there are some serious disadvantages to having your girlfriend train you at work. The advantage is that I can tell her how I actually feel. had she been some one esle I would have labled her a bitch and left it at that. I suppose if she were just a friend, I wouldn't have labled her a bitch but I wouldn't have approached her either.

I'm really cranky this morning. At least I'm getting paid while I update my blog. mmm money.

Worth a fortune........... cookie.

2005-10-29T07:16:00.000-05:00

Bad hardware does not play by the rules.

Don't walk too close to an unused server rack. Your new shirt will snag on it and you'll get a hole in it.

This has been a long week. It was a slow week at work due to a lack of tasks. Note not a lack of things to do. I had plenty of things to do but I had to hunt them down. I took an old computer and put in some hard drives and some extra RAM from other out of warranty computers. I plan to use it as a file server for various things that I need to do on the job. Sure we allready have a file server for stuff but It'll be nice to have one just for help desk type stuff... like sed scripts, documentation, ghost images, and batch files that are in progress. I spent much more time than I would have liked, and it's still quirky for some reason, but it is working now. The biggest problem that I ran into was that one of the hard drives is bad. Nearly drove me insane. I learned several things though, for example, if you're pulling previously used hard drives from other computers, Fdisk them BEFORE you try to do anything with them (and before installing an OS if possible).

I started a new job this weekend. It's a night/weekend job. So far so good. Without going into too much detail, I'm kind of a baby-sitter / night watchman. It pays very well for the work that I do, and there is downtime with which I will be able to work on my projects. I'll actually have a chance to update my blog, as well as some other websites. Oh and money.. It'll be nice to have some extra money. I've not had that for a while.

Lately I've felt like I never have enough time. As if I'm not able to sit and just relax or anything anymore. I suppose getting a weekend job isn't going to help that, but, I will have more money, and I should get more work done.
--
I made a valliant attempt to switch to Linux about 3 weeks ago. (I installed Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) ) Because so much of what I do on a day to day basis on my home computer is web based, There is really very little change. I've tried getting some things to run in Wine, but .. ugh it's not great. After talking to a few people It was recomended to me to look at running a virtual machine and running windows inside of that, rather than a dual boot. I think that's a good idea, but I'm not sure if my 550Mhz PIII will run something like that adequately. The gnome desktop environment is a bit more resource hungry than I'd like, but it's useable. One thing is certian, Linux is not ready for the masses. It's not ready for joe schmoe, even with services like Apt, and the plethora of documentation out there. That's not to say that the masses can't benifit from open source and Linux as well.
One of the things that has me bummed is the lack of shockwave support in Linux. I tried a lot of different things but there seems to be just no way. The only known way that I've found online is to shell out $50 for that Crossover software. However, according to it's own website, shockwave works, but not perfectly. There's no way I'm going to pay that kind of money for something that only sort-of works.

The other thing that irked me was not the fault of the Linux community, but Microsoft. (Though Microsoft can't take all of the blame.. that would be like holding the owners of a turnpike 100% accountable for ass-hat truckdrivers that cause accidents..) Anyway, I was reading an oline forum and some one mentioned that they havn't used an online relay service lately because they just switched to Linux and havn't gotten the Sun Jave Runtime Engine to install/work. I thought what a coinsidence because I had been reading up on how to get it to work myself. Anyway, I found some good documentation online for not only downloading the JRE in Ubuntu, but also "linking" the appropriate file to the right folder so that the plugin works in Firefox. So... After I got all that working I went to HIPrelay.com and loaded the java applet. it seemed to work but I was unable to type into the box. I tried it again after restarting my browser and the results were consistant. I sent an e-mail to their support, but they weren't helpful. They recomended that I download and install the microsoft virtual macine. Ugh. I sent another e-mail to politely reiterate my situation, and havn't heard back from them.

ok.. tune in next week when FJ writes "I love Vernie, she's so cute."

2005-09-11T22:01:00.000-05:00

Another week....

Vernie and I satarted Atkins this week. Some how it's harder this time. This is the first time for her, and she's allready noticing the change. I started a day later because the Captain and his family bought me dinner for helping him move some stuff. Being one to not pass up a free meal. Also, it's been tougher for me because I've been eating the wrong things. No caffiene though, That's been the hardest part of the induction phase. It really comes down to wanting it. You have to want something to get it. Right now I don't want it badly enough... it dosn't make sense.. how bad does my situation have to get before I want it badly enough to change? I've only gained back ~half of the weight I lost. One of the things I told myself was: "Loosing weight will make me [more desireable] to women". and I asked myself, "Which do you want more; that starchy thing or a hot date?"

Vernie and I have found a few recipies online and out of my Atkins book that we enjoy quite a bit, so that's helped us. I'm going to be more diligent in these next couple of weeks.

I think it's safe to say that the snails are 100% gone from the aquarium. I havn't found any since my last post. The other day we noticed that one of the tetras is much fatter than the other. We can tell them apart now.

This Friday I'm going back to Omaha for yet another vist to Boystown. I'll be exchaning my equipment for a different model, still not sure how well things will work with the phone. We'll just wait and see I guess.

I diddn't make any progress on any projects this weekend. Though I did see my parents and installed the OpenOffice beta on thier comptuer. I was also going to install the AOL instant messenger. But I won't install the latest piece of garbage. I had intended to install the last 4.x version, but diddn't have it on a disk. However today I found this site
. It has the old versions of lots of usefull software. I'm going to download the 4.8 versoin of AIM, the download AIM+. They don't need the garbage taht the newer version of Aim thust upon you and I don't yet want to set them up with a 3rd party All-in-one instant messenger. Vernie got me to take a serious look at Trillian, as it's her favorite IM clinet. and While it works, it's not great, and it's not the one to rule them all. I have been using Gaim and while it's nice too, it's just not what I want.
I'm seriously thinking about going back to seperate IM clinets. Aim 4.8 with Aim+, MSN 7.X with MSN+ ((be sure to not install the "sponser" software) and be sure to get the stuffplug for MSN+. It's the only way I've found to make MSN messenger open your hotmail in Firefox.) I won't be installing the Yahoo! IM client again. Not enough people I know use it. I also think I'll install google Talk. It's nothing special but the gui is nice.
I discovered that AOL has a neat feature tied into their instant messenger. If you have a screen name thingy on AIM, you can set it up to automaticly forward messages to your cell phone via SMS. I had an unused screen name "fjaimbot" that I had intended to use for an aim bot now that they're actually accepted by aol. Well, building a bot was too daunting a task for me so I dropped the idea. But If you want to send a text message to my ogo, just add fjaimbot to your buddy list.