return void;

since i registered to vote a couple months ago, i’ve been pretty interested in politics. i also started receiving benifits from my current employeer, so im fairly interested in how taxes and health care are dealt with in the white house.

so i found 2 blogs of interest. first, john kerry has a blog. he seems to be the candidate i’m going to be voting for, mainly because of his policy against outsourcing.

then there is the bush blog. well, i can’t stand him, so im only interested in reading his anti-american propaganda. since he has done NOTHING to better this country and all of it’s problems, i will be voting to get him out of office. i want to “outsource bush”.

ok so i’ve been messing with xorg for quite a while, and i must admit, i am very impressed. keith packard is the man!

rather than eating up tons of memory, it eats up more CPU. this is an acceptable trade off because i am expecting to upgrade my machine anyways. while memory may be cheaper, gdesklets pails in comparison to what this new xorg is capable of.

there is a down side however. it can be rather flaky. sometimes i have problems with the root window not refreshing, then i end up with a terminal i cant read and a dozen menus still showing (due to not being refreshed).

also, my focus seems to be screwed up. i am having problems with getting windows to come to the foreground. sometimes, my menu drops up behind mozilla, which is always bad if the menu isnt on top.

if you’re considering makin the switch, read these two sites first. its easy to get it to work, configuring it is a nightmare.

the gdm theme that i decided on is based on warcraft, specifically, 3. its a really neat theme, cause they utilize the err… utility button section for GDM functions. it has a really spiffy image of the Thrall toy too, which is pretty cool.

i wonder if gdm themes can be self updating (ie they can dynamically change as they see fit).

anyhoo, i need to go to bed, just another sleepless night.

some neat updates.

first, i was determined to buy SF: Anniversary Collection tonight (its the one with the old school SFs and SF3:Third Strike). thing is, if you go to eb’s site, you’ll find that if you buy it online, you can receive a free bonus item, a ryuu bust (chest up figure type statue). i dont really like waiting for shipping, so i called every EB in town to see if anyone had one left. come to find out, the only one left in town was at an EB in the Quarry. not bad for $30.

secondly, i finally did the move to xorg. since they moved all that drop-shadow and native transparency into a stable release, i just couldnt say no anymore. it didnt go as smoothly as it could have but its obviously working now.

the first major problem was that i had 300+ config diffs to merge, most if which were for xorg. rather than wanting to go through all of them (i actually did 20 or so, then got tired of it), i just did an auto-merged em all. that presented some problems with the overwrite XF86Config. i want to move to the new xorg config, but for now, this will do. i also setup gdm to load at boot. if i need to drop to terminal mode, i imagine i can just ssh in from another machine.

i need to go play this street fighter, now!

this is my 100th post!!

just had to get that off my chest. its kinda nice, to know that i’ve consistantly kept my blog up to date since june.

anyhoo, on to many more pressing matters.

first on the agenda is poker night. it’s kinda dwindled into about 4 of us, which is kidna nice cause then i was actually able to seat everyone. tonight, i grilled some burgers and it was much fun. we learned to play a new vietnamese card game, poorly translated into, “charge”. the rules make some elements of gameplay feel lop-sided, but its a decent game. it seems to be lacking in the rules that define what hands can trump others. it would make sense that if 2′s are played (in multiple or singles) then they should be allowed to be trumped by anything that’s better (and change the pattern as well).

next on the agenda, libhaet. back in concurrency, i did a project (link to eventually provided on my website) to provide performance enhancements for ripping and encoding a CD. i have been wanting to turn that into a library for quite a while because i want to write an application that will rip/encode from my scsi cdrom tower. there has been progress!! to develop libraries, i find it best to write sample code that calls the library, so i can get a sense of how the API should look. last weekend, i wrote a sample client for libhaet, and it can be found here. it’s a very clean and nice start. from what i can see, it’ll be fairly simple to add features onto this design. i intend to finish the sample client and start work on the official API this weekend.

on the dvd front, i am about 2-3 weeks away from needing a 250+ disc binder for my dvd’s. i have completely filled the binder crystal bought me, which i love, for my birthday (with the exception of 1 page). i copied Band Of Brothers for ford in exchange for seasons 1&2 of curb your enthusiasm.

lastly, my system updates was this week. i updated world, and it borked out at docbook-sgml-utils, and the fix was to re-emerge openjade. it finally finished and i have 77 friggin config files to merge. xorg finally moved the xdamage and drop shadow stuff into an official release (6.8). this is the stuff that keith packard has had in experimental for a long time cause xfree wouldnt allow cvs commit. since he forked, he finished up the extensions and pushed it to stable. i can’t wait till gnome/fluxbox/enlightenment/xfce4 can take advantage of this. it will definately make computing WAY more interesting. this might even be incentive to purchase hardware upgrades. fortunately all this xorg stuff was written in C, so i dont have all that suckage like gdesklets.

oh, and i found this site. not sure exactly how they verify that you partake in their “offers”, but i just make do that myself so i can get a ~$40 ipod. hell, i could do this a couple times and start sellin those things on ebay…. >:)

peace out, its bedtime.

a lil side note as i get ready to leave work today.

earlier, josh said he bet he could find a website dedicated to someone’s dog. i told him not to look too long as im sure google should turn something up on the first page.

as it turns out, i found this dog-lovers contract and this page proving that cats are evil. makes for an interesting read.

btw, i LOATHE how microsoft’s copy and paste for URLs automatically format themselves.

once again, i lost a long blog, so i’ll try to recreate it.

on friday, crystal and i went to target to start a wedding registry. we started an account and they gave us one of those scanners. side note: they have an rj-45 connection in the handle, i wonder if i could connect to it…

we scanned 160 items, totaling out to $3200 bucks. we put some stuff on there that we dont expect to actually get, but why not shoot for the moon. we were in there for 3 hours!! we were even there long enough to see a shift change!

apparently, a clerk told me that target owns amazon. i didnt know that. it seems to be true, because i can log into target with my amazon account.

next on the list is bed, bath and beyond. hopefully it wont take as long as target.

i hate explorer, i had a really long complaint, and explorer crashed. mozilla rocks so much more.

so a while back i started a project to copy each of ford’s cd’s. that undertaking took 1.5 years while i borrowed 12 cds at once and would return them in about a half a week. however, i didn’t just take the cds without offering something in return.

since i got a dvd burner and netflix account, i promised ford a copy of any dvd i have. i would even provide the dvd+r free of charge.

there’s a general understanding that you can’t borrow something like the aforementioned example without at the very least offering something in return. that may include cds, dvds, media, or even money. unfortunately there is a guy that we work with (not for, and not in my company) who doesnt follow this code.

this moocher has borrowed cds, twice, without offering any goods in return. on top of that, he helps himself as if my binder is his. the next time he does this, i will not be friendly about it. i might have to reburn the cd because im afriad he’ll screw it up. i dont like or trust the guy therefore unless he offers something decent in return for this, i cannot let him borrow a single thing.

i guess i should go ahead and start (or redo, whichever works for you) that high performance cd ripping library that i started for concurrency. that way i can burn a ton of stuff to a few inconspicuous dvds and not worry about moochers getting their hands on my stuff.