| January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November |

December

Sunday, December 31, 23:52 CST (uploaded several days later)
I think I neglected to mention that I was going to be gone for a few days, with the usual Christmas-day trip to Kansas.

Considering that it was sort of a series of minor disasters, it was a good trip. I think.

There was snow at my Grandma B's house, which hasn't happened when we've been there for years. Some cousins had a high speed encounter with a rock. (In a gully, at the bottom of a steepish hill which is often affectionately referred to as Rock Hill, and which some have since implied might be a less than ideal choice for descending on an inner tube.) Watched True Grit, a film apparently made before Robert Duvall had learned to act. Sat around one night and argued politics and religion with an uncle and my Grandma Spencer, an experience that never fails to give me some perspective. Ate too much. Went sledding.

We've been back since Thursday. I should probably have updated this sooner, but I didn't. Such is life.

On the material gain front, people gave me some cool stuff. From my parents, there's a monster tin of Altoids, and a weird-cool brass bowl thing that makes some serious noise when you run a stick around the rim at just the right angle - some kind of self reinforcing harmonic thing, I think. From other family, there's food and clothing, which as a soon-to-be very broke college student I can certainly appreciate. My grandparents gave me a most excellent crockpot, which means I should really learn how to make something besides chili.

My Aunt Connie, who had most of her gifts for family stolen from the back of her RAV4 (weird little mini-SUV thing that's kinda fun to drive) gave me The Beatles: One (I think that's the title; the compilation of their #1 singles) and Led Zeppelin III, which seemed excessive.

Brent and Eric sent me DVD's of Serial Experiments: Lain, which also seemed excessive, and is exceptionally cool. Especially since they've been saying it's an absolute must-see for months. Before too long, I'll actually have access to a DVD player to watch them. (Thanks, guys.)

Big news at present would be that I'm actually building a new computer, something I've wanted to do for years. Do I really have much clue what I'm doing? Nope, but I guess there's no better way to learn. But more about that later.

Right now, I'm going to go to sleep and hope for epic dreams.

See you all in some other millenium.

Sunday, December 24, 13:41 CST
And already it's Christmas Eve.

Forgoing the usual list of names (is it a tradition if you've done it three times?), Merry Christmas, everyone.

(Ahhh, what the heck... Especially Brent, Eric, Erin, Stephen, Mike, Jesse, Ben, Rachel, rux, moon, tvb, Rif, Vash, Kes, MeanStreak, cat, Annakie, GaretJax, JohnLennon, Wyrd, kitten, FoolsRun, Bronweg, Capper, Zach, wombat, Axquat, Data, Hawk, Crayon, MlitiaGrl, Swooop, CornJob, and all ye other denizens of the 'net who've made this worthwhile...)

Saturday, December 23, 23:32 CST
So, I saw Proof of Life tonight.

In brief: Long. Boring.

Wednesday, December 20, 19:49 CST
Man, the fan on this laptop makes a lot of noise. And it's running constantly, too. That can't be good, can it?

Then I notice that the fan is actually located on the rear of the case. Less than an inch from the back of the docking station, where the airflow has got to be at least partially blocked. Now, granted, I'm no expert on these things, but isn't that maybe what you'd call a bad design decision? Laptops get *hot*, too.

Wednesday, December 20, 3:00 CST
Where to start here?

Finals went about as expected, which is to say good, aside from physics. (Some habits really do die hard.) I was done early Thursday afternoon, and took off for home shortly thereafter.

Decided not to haul the Ancient Pentium Beast home, since it would've added to the approximately half a ton of junk I already had to carry out to the car. So, here I sit, using my dad's laptop.

I won't complain much about using Win98, since there is a nice version of vim for Windows, mIRC is still one of the coolest pieces of software ever created, and PuTTY takes care of my telnet/SSH needs. Just wish recent official ICQ releases weren't so bloated.

Watched Lola Rennt Thursday night, actually managed to get a review written. In brief: Cool flick, and I need to watch more weird foreign stuff.

Friday night, the weather was supposed to be remarkably unpleasant, so I rented a copy of Gladiator, which turned out to be a dead tape. We wound up renting Keeping the Faith off the dish. Good flick, and I really ought to write a review. At 2:00 Saturday morning, the expected colossal storm still hadn't shown up... By 5:00, what must have been a 50-60 MPH wind had settled in for the day.

Sunday, a neighbor plowed out the drive for us. Made it to the mall in Sioux City late that afternoon for some pre-Christmas participation in the consumer feeding frenzy... Bought some books for gifts, and a copy of Kingdom Come (a comic compiled in graphic novel format) to read.

Got a (very) brief review of Kingdom Come written that night.

Yesterday, my dad and I managed to make it to town and back, though by the time we reached our road, visibility had dropped to complete white-out. This morning, the same neighbor plowed out our drive again. If you get the feeling that I not-so-secretly relish this kind of thing, well, you're right.

Ok, I've been on IRC for something like two hours. Arguing that perhaps the prohibition of alcohol would be a bad idea. "Weird" doesn't even begin to cover it, though "surreal" might.

I think I'm going to post this and go to bed.

Monday, December 11, 22:47 CST
Ars Technica: The Complete System Building Guide. Looks like a good place to start.

It seems quite likely that I won't be updating this page for the rest of the week, with finals and all. I'm debating hauling the ancient and venerable computer home over Christmas break, since we're not allowed in the dorms (!) 'til classes start again.

Guess it depends on whether or not I decide to dive in and start building the new system I've been dreaming about for, oh, 4 years or so...

Sunday, December 10, 15:02 CST
NASA Contacts Oldest Spacecraft on 35th Anniversary. Something about this story just warms the cockles of my geeky heart. I think Space.com needs to go on the list of sites I check semi-regularly.

Did little of anything much this weekend. Watched X-Men with the parents and one sister last night. Went to church, and then decorated the Christmas tree. Sometimes, a general lack of eventfulness is not a bad thing.

Finals week is here at last, which probably means I should be studying right now instead of typing this and arguing with Eric about interface design...

Saturday, December 9, 14:14 CST
A rather awful (though nowhere near as awful as I'd intended) piece of fiction written for a lit class.

Saturday, December 9, 1:42 CST
Just got done watching Pitch Black, which was good - a little better than I'd remembered, even - and Rules of Engagement, which was, well, iffy at best.

I think maybe I'll sleep now.

Wednesday, December 6, 19:27 CST
Well, the third and final installment of the Dune miniseries was last night.

Some day, someone will create the definitive film rendition of Dune, a production that will, somehow, encompass the sheer coolness that is the novel, and do so with a visual power that is awe inspiring.

This, pretty obviously, was not that production... But still, all in all... Not bad. It veered between Really Cheesy and Genuinely Cool from time to time, and there were some questionable decisions made, but in the end I'm far happier with this version than I ever expected to be. And the last half hour or so was carried off about as well as I could've hoped for.

(There's a bit of Dune commentary over on Lake Effect, along with a link to piece about an earlier failed movie attempt that would probably have been as bizarre as any film ever made.)

Wow. Opera's going to an advertising driven model - use the software no charge, and put up with ads, or register and get rid of them. I'm torn on how practically workable an idea this is - as far as I can tell, banner ads *just don't work* - but regardless, it does seem to indicate that they're having a hard time making money with their current shareware model. Not surprising - how many people are really willing to pay for a better browser? And of course they're sort of shooting themselves in the foot, expecting people who've registered once to pay again for major upgrades... There's a good chance I'll wind up paying for the Linux port, simply because it's good software I use a *lot*, but I've got to be in the minority here.

The way I see it, of course, the best revenue model would be one that opened up the code and somehow generated profit, but I'm not sure what that would be. How much money can you possibly make doing support for a web browser?

The one complaint I most often see levelled against free software (which, in point of fact is very nearly all the software I ever use, and the only kind I can ever see creating) is that you can't make money doing it. This is pretty obviously false (well, it seems obvious from where I sit), but it is a vast oversimplification / restatement of the simple fact that it's harder to make money on something that people don't have to pay for (something which, in point of fact, discourages people from paying for it in the traditional sense). Of course, since it's also pretty obvious from where I sit that commercial software costs too damn much and that the vast bulk of the consumer software industry is built upon an artificial, self perpetuating scarcity, this isn't really a *bad* thing. It's just that people creating (good, useful) software need and deserve compensation for what they're doing ("The spice must flow!"), and it's not always easy to see how to make that happen.

Not like I have a clue what to do about it. Here's hoping that a lot of people smarter than I am figure things out sooner or later...

Tuesday, December 5, 16:07 CST
Just finished up a review of The King's Peace.

Monday, December 4, 15:22 CST
Ahhhhh, finally. My natural ability to ignore every deadline, obligation, requirement and mutually exclusive demand upon my finite time and limited mental capacity until I'm trapped in a collapsing series of miniature crisis points for weeks on end has reasserted itself... The suspense was killing me.

Old habits die hard, it seems.

So, what's happened lately?

Went to a Lorie Line Christmas concert in Omaha with my family last Thursday. Not the kind of music I usually listen to, but it was good. An amazing amount of talent there.

Definitely time to expand my musical horizons.

Music Plug of the Day: Ever seen High Fidelity? If not, you should. At any rate, the soundtrack contains some excellent stuff. Been listening to the Beta Band obsessively for the past couple of days - search your filesharing service of choice for "Dry the Rain" or "Needles in my Eyes". Definitely on the Actually Going to Buy This Music list.

(There's a URL scheme we could use. Some standardized way to link to searches for media files...)

Also managed to hit a bookstore Thursday, and picked up a copy of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. It was excellent, in that weird and not at all what I'm used to way. Need to read more PKD... Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was good, and "Second Variety" is one of the most effectively creepy things I've ever read.

I watched (of course) the first installment of Sci-Fi's Dune miniseries last night. And here's the amazing thing: It Didn't Suck.

It was far from perfect, and of course they've still got 2/3 of their alotted time left with which to botch the whole thing, but so far... Not bad. Not bad at all. More on that later, I'm sure...

Friday, December 1, 16:19 CST
Day Without Weblogs.

November

Wednesday, November 29, 21:01 CST
Today's AWAD quote bears repeating:

In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter. -Chinese proverb

Anyway...

Watched "Comes the Inquisitor" earlier tonight. Powerful episode, and probably my favorite, next to "Z'ha'dum" (which is pretty much my favorite hour of television, ever).

SFC has been running heavy promos for their upcoming Dune miniseries... And you know I'll be watching. You know I'd be watching even if I *knew* it was going to be a trainwreck, but the trailers are enough to give me a sliver of hope. A very, very small sliver. Not really even one you could see with the naked eye. But it's there.

(I'm assuming the SFC's section for the miniseries is at /dune/, but I can't get past their Flash detection with Opera to check, and I find that I don't even care enough to check it out with Lynx. Not exactly the first instance of 'net cluelessness they've demonstrated, I guess.)

Skimming through a 2-year old IRC log last night, I came across an argument over whether anything worthwhile would ever come of the rumored Sci-Fi Channel Dune project...

Wonder if I can finish a re-read by Sunday night?

Monday, November 27, 15:50 CST
Finished up my brief Unbreakable review, added a bit to yesterday's update.

Now back to working on one of those ambitious ideas...

Sunday, November 26, 17:15 CST
I'm back. As ever, with the usual host of ambitious ideas that accumulate every time I'm away from a computer for a few days, which will probably go nowhere.

Thanksgiving was mostly good; we went to my grandma's house, saw relatives, ate too much, the usual. Well, not entirely the usual, but it was good anyway. Saw my cousin Rachel, who's getting married next year. And wow, is that still a strange thought.

Everything changes.

Managed to read Jo Walton's The King's Peace, and see Unbreakable. Both good, and both deserving of a full length review. Have most of the Unbreakable review written, in fact... Just need to finish it up and post.

Using the Mac at home last night, I downloaded iCab, a lightweight (1.2 meg) shareware web browser. As a rule, I don't envy Macintosh users their choice of software, but iCab is definitely one of the few exceptions. Renders pages nicely, easily customizable, and packed with cool little touches. Stuff like a built in HTML validator, image and JavaScript filtering, and graphical counterparts to Lynx features like listing all of the links on a page and making actual use of LINK tags...

Tuesday, November 21, 12:02 CST
Ahhhh, done for the week. Thanksgiving break is a goodness.

Handy tip for making life easier under Linux: Start up an xterm, set the font size to Small or lower (hold down control and right click in the window, you'll get a handy popup), resize it to a cute little box, stick it in a corner. Then whenever you feel the need to run some random command but don't need it to be interactive, you can just alt-tab or move the mouse over it instead of starting a new terminal. If you need to look at output, piping it to xless seems to work quite well, and if you *do* need to open it in another xterm, using xterm -e command & is easy enough...

I'm fairly certain there're dockapps that do the same thing, but at the moment I'm too lazy to go looking.

JMS' latest column is the kind of advice I ought to be taking.

Anyway, think I'll go home and be indolent for a while now. In case I don't write anything here for the remainder of the week, happy Thanksgiving, all!

Monday, November 20, 23:54 CST
Gurney: Wow, you're right. I could rattle off a BASIC program in no time at all right now. It's still...right there.

'Course, I did write approximately two billion cheesy little text games in BASIC, so that might have helped....

Brennen: LOL!

I'd say you topped my output by approximately half a billion.

Gurney: heh. As a local sword swallower puts it, "Evidence of a mis-spent youth."

Monday, November 20, 15:52 CST
Listening to "The Squirming Coil" and playing with a slinky.

(Phish on dmoz)

Just spent several hours rearranging Ye Olde Dorm Room. That was way too thought intensive.

Watching my roommate re-install Windows, after a week of increasing frustration with a bizarre bug that pops up a little "Setting up Personalized Settings" box as it starts and then freezes. Can't help but feel that I should've figured it out by now, but I'm pretty much clueless.

Oh yeah... Laurel won, 34-0. And watching that definitely would've been cooler than, say, taking an essay test over the French Revolution. Though actually I'd have to say my world history class is probably the one I enjoy most, at least in terms of the subject matter.

"Have you ever heard of a thing called an assassin? They're known for assassinations." - Some guy out in the hall

Friday, November 17, 1:37 CST
Well, I was going strong on the whole studying thing, 'til I succumbed to the lure of playing Dead or Alive 2, a game I've become downright addicted to, in a friend's room.

Walking back to my dorm across a silent campus, watching snow drift down from a nearly cloudless sky is an experience I would have missed, if I'd been better at resisting temptation. I think I'm ahead for the night, one way or another.

Thursday, November 16, 19:27 CST
Well, I've been sitting here all day, doing essentially nothing, beyond aimless web surfing and messing with e-mail. I didn't even read rec.arts.sf.written, which means I'm probably about 5000 articles behind. I would check, but if I did that it'd be far too easy to read a post or two or a hundred, and I probably wouldn't escape for at least two hours.

Stuff bookmarked while aimlessly browsing:

I'd really kind of like to go to Lincoln, and watch Laurel play for the (Nebraska, class C2) state football championship tomorrow. Unfortunately, I have a quiz at 9:00 and a test at 10. The game is at 11. I suppose I could have found a way around this, if I'd actually thought about it prior to this afternoon.

(Interesting to note that though the LCHS site is still an ugly mess, it's an ugly mess considerably improved over what was there when I was supposed to be working on it, a year ago. High on the list of things I'm quite grateful my name isn't attached to in any visible way.)

Now I am going to do some studying.

I keep meaning to stop procrastinating, but I always wind up putting it off a few days...

Thursday, November 16, 13:35 CST
Well, it didn't snow enough to get any class cancelled... Ah well.

Messing around with that little table cell over to the right of the page. Nothing much of any use there yet.

Thursday, November 16, 0:22 CST
Snow, I say, SNOW!

Tuesday, November 14, 19:51 CST
"If only for a little while..."

I've missed a couple of good B5 episodes, but I did catch "Acts of Sacrifice" tonight. One of my favorite season 2 eps.

Great. Not only is Amazon.com spamming me with increasing frequency - now they're doing it in HTML. (Let's stamp out inline-HTML E-Mails.)

I mentioned Bright Weavings, Guy G. Kay's official site, a while back... There's some nifty new stuff up there - a speech on privacy and fiction which makes some interesting points (especially when considered in the light of Kay's almost-but-not-quite-historical fantasy), and a low traffic discussion board.

Monday, November 13, 16:07 CST
My dad dropped my keys off at the front desk... A definite relief.

Ever stop to think about the innumerable little tokens and talismans without which you'd find it almost impossible to move through society? Keys, licenses, cards, permits, stickers, badges, barcodes, tickets, certificates...

I sense the seeds of an interesting rant here, somewhere.

Ok, I said I was going to keep updating the little weblog like section over on POV, so I suppose I should go do that.

Sunday, November 12, 21:25 CST
Snow. Cold. Wind.

Might have a real winter this year.

Went home (of course) this weekend. Did very little of anything much. My Aunt Connie was here from Chicago, which is always cool.

Forgot my keys at home. Sometimes, I amaze even myself.

Watched K-State (marginally) beat Nebraska last night. As every year, in a room full of K-State alumni and native Nebraskans. Heck of a game, but there's no way I'm taking sides.

Poured a couple of candles this weekend, something I've been doing once in a while for years... It'd no doubt be a lot more exacting a craft if I knew what I was doing. Then again, how exacting can "melt wax, pour in mold" really get?

Wednesday, November 8, 21:25 CST
Just posted a review of Princess Mononoke.

Wednesday, November 8, 11:48 CST
To finish where I left off rambling about dedicated gaming systems...

I've never been a huge console gamer, though I have killed quite a few hours on machines (Nintendos and SNES's and Ataris and Gameboys and Playstations...) owned by friends. 2D platform games and beat 'em ups aside, the kind of stuff I enjoy hasn't really been done (or done well) on console systems - first person shooters and Wing Commander style space combat, for example.

These days though, with the lines between PCs and consoles blurring ever more, and a growing number of games that're worth the play time, it's getting much more tempting to buy one of the latest round of systems. Especially since the multiplayer dynamic on a console system is an entirely different thing from that you'll find in most computer games - not better, but equally worth experiencing, I think. Granted, a new computer provides more bang for the buck, and there's still no way a console system can keep up with the development of new PC stuff, but there are advantages to that - notice how much performance console developers manage to squeeze out of a static system like the Playstation, even now? I only wish PC game developers would even attempt to make that much of what they have to work with...

Er, anyway. Time to go to class again.

Wednesday, November 8, 8:46 CST
Well, Mystery, Alaska wasn't all that bad. Not great or anything, but it did have its moments. Would've been much improved if it weren't trying to cover so much ground, I think.

Woke up vaguely wondering who won the (US) presidential election, and how much I really cared... There's something gratifying about turning on the TV and finding out that no one else knows either.

Suppose I should go to class.

Tuesday, November 7, 23:11 CST
(Cool Music Plug: Goldfinger's cover of 99 Red Balloons rocks. Search your local Napster equivalent now. I figure out what album this is on, I'm buying it. Thank you, Much Music.)

Just spent a couple of hours playing Dead or Alive 2 in 4 player tag-team mode on a friend's DreamCast...

My first impression was "pretty but brainless" (very, very pretty)... After actually taking time to get used to the controls though, I think I'm hooked. It's maybe not quite as well rounded as something like Tekken 3, but it makes up for it with a control scheme and gameplay that are actually 3D, using the little analog doohickey above the direction pad on the DreamCast's controller to control movement on the ground, along with featuring walls and multilevelled combat arenas that actually have a big effect on play. And the 4 player tag team mode adds an incredible dynamic to the game that's probably the coolest multiplayer experience I've ever had on a console...

Rant to be continued after I finish watching Mystery, Alaska.

Monday, November 6, 18:54 CST
Sounds like Laurel's winning 14-6... Would've gone to the game, but it's sort of cold, windy, and snowing. Looks nice and picturesque from my window, but I'm guessing it'd suck to stand around in. Especially on top of a hill, facing directly into the wind...

Sunday, November 5, 18:31 CST
Ooh, new Simpsons.

Just spent a couple of hours getting sort of caught up on rec.arts.sf.written, came across a couple of cool links.

Jo Walton's "Relentlessly Mundane" is a good (if depressing) take on the young people transported to a fantasy world story.

If you've been reading George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, this looks very useful - summaries of all the chapters of A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, though there's not yet anything up for A Storm of Swords.

I went home this weekend, as usual... Spent yesterday outside, in the sun, moving things around and pounding on stuff. The sort of thing I think I need to spend more time doing.

Saw Charlie's Angels last night. Probably should've waited around for a quality film, but I have to admit that it was a guilty pleasure. Mileage will, of course, vary, but I'd say it's worth a rental. Or, heck, if nothing else is showing at ye olde mall multiplex, you could do far worse.

Wednesday, November 1, 23:21 CST
Another month just rushed past...

I spent last night standing around in a well-heated house, wearing a fuzzy hat and a heavy trench coat over a sweater.

Tonight, I sat on remarkably cold metal bleachers in a 30 mph wind wearing a light jacket over a t-shirt for several hours, watching a football game.

Story of my life.

Got a review of The Amber Spyglass written. Can't say I'm all that happy with it, but it's there - and hey, it serves its purpose well enough, I guess.

And I suppose I can always go back and revise it later... Or would that be dishonest? Probably.

Speaking of reviews and suchlike, I think I should link to Evelyn C. Leeper's page. Good stuff.

October

Monday, October 30, 23:27 CST
You know, initially, dropping the empty peanut shells back into the sack seemed like a good idea. As the peanuts become increasingly difficult to find, however, I realize that this may not have been the best long term solution to the shell disposal issue...

It's also a bad idea to type while shelling and eating peanuts.

Ok, so I just finished reading The Amber Spyglass, the final volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

And wow.

I need to write a full length review of this, I think, but I don't really feel up to saying anything worthwhile or even vaguely original about it tonight. And I do think it's deserving of an effort to do so. The same applies to Drunken Master and Mononoke...

For anyone out there who might have their e-mail address listed/linked on a web page, I came across a nifty idea that might help prevent spam bots from collecting it. Just use character entities to represent it. Never would've occurred to me, but it at least seems to work in all the browsers I use, and there's at least a chance that it'll help. They even have a little CGI up to convert plain text to character entities.

Sunday, October 29, 22:15 CST
Ok, so it's a mostly functional Opera beta. Nice, but there are a couple of bugs and ommissions that need obvious work. Then there's its tendency to occasionally freeze up not just its own window, but pretty much the entire X session for a while, especially when dealing with large images (and maybe large pages in general?). I'm not sure if it's just hammering the processor so much that everything slows to a crawl or what... Though come to think of it, Opera for Windows does sometimes do something similar when switching between a number of large files (unlike most browsers, Opera opens pages as sub-windows instead of using the one-page-one-window approach).

Still, it *is* a beta, and they're getting very, very close.

Meanwhile, I understand Mozilla continues to approach usability, though I suspect it will forever be beyond the capabilities of my present computer.

(A few minutes pass as I grab milestone 18 and fire it up...)

Wow. To all appearances, this is something like a very usable browser. The layout engine is certainly up to snuff, and though it's sluggish on my machine, I note a marked improvement over its performance the last time I gave it a try. I begin to think that perhaps things are looking up. (Of course, it did just sort of freeze up, and my loadmeter is skyrocketing...

Meanwhile, I saw both Legend of Drunken Master and Princess Mononoke, along with buying Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass. But I think I'll wait to talk about that 'til tomorrow. Right now, it occurs to me there are notes I should be poring over for a history test tomorrow...

Friday, October 27, 16:42 CDT
Ok, so I didn't go home quite yet.

Yes! A functional, installable, working version of Opera for Linux! And they even have a Debian package! And the interface actually looks better than the Windows version! Now if only it weren't obnoxiously time limited shareware that I'm going to have to pay for again if I want to keep using it!

Yes, I've become spoiled by software that's free in an intellectual sense and dirt cheap in a monetary one. Yes, I'll probably wind up paying for Opera again, both because it's Good Software, and because I harbor some faint hope that eventually the code may be opened.

Friday, October 27, 15:08 CDT
To quote Londo Molari, Oh, my aching head...

Well, so much for a reasonably good time between updates.

Would've written something yesterday, but I had to crank out most of a paper for a lit class. (Sure, I've known about it for weeks. I figure I do my best work 15 minutes before something's due.)

Before I leave for the weekend, have a list of stuff I think is worth linking to but can't really come up with any clever context for:

Tuesday, October 24, 18:16 CDT
Ooh, "Babylon Squared". A good time travel ep is such a rarity...

Zathras rules.

Tuesday, October 24, 16:26 CDT
KDE 2.0 is out, so I grabbed a copy. And yes, it is indeed Very Cool in a lot of ways. If you're running Linux and even vaguely interested in something like an integrated desktop, you really need to check this out.

Konqueror, the combined file manager / viewer / web browser, is especially impressive. Whether or not you like the concept, this is close to being what Microsoft would like Internet Explorer to be. On top of the file managing / viewing stuff, it would appear to be easily a good enough browser for every day use, and it sort of reminds me of Opera in terms of features and size. I'd love to quit using Navigator in favor of this entirely...

Unfortunately, for whatever reason (my computer being ancient and overstressed seems likely), KDE and all of its associated programs are way too slow to be usable.

Monday, October 23, 22:29 CDT
I'm back.

The weekend was good, mostly. K-State won, though not by much.

I did some reading over the weekend - Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, On Basilisk Station by David Weber, and Cross the Stars by David Drake.

Mere Christianity was well worth the read, which didn't come as too much of a surprise - Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia being among my favorite books, though I haven't re-read them for a few years.

On Basilisk Station is the first Honor Harrington book; an enjoyable piece of Naval Space Opera (for lack of a better classification) that apparently draws on both naval history and the Horatio Hornblower novels I've never actually read and probably should. I'll be seeking out the next book in the series, I think. Cross the Stars is kind of a Space Opera Odyssey set in Drake's Hammer's Slammers universe (military SF I've never read and probably should). Enjoyable, and maybe enough incentive to check out some of Drake's other stuff. I downloaded both books from Baen's free library, some e-books they're offering free (and in a nice variety of open formats) as part of their WebScriptions program. Read 'em on my Palm 3x. (This has turned into one of the best reasons to own a PDA, IMO.) Amazingly enough, what we appear to have here is a publisher actually being clueful about electronic publishing.

Wednesday, October 18, 13:35 CDT
Done with classes for the week. Gotta love fall break.

I'm heading to Kansas this weekend with the family; visiting grandparents and going to a K-State (where my parents both went) game. So probably no updates 'til Monday.

Hmm... Interesting. Very.

It's beautiful outside. One of those inexplicably warm Fall days with a perfect clear sky... I think I'm going to go find an excuse not to be inside a building. Maybe I'll just go lay in the sun and take a nap.

Tuesday, October 17, 21:46 CDT
Argh. Telemarketers.

One more call tonight and I think I'm leaving the phone off the hook.

It's worse than spam. At least you can delete spam without feeling even slightly rude. Fortunately, I think that little twinge of guilt I feel when summarily hanging up on someone is rapidly disappearing.

And somehow, I have remarkably little sympathy for someone whose job boils down to continual intrusive harassment of others on behalf of whatever company is unscrupulous enough to hire them.

And speaking of employment, I really ought to find some. Waaaay too much time on my hands. And yet, somehow, I never really get anything done. Might as well be making some money.

Spent some time this afternoon downloading some WM and GTK themes, and generally prettifying my desktop. For the time being, I think I'm going to defy convention and not post the obligatory screenshot(s).

Monday, October 16, 1:08 CDT
Just got severely beaten down in Tekken 3 on the Playstation. I would make some pathetic excuse about a lack of experience, but let's face facts: I have the reflexes of an arthritic tree sloth.

I do have to say the Tekken series are pretty much the best console fighters I've played since the days of Street Fighter 2 on the SNES, in terms of character balance and control. This one even comes close to making 3D elements a meaningful part of gameplay (though I think someone's going to have to come up with a radically different interface before these games really break out of the 2D mold).

Fall break is this week. Which means no lab tomorrow, and no classes Thursday and Friday... This is Good.

Friday, October 13, 19:30 CDT
Once, long ago, in the days of the original Quake and the endless list of weird and cool total conversion projects that it spawned, a couple of geniuses gave us a mod called Quake Rally. A full fledged arcade racing game done in a first person shooter engine... And if you have to ask why this is cool, well, you have my pity.

I've been playing a little classic Quake lately, and looking around for some of the nifty mods I messed with a few years back. So while looking for a place to grab the original Quake Rally, I stumbled across Quake 3 Rally. Yep, someone's making a sequel for Q3. Coooool.

Friday, October 13, 15:53 CDT
Hmm. Friday the 13th. I think I was born on a Friday the 13th.

:r !cal 2 1981

   February 1981
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7
 8  9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Yep.

Er, anyway...

Looks like I'm going to be working on Brent's anime project, once things get rolling. This should be an experience.

Just read an interview with Ian Murdock, the guy who founded Debian way back in the day, on slashdot.

Funny how my reading of /. has dropped off of late. Or more accurately, since it became way too much effort to wade through the comments in search of anything worth reading. Still, I do try to skim through the new posts once a day or so. Almost always see something worth taking a look at.

In all honesty, I'm frighteningly ignorant of what's going on in the rest of the world... Frex, I'm pretty sure all hell is breaking loose in Palestine right about now, and has been for a while... But that's about all I know, and that's only because I happened to glance at a newspaper yesterday for the first time in a couple of weeks.

I'm more plugged in than I've ever been before, and less in touch with nearly everything...

Wednesday, October 11, 21:03 CDT
"Believers" and "Survivors"... Both decent B5 eps I somehow missed the first time I watched the series.

Carp. The network (or at least our connection to the rest of the 'net) just went down. Hate that. Especially when I'm making a doomed attempt to catch up on 3 days worth of rec.arts.sf.written...

Ah, there we go. I'm connected again.

Tuesday, October 10, 16:20 CDT
Well, I'm running Window Maker with GNOME. A weird combination, but one that sort of works. WM just appeals to me, for some reason, it's nice and responsive on my machine, and the GNOME taskbar sort of fits nicely as a replacement for doubleclicking all those big icons.

Monday, October 9, 21:23 CDT
A honkin' list of Babylon 5 quotes.

What happens when people with too much time on their hands really like a song. Ditto.

What happens when disturbed people with too much time on their hands *really* like an episode of ST:TNG.

Saturday, October 7, 14:11 CDT
Well, I said it might be a while.

I just posted my review of A Storm of Swords. Said book being the principle reason I haven't spent much time online lately.

I just stumbled across what must be a fairly recent development - Bright Weavings is Guy G. Kay's authorized site, and definitely one of the better author's sites I've come across. All sorts of interesting content, and a very nice design (including one of maybe 3 worthwhile uses of JavaScript I've ever come across). If you've never heard of Kay or felt motivated to read his stuff, it's still well worth a visit - you might just be convinced.

(Robert J. Sawyer's sfwriter.com, though of a somewhat different character and not quite as well designed (frames... *shudder*), also comes to mind as an author's site with a ton of interesting content.)

Tuesday, October 3, 15:23 CDT
Page 250, taking a short break...

I've just been browsing around a little on Elfwood, one of the most amazing (if sometimes a tad slow) repositories of art I've ever seen anywhere.

Some stuff I've bookmarked there recently:

Monday, October 2, 22:26 CDT
Got up this morning, went to physics and history, struggled mightily to stay conscious, almost succeeded.

Ate a mediocre lunch.

Went to topics in lit, joined the rest of the class in desperately avoiding the attention of the teacher for an hour. Went to physics lab, botched experiment in pretty much every way possible. Stumbled out, half brain dead, after 3 hours of stultifying BS.

Ate dinner, watched "Infection" (as bad as I remembered, but actually not without some merit - a couple of good quotes, Sinclair's bit about why we need to stay in space).

Did 40 minutes worth of busywork for intro to CIT ("Files, Directories, Folders", "DOS File Management", "Using Files"...).

Played basketball for a while.

(Orange ball flies.
Running out of breath,
I suck.)

Discovered my tolerance for self-humiliation has, if anything, decreased since the days of junior high physical education.

Came back to the room, and a copy of A Storm of Swords (Eric, you rule!). Today is a Good Day.

And now, I have some reading to do. My next update may be a tad... Delayed.

Monday, October 2, 18:06 CDT
Ooh... "Infection", possibly the worst episode Babylon 5 ever produced, is on. Can't resist this.

Sunday, October 1, 19:12 CDT
Another month gone... Moved September's updates to the archives.

I saw Almost Famous last night.

It was good. More than that, it was great. One of maybe a half dozen things I've ever seen in a theater that prove to me that truly wonderful films are being done in my lifetime, and remind me why I sit through so much crap.

Need to write a full length review.

September

Thursday, September 28, 19:12 CDT
Just watched "Soul Hunter". Good ep, even though I pretty much hate the soul hunter character design...

The waterfight out in the hall seems to have escalated. I hear splashing.

Should really do that physics homework... Especially with that test coming up and all.

Thursday, September 28, 15:29 CDT
Well, I just spent something like 3 hours reading rec.arts.sf.written... I've been making one of my periodical doomed attempts to keep at least slightly caught up on the group. It's a little easier now that I have a permanent connection, but it's the kind of time-sucking activity that I'd probably be ill-advised to get too heavily into right now, even if I *could* keep up with it. And I'm just lurking... Forget about actually participating in the discussion.

(Actually, pretty much every time I've ever posted to usenet, I come off looking like (at best) a jackass. I'd use DejaNews to demonstrate this, but (perhaps mercifully), their archives now only go back to May '99.)

Wednesday, September 27, 19:31 CDT
Watched "Midnight on the Firing Line" on Sci-Fi a little earlier...

B5 in widescreen is cool. Actually, B5 is just plain cool. I had forgotten how much I enjoy this show.

Of course, I'll probably enjoy the sometimes mediocre, and once or twice downright awful, first season more knowing both how much better it gets, and where it's going (how many shows do you know of that foreshadow things that'll happen 4 seasons later in the *first* episode?).

Commercials and squashed sped up credits are annoying (though at least the SFC has promised to run the credits for episodes where it actually matters unsquashed).

Wednesday, September 27, 17:43 CDT
Reading an article on freshmeat about software packaging for Linux distros. Surprisingly, though a lot of the comments are essentially .deb vs. .rpm, it's actually a pretty thoughtful discussion about the topic (rather than, say, a juvenile flamewar).

Personally I pretty much love Debian's package system. It's obviously not perfect, but I'm pretty sure they're on the right track, and most of the time installing/upgrading stuff couldn't be easier, even on a Mac or Windows box.

instmon, a shell script that tracks stuff you install. Looks useful for keeping track of things you compile from scratch rather than install from a binary package.

Wednesday, September 27, 16:16 CDT
dircproxy looks interesting - an IRC server proxy that keeps a connection to a server open for you, and lets you connect with a standard IRC client from anywhere.

I sort of wonder if anything's being done these days to adapt or expand IRC... Why, for example, shouldn't it be able to function well in the instant messenger space?

(Ok, I know that's a complex question and that there're fundamental differences... It's a question stemming from the simple fact that, put bluntly, most instant messaging services suck in a variety of ways, whereas IRC is IMO actually good.)

Tuesday, September 26, 21:52 CDT
Well, KDE certainly seems cool at first glance. Except that it took forever to load, and it's being painfully sluggish for some reason, this is definitely worth checking out further. Looks to be ahead of GNOME in a number of ways, lagging behind in others. At least initially, there's definitely more of a feeling of cohesiveness to the whole thing, and a more complete set of basic apps and config tools.

(It's officially in Debian now, BTW. apt-get install task-kde, and away you go.)

Abrupt random subject shift (now there's something HTML needs a tag for): Gotta link to the The Annotated Dennis Miller.

Some tweaking of settings makes KDE a little more responsive, but not nearly enough.

Wow, do I really need to be studying for a history test.

Tuesday, September 26, 15:37 CDT
Would someone explain to me why most of the spam I've been getting lately is advertising bulk e-mailing lists?

How effective can it possibly be to market your product to the people it serves to harass on a daily basis?

Tuesday, September 26, 14:36 CDT
Think I use too many ...'s?

Ellipsis
El*lip"sis, n.; pl. Ellipses. L., fr. Gr. ? a leaving, defect, fr. ? to leave in fall short; ? in + ? to leave. See In, and Loan, and cf. Ellipse.
1. (Gram.) Omission; a figure of syntax, by which one or more words, which are obviously understood, are omitted; as, the virtues I admire, for, the virtues which I admire.
2. (Geom.) An ellipse. Obs.

Er, anyway. I just went to the W3C site to make sure I remembered how to do a definition list (like the one above). Noticed once again that there're all sorts of nifty HTML tags that get less use than they should. Stuff like <abbr>, <acronym>, and <cite>. I should really redo this page in something other than HTML 3.2... XHTML, maybe?

Tuesday, September 26, 1:28 CDT
Well, I'm downloading KDE... I've been using GNOME considerably longer than I thought I would (and mostly liking it), so I figure I might as well give the other desktops a chance.

Some genius just wedged a little stack of pennies in between a door and a doorframe down the hall, which (interestingly enough) keeps the door from unlocking. Juvenile, yes, but good to know...

Really ought to find some kind of rope ladder or something that could be lowered from our window. Just in case.

Listening to a CD of Aaron Copland music... Good as this stuff is, I *still* can't help thinking Beef... It's what's for dinner. every time I hear it.

Monday, September 25, 19:00 CDT
Spent last night compiling a new kernel. Well, actually several of them... Finally got it right on the 3rd try, I think. I've got sound working now, which is cool - and was surprisingly easy, what with the nifty GUI configuration tool. I'd probably only have needed to go through it once, if I'd remembered to configure it for the network the first time.

Now I just need to figure out how to get ALSA working right. And it'd be cool to be able to access stuff like the shared printers and drives on this network. I think the kernel's configured properly for it, I just need to figure out what other software I need...

Sunday, September 24, 20:19 CDT (posted later)
Ahh, the Linux console. Refreshing, once in a while, after all those flashy chrome-heavy GUIs... Sometimes you just want a little text.

I'm back at the dorm, after spending another uneventful weekend at home.

Spent some time helping my dad cut down a (big, uncooperative, you might even say vengeful) walnut tree this afternoon... He bought all the walnuts in a grove about 20 miles from home, with the intention of getting as much lumber out of them as possible, and then (this is where it gets vague) somehow realizing a profit on the whole deal. We're better than half done, but I suspect we'll be working on it for quite a while. Then there's figuring out something to do with the wood... Furniture? Roll-top desks?

There's something oddly satisfying about running a chainsaw. A satisfaction which probably stems partly from the fact that I haven't yet managed to inflict grievous injury on my own cherished person with one. Despite being perhaps one of the clumsiest individuals alive.

Have you ever thought about how much havoc a small group of determined people with chainsaws could wreak? Forget bad horror movie chase scenes with screaming coeds and nutjobs in masks. Picture phone and electric lines downed, trees dropped across roads... Throw in a 4 wheel drive pickup, some log chain, a pair of wire cutters, plenty of gas, maybe some black powder or TNT...

What, like *you've* never indulged in a little idle speculation about waging small scale war against civilization?

Thursday, September 21, 10:36 CDT
How is it possible to reduce something as varied and fascinating as the entire scope of human visual art to a mind numbing lecture on focal points and balance?

How about the way every introductory computer course I've ever been exposed to seems aimed at completely obscuring everything mysterious and wonderful that first drew me to computers behind an impenetrable wall of unspeakably bland BS?

I would rant further, but I've got Intro to Computer Information Technology in 10 minutes...

Wednesday, September 20, 15:35 CDT
It's the 20th of September. I've been here 5 weeks... How'd that happen? Am I permanently afflicted with a disorder that prevents me from perceiving the passage of long periods of time? Or is it just that there's so little actual change in my day to day existence that everything blurs into a single memory?

("Guess I'm stuck in a dream, surrounded by colored leaves on the ground...")

This is one of those days you can tell it's getting on towards Fall. Chill, windy, can't quite decide whether it should cloud up and rain, leaves blowing around... People walking slightly hunched over, hands in pockets, the way that says if it wouldn't look so undignified they'd break into a run and get somewhere warm.

It's time to start burning stuff... Piles of leaves, sticks, firewood, whatever.

Hot beverages, pots of excessively hot chili, crisp air and wood smoke, dead leaves, burning stuff, smoking cheap cigars and drinking cold beer while burning stuff, short days and nights cold enough to justify sleeping under 50 pounds of blankets, that certain quality in the angle and tone of the light that tells you it's Fall, even on those days when it's hot enough to be mid-July...

It's almost enough to make up for the end of Summer.

Tuesday, September 19, 19:56 CDT
The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord is either one of the funniest things I've ever read, or good practical advice.

Monday, September 18, 19:01 CDT
Curious about the kind of info crumbs your browser is leaving scattered in access logs across the web? iPiD can be educational.

A friend and I were trying to figure out the author/title of a story we'd read for a highschool English class... Turns out it's "The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell. Would make a decent movie, if it hasn't already been done. (The plot has certainly been used often enough.)

Gotta love the Gallery of CSS Descramblers. Talk about making a point and hammering it into the ground...

Monday, September 18, 17:20 CDT
I hate Mondays.

At least I'm done with classes for the day.

Sunday, September 17, 17:36 CDT
Cool. Just got back from eating to discover we've got a rug and a dorm fridge... This place is steadily becoming more livable. (More full of junk, sure, but how else would you define "livable"?)

The SFC had a decent little chat with Jeffrey Willerth, the guy who played Kosh on B5, which they're going to be airing starting the 25th, in widescreen... Can't wait.

A Storm of Swords is out in the UK... Time to re-read A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings in preparation...

I watched The Boondock Saints last night... *Excellent*, IMO.

Thursday, September 14, 17:36 CDT
Well, turns out eGroups just sticks a 5 line (including the dividers) text ad at the top of each message. Possibly tolerable.

I'll look for other alternatives (such as shelling out the few bucks a month for one free of ads), but this seems like it'd be worth a shot.

Of course, I have no idea how well the concept of a family mailing list will work. Might fall completely flat, but why not try it?

(CarolAnn, if you happen to be reading this, e-mail me at bbearnes@hardlink.com. Don't have your address.)

Thursday, September 14, 14:11 CDT
I've been thinking about setting up a mailing list of some sort for my extended family on the Bearnes side, since it seems like most of us have access to e-mail these days... Not really sure how to go about it, though.

eGroups is tempting - they basically provide a free list server with the option to access (as well as moderate) it via their web site... Of course, you know there has to be a catch... You can't just provide a service like this on a huge scale out of the goodness of your heart with no business model. (A catch other than it appears Yahoo just bought them out...) I assume they're working on an advertising model, which might or might not be worth the trade off. Just depends on how intrusive the advertising would be, I suppose - do they send separate e-mails, or append ads to every message sent through their service? Or maybe just depend on the banner ads on their web site? (I'd think that'd be risky.)

Note that it doesn't say *anything* about advertising anywhere on their site, that I've been able to find.

Ahhh, here we go. "Check the boxes to receive special offers about your favorite interests!". I'll give them bonus points for not having any of the checkboxes pre-selected. But you know you'd regret the decision to let them spam (ok, legally I suppose it would constitue solicited commercial e-mail and therefore not quite spam, but either way it'd suck) you... The question is, do they give the same option to everyone who joins a list?

Argh! Of course they require cookies, and I'm running junkbuster... Ok, so add egroups.com to the domains allowed to send me cookies...

Guess I'll give this a shot.

Wednesday, September 13, 21:11 CDT
Just finished reading The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman. Um, wow. This trilogy (His Dark Materials) is going places I never expected... Which in this case is good. *This* is the sort of thing fantasy should be doing.

(Some thoughts on fantasy, if I haven't linked to this before: Beating a Dead Horse: elvesndwarves)

Wednesday, September 13, 18:46 CDT
"Hmm... we're the de-facto gateway between Usenet, essentially the truest surviving bastion of the Old Net and an unbelievably rich stream of diverse and in-depth content, and the Web, essentially the closest thing the Internet has to a unified interface and the only part of it familiar to millions of users... How can we best capitalize on this?"

"I know! Let's obscure all connection to Usenet, drop the part of our name that gives it any meaning, and become a portal site! We can be about, um, e-commerce!"

"I like it! Now we just need a slogan..."

"I've got it... 'We help you decide what products to buy and where to buy them.'"

"Yes! Let's do this, people!"

(Ok, to be fair, they do have a more direct Usenet service up at dejanews.com these days. I wonder if intelligence might one day prevail and see them change their focus again... [Addendum: Considering that their massive archives of everything prior to 1999 are still missing, it seems unlikely. Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to make decisions like this.])

Tuesday, September 12, 12:47 CDT
Courtesy of AWAD, one of the best quotes I've seen recently:

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -Niels Bohr, physicist (1885-1962)

(So I'm contributing to a culture where all wisdom is distilled into sound bites and one-liners or disregarded... So what?)

Monday, September 11, 22:21 CDT
How many of the IMDb's bottom 100 movies have you seen?

If you're much interested in pen & paper gaming or free software, this interview and the stuff at opengamingfoundation.org are interesting, to say the least.

Monday, September 11, 20:21 CDT
Maybe things are back to normal now...

Ever notice how if there's something you really want to do on the Unix command line, there's almost certainly already a way to do it, provided you can somehow figure out which obscure little switch or what syntax to use?

Monday, September 11, 19:59 CDT
Now I *know* I'm wasting bandwidth...

Oh well, this *is* pretty nifty. Should save me all sorts of messing around with FTPing stuff.

Granted, it's nowhere near as good as redesigning the site and building some kind of real backend for it, but how soon am I going to get that done anyway?

Somewhat depressing to note that this is pulling in a bunch of hits. Do I *really* want people's first (or only) introduction to my writing to be badly written Quake fic?

Monday, September 11, 19:42 CDT
Playing with weex, an FTP synchronization tool that basically makes a remote directory match a local one. So, for example, you just stick a copy of your web site in a local directory, edit it there, and run weex when you want to upload it.

I think I'm wasting quite a bit of bandwidth in the process, but somehow I just can't bring myself to feel terribly guilty.

D'oh!

Just deleted everything in my cgi.bin directory... No problem, I can re-upload. Must be because I told it to ignore the local copy. This ain't exactly what I'd call intuitive.

Grr. I'll bet all those permissions are reset.

Sunday, September 10, 21:27 CDT
Just attempted to play a little basketball... The less said about that, the better, I think.

Nifty Linux desktops to try: XFce

Themes.org is an enjoyable way to kill time... Not to mention one that looks pretty nifty in a graphical browser and acceptable in textmode.

Worth a read: "The evidence of our hollowing out as human beings".

Should go study for a history test...

Saturday, September 9, 18:15 CDT
Just watched Nebraska beat Notre Dame... All sorts of fun, football nut that I am. ;)

Actually, that was way too close a game. Especially for my er, excessively tense room mate.

S'pose I could start following this stuff, just so as not to stare blankly ahead whenever someone mentions a score, ranking, or statistic.

Just uploaded a brief, badly written review of Hollow Man to POV.

Saturday, September 9, 11:17 CDT
You'd think it'd be easy enough to update this on a daily basis. Oh well.

Finally moved some old updates off this page. I should really break that down by month and automate it somehow or another. A 70k file with 8 months worth of updates is probably not especially good design.

I went to a highschool football game in Laurel last night... First game they've played on the new (I don't even want to speculate on how expensive) field (complete with track, bleachers, press boxes, big lights, and insufficient parking). It was depressing as hell, for some reason.

Read a little bit of The Decameron for a topics in lit class.

Wednesday, September 6, 23:52 CDT
Woo!

It's amazing what can keep me amused.

Turns out you can stick a cgi exec in a file you're including, and it'll still work fine... Server Side Includes are fun. (And just think, I could have spent that time reading a textbook... Good thing I have my priorities straight.)

Wednesday, September 6, 23:25 CDT
Dumb & Dumber... Intellectually stimulating it ain't, but hey, it's entertainment.

Figured out the counter thing. Sort of. Every time I tackle even the smallest scripting problem, I remember how truly lacking my skills are. On the plus side, that means that solving utterly trivial problems gives me that "I am a genius!" feeling for a good 5 minutes.

Anyway, now I can put my puny little counter script on every page here and start collecting statistics to further my insidious plans. Cue evil laughter. Hmm... Wonder what would happen if I stuck the counter script inside the little nav bar that I include in all these files...

(Ever get the feeling that I'm talking to myself here?)

Wednesday, September 6, 20:51 CDT
Messing with lame hacked up counter script... Thinking about getting all ambitious with this site... [error occurred while processing this directive]... Grr. Maybe if I... No, but why wouldn't that... ARGH! Ok, so I'll just take the easy way out and... Whaddya mean "Making HTTP connection"? You've been making a connection for 5 minutes... Frustration setting in...

Roommate's going to watch a movie. Good idea. Drink a pop, relax, come back to this later.

Pop machine eats change.

Things are just not going my way lately...

Wednesday, September 6, 16:31 CDT
You never know when something like a Glossary of Postal Terms is going to come in handy...

Tuesday, September 5, 20:25 CDT
Posted a review of Highlander: Endgame to POV. Next up, Hollow Man: The kind of film that makes you wish you had the power to inflict physical pain on writers and directors.

Just occurred to me I need to write a lab report thingy for physics before tomorrow. Good thing I'm not out having a life or anything...

Wish I could connect to Hardlink's servers to post this or check my e-mail...

Monday, September 4, 11:29 CDT
Wow, my hands are sore. Waaay too much Quake last night. Especially since I couldn't figure out how to get my mouse working with svgalib...

If you set up the traditional WASD scheme, use the right and left arrows to turn, and the up arrow to fire, you can get sort of decent control with just a keyboard, but it's hard on the hands and you still don't get any control over vertical aiming. The mouse is the only way to go.

Remind me not to ride a bike in LA.

My first couple weeks of college have been pretty much entirely uneventful. Not exactly surprising, I guess. Nor is it terribly surprising that this campus is completely empty today... People leave on the weekends anyway, and with today off, I think there might be all of 20 people scattered around here... Suppose I'll go home for a while.

Theoretically, POV was supposed to go "live" today, which probably means I should be writing some content for it. Think I'll go do that.

August

Wednesday, August 30, 8:39 CDT
Weird. Can't connect directly to Hardlink's servers, for some reason. Had to connect from the local mail / shell server and paste the last couple of updates into vi instead.

This is too early to be awake. Going to have to do better with my schedule next semester.

And it's off to physics...

Tuesday, August 29, 23:21 CDT
Well, I was going to get something done, but instead I wound up watching Strange Brew. If you haven't seen it, well, um... Let's just say it's that rare kind of stupid bad comedy that's entertaining anyway.

Tuesday, August 29, 14:34 CDT (posted later)
Wow, I have been out of touch... I see Debian has finally officially released v2.2, which I've more or less been running for a while now. LinuxPlanet has a good review. It also looks like they're going to be doing a testing distribution that'll be somewhere in between the stable (i.e., really out of date) and unstable (i.e., as bleeding edge as the distro gets, and buggy) trees.

I see Stephen's been updating his page again. And, it'd appear, leading a far more interesting life than I. Go figure. ;)

Did I say 20 k/sec? I've been getting 45k... This is like... Ok, I can't think of a good metaphor. But it would involve some sort of illegal narcotic.

Monday, August 28, 18:05 CDT
I'm back.

Got my computer back early this morning, after a certain amount of frustration. (Ok, maybe that's an understatement.) So I'm finally networked.

The network policy here sucks. Of course.

But hey, at least I've got a connection. And they can't ban *all* of the cool things you can do with a permanent connection. (20 k/sec transfer rates... Ahhhhhhh.)

Anyway, the past week hasn't been especially eventful. I've read a couple books, gone to classes, and that's about it.

As usual, I should be doing physics instead of this.

I had intended to write a lot here, but it can wait.

Sunday, August 20 (sometime or another)
Well, I'm officially a college student.

I am sitting in a dorm room doing nothing.

I should probably be out socializing or something.

Wait, I think I see a familiar pattern emerging here.

No network connection yet. Have to take the computer to the network services people and get a card installed. Which probably means it'll be a while before this actually gets posted.

I haven't checked my e-mail, IRCed, surfed, or fired off an ICQ message in long enought that major withdrawal symptoms should probably be setting in soon. Hands aren't shaking yet, but I keep feeling an urge to make the modem dial something, anything...

My room mate (one J. Anderson) has a copy of Mallrats. Think I'll go watch it.

"And he said to me, 'Bro, how the hell else am I supposed to get the gerbil out?'".

Saturday, August 12, 16:11 CDT
Just got off the phone with Brent and Eric... Effective conversation - voice is just more efficient in a lot of ways, but at the same time I realize why I like IRC so much for this sort of thing: You don't have to worry about *hearing* anyone with text. Or interrupting them.

Looks like I'm leaving tomorrow for a somewhat badly scheduled family reunion at Mahoney State Park (wow, is that ever a badly designed site... What sane reason is there for using 6 frames on a page and failing to provide any alternative?).

Finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo. *Excellent*.

Saw Hollow Man last night. I'll never get those hours back, but at least I didn't pay for it.

I suspect this will be my last update for a while. Could be wrong, but if not I'll probably be in a dorm room (Morey hall, for anyone else who's going to WSC) and on a network by the time I get around to doing anything with this page again.

Thursday, August 10, 16:40 CDT
Got home about an hour ago, I think. It's been a mostly uneventful week. Spent the last couple of days alternating between talking to relatives, reading, and eating. Yesterday I walked around a creek with my little sister. We almost caught a monster frog that was blind in one eye.

It was hot. 100+ degrees every day.

I read Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follet (Folett? something). Thick historical novel set in the middle ages, with monks and cathedrals and wars and stuff. One of those books that frustrated me most of the time I was reading it, but I decided I liked it when it was over.

I'm about half way through The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas is cool.

Sunday, August 6, 19:41 CDT
Random observations on animal life: There're ~13 barn swallows sitting in a row on the power line outside the South windows of this building. I suppose some of them must be the ones that were in the nest on our front porch. They've been nesting there ever since we tore down the old barn and all the assorted out buildings that used to be the other half of this property...

Funny little birds, barn swallows.

After reading this, I checked out Kevin and Kell... A surprisingly good comic that's sort of hybrid furry/BBS/Internet/family humor. (Yes, that is in fact a bizarre combination. But hey, it works.)

I repeat my assertion that the 'net will be the salvation of the comic strip as a medium, even as newspapers demonstrate ever greater cluelessness about one of the coolest art forms ever created...

I'm taking off tomorrow morning with the family for Kansas. Probably be at my grandparents' house for a good part of the week. Think I'm going to take a big stack of books and make up somewhat for how little reading I've done this summer.

Probably also be good to spend some time away from anything resembling a keyboard.

And now I'm going to go look through assorted paperwork and figure out how deeply in debt I need to put myself to pay for college. Oh, this is going to be *fun*.

Saturday, August 5, 9:25 CDT
Well, the fair is over. And life returns to what passes for normal around here, for a while. The tattered remnants of summer will limp on for a week or two more. And wow, that's some awful metaphor mixing. This is definitely earlier than I should be awake after reading that late...

To quote NTK, "Oh, The Man is going to *love* this."

I've been trying to stay off the computer lately, since my wrists are acting up again... Which probably means I should go do something else right now.

If updates are a little scarce around here for a while, there's my excuse. And I'd almost started a decent streak, too. Oh well. I should probably be concentrating on writing some stuff for POV anyway, if I'm going to be typing anything.
(top)

Tuesday, August 1 (posted later)
Updated my software and written stuff pages a bit.

And now it's off once again to the excitement of the Dixon County Fair (been going on since Sunday, actually). Tractor pulls, livestock, and greasy overpriced food - just a few of the joys of participating in our multi-faceted agricultural heritage. And the thing is, I have absolutely no idea if I'm being sarcastic when I say that.

I suppose once the fair's over, I should sort of start thinking about college. However, for the moment, I think I'll pretend the summer's not about to come to a screeching halt.
(top)

July

Sunday, July 30, 23:51 CDT
Just got back from seeing X-Men again with a friend. Would've been home sooner, but about 10 minutes in, the film jammed (well, looked like it jammed) and melted. Impressive effect... Never actually seen that happen. They took their own sweet time getting it fixed, but at least we got free movie passes out of it.
(top)

Saturday, July 29, 12:05 CDT
Interesting proposal on freshmeat, suggesting that distributed file sharing be integrated into web browsing as a way to share the load on web servers. Pretty cool idea, even if there are probably a billion things standing in the way of its implementation. Looks like they're serious about doing it, at any rate.

Hrm. An AICN bit that mentions Fox doing a Stainless Steel Rat movie. I love the Rat books (well, up until The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Army, at any rate), and there's no reason they couldn't make good movies, but I have a terrible suspicion that if it does get made, it's going to suck.
(top)

Thursday, July 27, 21:20 CDT
I meant to go to sleep at a sort of reasonable hour last night, but instead I read The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle. Good book. Fairy tale, but aware of it... The kind of book I'd call the best kind of fantasy, except that I like the other kinds at least as much. If that makes any sense.

Less than a month left now before I'll be starting college... Weird.

Read a couple of interesting Napster / music distribution related pieces on Salon today. Why the music industry has nothing to celebrate, which isn't exactly news to a lot of us, but well written anyway, and Courtney Love does the math, which is a surprisingly good (and surprisingly clued in) rant from an artist's perspective about the music industry, 'net distribution, and all that good stuff.

(Hmm... Yet another distributed file sharing system. But this one appears to have a well thought out design and actual security. I think I'd like to try running this, once I have an always-on connection.)

Surfing freshmeat, I stumbled across gentoo, a graphical filemanager for Linux that uses a two-panes with buttons at the bottom design. I suppose the interface is sort of hideously cluttered, but it seems efficient and has some cool features. Maybe more purely useful than GNOME's included version of the GNU Midnight Commander, or at least a good complement to it.

One thing that sort of bothers me is that gentoo has its own huge internal list of filetypes, display characteristics and icons for them, and actions to take on different kinds of files. I'm not knocking this - it's an impressive amount of work, and the filehandling is pretty sophisticated. It can group things not just as .jpg's or .gif's for example, but as subgroups within the category of "images". Nifty, and actually kind of useful.

What bugs me is how much duplicated effort is involved here... It seems like every different free filemanager and desktop project, not to mention countless different applications, go to the effort of coming up with a set of filetype data and ways to deal with it. "Files with an extension of .html should be edited with such and such, and viewed in Netscape... Files with an extension of .jpeg should be edited with the GIMP and viewed with xv..." etc., etc. Why isn't there some kind of open, cooperatively maintained set of file data usable by anyone, with maybe some kind of library that would allow everything from textmode apps to flashy graphical desktops to take advantage of it? Use XML and some other buzzwords, and make it usable on pretty much any platform... I'd think it'd benefit a lot of different projects, especially KDE and GNOME, in a big way...

I'm probably just being totally ignorant here, but I *think* I see something where free software could take a pretty big step forward if someone with far more skill than I and an actual understanding of the situation did something about it. (Heh. Why do none of my ideas ever amount to anything, anyway?)
(top)

Wednesday, July 26, 18:51 CDT
Just uploaded my full-length X-Men review.

Wow, I'm slow at writing these things.
(top)

Tuesday, July 25, 23:23 CDT
And, once again, not much has happened lately.

I saw X-Men Friday. I'm pretty sure it's the best comic book film adaptation ever made. It was pretty much everything a summer blockbuster should be (and almost never is).

The Coming Age of Calm Technology is one of the better interface related pieces I've read lately. Lavaps, a process tracking tool inspired by the concept of calm computing, is one of the coolest things I've installed lately. It uses lava-lamp like blobs to display the state of all the programs you have running, which both looks cool and is somehow actually useful. First time I've ever left any program like this running for an extended period of time and felt like it was a good addition to my interface.

I found both of those links in an interesting piece on Advogato about the potential for free software to create the Anti-Mac Interface.

In turn, I stumbled across Advogato, which I'd seen occasionally mentioned but never actually bothered to look at, in a Salon article referenced in the last NTK.

I think it's going to storm... Or maybe it'll pass us by to the east, but that looks like a lot of cloud...
(top)

Wednesday, July 19 (posted later)
Well, I justed watched the 49th and final episode of Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network. I actually managed to see most of the series this time around (if you're going to understand what's going on at any time, you pretty much have to see everything from episode one on), and it was definitely cooler the second time around. Despite the repetitive action, the constant blathering about pacifism, the way that the English dub probably doesn't do it justice, and the fact that the main characters are pretty boys with bizarre physics defying 80's glam haircuts, I like this show.

It's got badass giant humanoid robot war machines, an unbelievable amount of plot/backstory that's actually decent military/political SF, and stuff blows up real good. In short, it's well worth your time. Keeping in mind that if you miss so much as 2 episodes in a row at any given point, there's a pretty good chance you'll lose complete track of the plot.

One of these days, I'll get around to writing (maybe as a collaborative effort) some kind of lengthy review of the series.

Meanwhile, I posted a Chicken Run review to POV.
(top)

Tuesday, July 18 (posted later)
Just posted a short review of Neverwhere to POV.

I've got to admit I'm impressed by GNOME. As happy as I was with my old windowmanager setup (Window Maker), there's a lot of coolness here. Didn't really expect to be using this for more than a couple of hours to play with, and I think I may be hooked.

Maybe I'm just happy that my OS can do the whole desktop thing. Little icons, cute pictures, file managers and overly configurable dock/taskbar/menu thingies... And it doesn't suck.
(top)

Friday, July 14, 1:28 CDT
Jerry Doyle for Congress. 'nuff said.

The 11th Hour has an interview with Doyle where he talks about the possibility of a new Babylon 5 related series. (Please, please let it happen. And let it not suck. Is that so much to ask?) And it looks like the Sci-Fi Channel is going to be showing B5 in letterboxed format. I didn't even know a letterboxed format existed. Coolness. Noticed this stuff on the ever-nifty Lurker's Guide, which easily ranks as one of the top 3 or 4 obsessive fan sites ever.
(top)

Thursday, July 13, 16:32 CDT
Well, I'm running Helixcode's GNOME distribution. They have it all nicely packaged for a number of Linux distributions, including Debian. (GNOME, if you don't know, is one of the big free software desktop projects.)

I don't know how long this is going to last. There's undeniably some cool stuff here, and I do prefer Sawfish to Enlightenment as a window manager, but sooner or later I imagine I'm going to wind up back with my old setup, occasionally using some GNOME program or another. Especially since there's still just a little too much bloat here for the whole system to run as smooth or load quite as fast as I'd like it to.

Ok, that's not really fair. When new software seems sluggish on your 5 year old machine, you probably shouldn't complain all that loudly. I do anyway, of course, but at least I know I shouldn't.

I suppose I should try a full KDE install on this machine, just to see what it's like. After I spend some more time evaluating GNOME, of course. (That's what I'm doing. Serious evaluation. Messing around aimlessly? Wouldn't dream of it.)
(top)

Wednesday, July 12, 0:50 CDT (posted later)
I'm downloading the Helixcode distribution of GNOME, so I might as well write an update while I'm waiting around...

My flight on Friday wound up being delayed, but otherwise the trip went smoothly. I even got reseated into first class on one leg of the flight. Got into BWI a little before 6:30. (Or 7:30? Time zone changes never fail to confuse me somewhere along the line.) Met Brent at the gate, and we drove to his house (nice place).

The weekend was generally cool, though there's not a whole lot to write about here. Gurney/Brent, Saalon/Eric, and I basically spent most of the time talking, 'net surfing, watching anime, and talking. Think live-action IRC session. Brainstorming is fun, as is just getting to interact in Real Life (tm) with people you normally communicate with purely by text.

Watched some anime I'm going to have to attempt to review.

Did you know NASA has a cable TV channel? The content appears to be 90% or better views of Earth recorded by various shuttle crews. Bizarre, but oddly hypnotic.

Got on the plane around 2:00 Monday, and made it home with little incident. Not much has happened since then.

A really intense storm just went over. The kind where the thunder is just a steady roar, and once it passes over you can see almost continuous lightning. Like some kind of ongoing explosion, almost. We had a largeish chunk of tree come down on a power line, which means I get to reduce it to firewood in the morning. Fun.

Sleeeeep...
(top)

Thursday, July 6, 19:54 CDT
Updated ye olde software page a bit.

Spent last night setting off a meager supply of fireworks at my Aunt & Uncle's house, then watched some really impressive lightning to the South (these weird multi-tiered clouds where you could see the lightning travel through and out into open sky). Not a bad way to spend an evening.

I'm leaving tomorrow @ around 9:00, getting home Monday evening. Probably won't update this until then, but it's not like a 3 day gap is all that unusual around here.
(top)

Wednesday, July 5, 14:52 CDT
It's one of those summer days where it thunders and spits rain for hours, without ever building up to a big storm. There's blue sky in the South, sooner or later it'll clear off and turn hot and muggy.

Then again, that thunder seems to be getting louder. Probably an indication I shouldn't have the computer on...

I did a whole lot of nothing yesterday (belated happy Independence Day, all), not even the traditional running around and blowing stuff up, which was depressing.

Did go see Chicken Run with my family. Not bad at all, IMO. I love the "Great Escape with chickens" idea. I should probably write up a review.
(top)

Sunday, July 2, 1:29 CDT
I've been looking for a good GUI Unix/Linux IRC client (there's a mouthful). Started using a recent version of X-Chat, which seems pretty cool. It's still no mIRC (which I can actually run under WINE now), but with some tweaking of settings it's not half bad.
(top)

June

Friday, June 30, 14:33 CDT
Well, that was simple enough to fix. I had diald, a demand dialing package, installed. Apparently what it does is act as a pseudo-network connection until something tries to send data over the network, when it dials in and grabs a PPP connection. So if you started Netscape and tried to load this page, it'd automatically dial in and send your request. Actually seems pretty useful, but it was conflicting weirdly with my current setup, and uninstalling it seemed easier than messing around with it.

I've been playing a little with the GIMP lately... I'm rediscovering that the mouse doesn't make a very good drawing tool. Or possibly I just suck at using it.

There's a bunch of pen and ink stuff I'd like to put on my non art page, but I don't have access to a scanner. Sure, they're probably not that expensive at the moment, but for some reason I'm broke. Probably has something to do with being a jobless slacker.
(top)

Friday, June 30, 1:13 CDT
Ok, so I was wrong. Looks like I'll be flying in to Washington (well, BWI) on Friday the 7th, and coming home the following Monday. Cool. :)

My dialup connection has gotten flaky (flakier than usual). I suppose this means things are now set up differently than they were before, and I should start messing around with config files. Think I'm just going to be lazy and put up with it for tonight.

Ahh, a pointless random poll.
(top)

Thursday, June 29, 11:08 CDT (posted later)
I'm nearly finished downloading 120 megs or so of Debian packages from the unstable tree... Installing this stuff should be fun.

And here we go... Package configuration. Maybe if I knew something, I wouldn't blindly go with the default choices on all of these. OTOH, I guess it hasn't caused any major problems yet.

Is there anything that makes it necessary for me to have newer versions of all this software? Of course not. But I feel compelled to get it anyway...
(top)

Wednesday, June 28, 16:18 CDT
Well, I posted what I wrote Sunday (see below) before spending hours talking to Brent/Gurney and Eric/Saalon, and really getting all nice and sleep deprived. We talked seriously about getting together on the 7th, but it looks like that's not going to happen. One of these days, though...

I finished reading Litany of the Long Sun, but I kind of hesitate to say much about it since I get the feeling there's a lot I'm missing, not having read Book of the New Sun. Then again, it could just be because both books that make up this volume are intentionally utterly confusing. They're good enough, at any rate, that I think I'm going to track down Book of the New Sun, and start there. Then come back and read the last two in this series. Assuming they're not out of print and impossible to find.

I'm pretty sure there's something I should be doing, other than sitting here. Guess I'll go try to figure out what that might be.
(top)

Sunday, June 25 (posted later)
Must. Have. Sleep.

Oh well, maybe I can get this written before crashing. I did say I'd update yesterday. There was all sorts of stuff I was going to write about too, but most of it's sort of slipped away.

I went to Minneapolis Thursday afternoon with my dad (it's a 6 hour drive, and I didn't really have anything better to do than help drive it). Wandered around the Mall of America for an hour that night. (Build it the size of a small town, name the parking garages after states, put an amusement park in the middle of it, and you've got... A bigass mall. What the success of this thing says about American culture I prefer not to dwell on.) Came home Friday afternoon after sitting around an office reading a novel all morning while my dad was in a meeting.

Along with that novel (a copy of The Litany of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe), I got the latest issue of PC Gamer, which I haven't read in ages. I was pleasantly surprised. The ad count seems to have gone down to something tolerable, and it's still a decent mag. The really impressive thing, though, was the cover disc - they managed to get permission to distribute a dozen old but undeniably classic games. Stuff like the original X-COM, Wing Commander tweaked to run at normal speed and sound better, and Ultima Underworld.

I've been playing Ultima Underworld, one of those classics I missed the first time around. I'm impressed. This is a game that featured a 3D world with slopes, stairs, swimming, jumping, dynamic lighting, and a mouse based interface that actually doesn't suck, all of it integrated with the standard trappings of an RPG. In 1992.

There was a big (well, big is a relative term) celebration in Laurel over the weekend for the school's hundredth something or another (100th graduating class, I think, which would've been us - what I can't figure out is did they graduate a class the first year there was a school here? And does anyone actually care? Right, that's what I thought).

There were a bunch of alumni in town, the usual small town celebration kind of thing. Complete with a parade consisting of old cars and tractors, and all that crap. They dedicated the new football field / track, which I have to admit is pretty nice. There were fireworks afterwards, which were actually remarkably good, probably the best I've seen short of the time I was in Washington on the 4th. Then there was a dance, which was remarkably bad. The kind of thing where you have a mediocre band who're wasting what little talent they might have playing bad early 80's pop, and some distance away you have large clusters of people standing around with beer and talking about how much the dance sucks...

Which just about brings things up to the present.
(top)

Thursday, June 22, 11:13 CDT

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment. - Robert Benchley

Ok, real update tomorrow or Saturday. Meanwhile, have a big list of links culled from recent additions to my bookmarks:

Oh yeah, and Points of View is coming along nicely. Still some minor bugs to work out, but there's some actual content there now.
(top)

Thursday, June 8, 11:46 CDT
It's hot. Hot and windy. Thermometer hit 97° (F) yesterday, 100° today... Summer has arrived.

I just watched one of my sister's 4H lambs jump several feet straight upwards, into the ceiling of the shelter it was standing under. Loud *clonk*, lamb drops like rock. Sheep can be amusing.

Need to find a word definition? Or are you just one of those weird people who occasionally enjoys paging through dictionaries? Either way, dict is cool. Oh yeah, and so is A.Word.A.Day.

The ongoing search for a really good web browser: Konqueror, the KDE project's file manager/browser looks promising.

The obligatory Microsoft commentary: The more analytical side of me says that there is some real possibility that an MS breakup is, in the grand scheme of things, not the best possible outcome for the world. Maybe this sets a bad precedent, and it's probably wise to consider that MS is far from the only "evil corporate empire" in the world... Who really stands to benefit most from this? The average computer user, or, say, the minions of darkness at AOL/Time Warner? What, in the long run, is really going to change about the software most people are running? And in the end, what good can come out of something involving so many lawyers? I don't claim to be terribly clueful here, but there are some nagging little doubts...

The rest of me is saying something along the lines of "MUAHAHAHA! VENGEANCE AT LAST! YOU'RE GOING DOWN IN FLAMES, YOU ARROGANT BASTARDS!"

You may get the impression that I feel no great love for Microsoft. While I am not a foaming-at-the-mouth MS basher, this would be correct. Sure, I'll freely acknowledge that MS played a huge role in creating the world of personal computing as it is today, good as well as bad. And sure, if it weren't for MS or someone like them, the conditions that gave birth to Linux and a host of other cool things would probably never have arisen. But you can only take so much frustration, so much dealing with mediocre, just-good-enough software, so much arrogant BS, before you begin to develop a little resentment.

On the balance, this should at least make things a little more interesting for the next couple of years.
(top)

Tuesday, June 6, 23:47 CDT
Do Islamic lepidoptera worship in mothques?

Monday, June 5, 21:43 CDT
Well, I just got done registering for classes at Wayne State College. Much excitement. (Just sort of coasted into going to Wayne for lack of any real decision about what I was going to do.)

The site is kind of rough, there's a definite shortage of content for the time being, and the URL is too long, but check out Points of View. I suppose it counts as shameless self promotion since I'm involved, but I'll say it anyway: This has the potential to be cool.

Ok, so maybe there're already way too many opinionated review sites out there. But we're different. No, really. We don't suck. Honest.

You might notice that POV's layout is reminiscent of mozilla.org's, for the pretty good reason that that's where we stole it. Ok, so maybe it's not *that* similar, but it's got little tables with heavy black borders. ;)

I finally got around to trying a recent build of Mozilla, both on Windows and Linux. I have to say it looks pretty spiffy, and it seems pretty cool as browsers go, but... Well, on a Pentium 75, it runs like a crippled turtle wading through molasses. This is not especially surprising. This is, after all, a 5 year old machine that wasn't exactly top-of-the-line when new. On the other hand, it's still kind of disappointing.

Ok, I realize Mozilla isn't "just" a browser. It's a whole bunch of stuff. I've seen it compared to the Java virtual machine, discussed as a way to build cross-platform applications. And I realize that the demands on a browser these days are pretty heavy. And yet...

Why is it that something like Opera can do almost anything that I want a browser for, on this machine, and we don't have a Free Software equivalent? Why is it that all of the really cool features that I want to see in a browser are just a pipe dream, while people spend massive effort on new ways to make text look flashy?

I'm not knocking Mozilla. Give it a little more time, it looks like we'll have a cool, open, multiplatform alternative to IE, with all sorts of capabilities. That's great.

But what I'd really like, right now, is just a web browser. Something more like a graphical Lynx than a new and improved version of the Big Two web browsers. Something small and fast that does the job of displaying web pages, and does it well. Without worrying about all the extra crap, or trying to compete to have the most bells and whistles.

Time to go hunting software.
(top)

Thursday, June 1, 0:29 CDT
Well, I sort of have an excuse for not updating lately (aside from nothing happening). Most of the time I've spent on the computer has been writing other stuff, some of which I should be able to link to fairly soon.

I picked up a copy of Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, the other day, along with a copy of Linux Journal. LJ turned out to be a pretty cool mag.

Good Omens was excellent. It's the kind of book that gets a lot of comparisons to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and actually deserves them just in terms of sheer weird Brit flavored laugh value. It's about the apocalypse, main characters including an angel/bookseller, a demon, the Antichrist, a psychic witch, and a couple of witchfinders... Actually, it's not really quite the same sort of book as the Guide, and in some ways I think it's a better one. Both Pratchett and Gaiman are definitely on the list of People I Wish I Could Write Like.

Stephen picked up a domain name. Cool.

I've been trying to think of a good name, domains being reasonably priced these days. The obvious choices appear to have been taken. Something short and distinctive would be nice... Any suggestions?
(top)

May

Thursday, May 25, 13:08 CDT
Not much has happened lately. One hopes that changes one of these days.

I actually got up at 6:30 this morning to run with a friend of mine. Well, he ran. I jogged 3/4 of a mile, and thought I was going to die. I would say I'm out of shape, but I think that would imply that at some point in my life I was *in* shape...

I wrote up a short review of Neverwhere the other day, for a review/commentary site project that Saalon (of Daemonsong) and Gurney have in the works. I'm planning to write stuff for them on a regular basis, so whenever it actually goes up, expect to see quite a few links to stuff there. It sounds like the kind of project that could be pretty cool, without being too ambitious. After all, we all ramble endlessly about media as is - might as well expose it to a wider audience.

I've been watching Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network, when I remember it's on. I caught some of the later episodes the first time around, but I was never sure exactly what was going on. Trying to stick with the story at this point... I'm fairly impressed by this show, despite the repetitive action scenes and the sheer cheesiness of the translated dialog. It's got an interesting set of characters, a pretty good plot, and lots of cool looking giant robots.

Then there's Dragon Ball Z, which as near as I can come to describing it, is like an anime version of American professional wrestling with planet-wrecking explosions. The sort of thing you have to be in a very specific state of mind to enjoy for more than a couple of minutes. (Mild intoxication or sleep deprivation, for example.) That said, I have been watching more of it lately. I suppose this sort of thing is an acquired taste.
(top)

Monday, May 22, 0:30 CDT
Well, it coulda been a lot worse. Coulda been better, too. I refer, of course, to the somewhat lackluster X-Files season finale.

On the plus side, I've developed quite a liking for Malcom in the Middle... If it weren't for all the manufactured hype the show got, it'd be one of those quirky little sitcoms that you really enjoy for the season and a half before it gets cancelled to make way for something with better demographics.

I managed to break one of the little plastic leveller things (what, exactly, would you call those?) on my keyboard the other day. Fortunately, my leatherman tool is the right height to rest the corner of the board on. You know, there would be something to be said for making input devices out of something a little less brittle than this plastic. Titanium, for example.
(top)

Wednesday, May 17 (posted later)
Ahhh, a shiny new Linux installation.

True, it's still Debian 2.1, but there's some spiffy new stuff here, and I'm finally looking at a decent color depth in X. Now I just need to grab some other software I've been putting off installing for a while, fiddle with some settings, and get sound working.

I'd definitely recommend this boxed version of Debian, if you're going to buy a Linux distro off the shelf somewhere. There's some pretty outdated stuff here, but it all seems to be stable and well put together, and the documentation that comes in the box is actually pretty good.

Of course, I haven't tried any of the other distros packaged this way. Or really many of the other distros... I definitely need to check out Mandrake some time, among others.
(top)

Tuesday, May 16, 23:05 CDT
Well, here goes.

Ok, so I've had that paper done for a while. Since a week ago, I think. Along with all that other school related stuff. Things have been a little weird lately, though... Actually, things have been a little weird for a couple of months.

Not weird in an interesting to read about way. Just weird in an end-of-highschool, trying to figure out what to do next, realizing what you should've been doing different for years way.

I'm trying to think of things that happened in that large-ish space where I didn't write anything here.

Easter was somewhere in there. Hope everyone had a good one.

I actually went to prom this year, with a date (hi Lani), instead of sitting at home and playing with legos. This may have been a little out of character. Or a lot.

Stephen turned 21. (Happy b-day, Gul...)

I see Gurney finally got a copy of The Lions of Al-Rassan. A truly great book, which I need to read again soon. If my copy weren't loaned out at present.

If a film version of TLoAR were ever made (which borders on absolute impossibility), I think I'd want Russell Crowe to play a major character. But more on Gladiator later...

Some books and stuff I have read lately:

  • A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge - An extremely cool, very well writt