return void;

‘nother interesting day. stopped by dillard’s to buy crystal’s mom’s dress. she went to pay with a check and they declined it. declined a check! its cash! so i figured i’d write a check and cover her for it. i wrote my check, they called it in, and declined it as well! i was paid on friday so i know i have the funds. at this point, i was fairly pissed off, so i demanded to know why. the best they said they could do was give me this card that referenced the company that dealt with their banking (i assume), equifax. what a bunch of idiots. they wont take checks under 1000. apparently no one clued them into the fact that most banks and/or check companies allow you to order from any number. so high check numbers mean nothing, but these tards seem to think they do.

i want to test a link real fast. hover over it and check your status bar. then click on it and see if it takes you to the same place. UPDATE: ok so the link wouldnt work here since blogger (apparently) strictly checks the HTML you paste. there is an article about the flaw on slashdot.

lastly, check out this article. see if their description is remotely close. since im primarily a gentoo user, i’d say their description of me is fairly close (“if it moves, compile it”).

“gt-s stands for Garaunteed Tremendous Safety”

halloween, often referred to as the celebration of the dead. wierd holiday and strangly similar to Dios De Los Muertos (forgive my terrible spanish, im white). this year, on All Hallow’s Eve, we get to set the clocks back an hour. everyone loves the fall back part but hates the spring forward part.

we met yesterday with Christine of Amex. we mostly discussed where crystal and i are in our lives. we talked (very little) about some rough numbers to give her an idea where we are. she seems like a very nice and knowledgable woman. she asked us to bring in some credit statements, 401k and student loan paperwork. she said its actually good to leave the student loans around, they’re good debt. you don’t HAVE to pay them off immediatly because they have such a low interest rate and the longer you’re paying them, typically 10 years, the more it can build credit. student loans rank up there with car and house payments. apparently everyone has them and they’re considered good. im just lookin forward to cleaning up all of our debt.

we went and looked at some apartments, hidden lake and estates at northwoods. i wasnt too impressed at the northwoods. the apartment they showed us needed some serious repairs. the hidden lake place is very nice, but fairly expensive (about as much as my rent at my current complex).

crystal saw eternal sunshine of the spotless mind yesterday and i dont think she was as impressed as i was. she seemed to have a hard time following it (as did i until it was 3/4 of the way over) so that’s usually a sign that she wont like it. oh well, what can you expect from a bush voter!

heh yeah that reminds me, i voted on friday. we went to whitmore elem. at 5pm but they were packed. so we went home to eat and went back at 7pm. it was even worse then. it took us an hour to get to sign in. once we signed in, it took only a few minutes to actually get to a booth. it was an electronic ballot, touchscreen monitor. i voted straight ticket LIB, and split the remaining votes between the REP and the DEM. since crystal (and her staunchly REP friend rebekah) both voted REP (shutter), i had to lean more towards DEM on the remaining votes, just to cancel theirs out.

im off to see the wizard.

so i watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind today. i dont know where to begin. the film was so brilliant, i would be as bold as to put that on the top of my top 5 best movies of all time.

its a story about love and how it can overpower anything. i never knew how to describe my love for crystal but i believe this film can embody that emotion. near the end of the film there is one simple line that sums it all up:

Joel: Ok.

i know it doesnt make sense, but it will when you see the movie. its the hallway scene just after clementine picks up her toothbrush. if you can wrap your mind around the emotion in that one line, then i think you can understand how i feel for crystal.

jim carrey is an excellent actor. now that he is a little older, hopefully he’ll play more mature roles and this is a prime example of brilliant acting. in my opinion, he should win many awards for his performance. charlie kauffman (of ‘being john malcovich’ fame) is an unbelievable writer and should also win awards for his work as well.

on a side note, i think iText is a wonderful library. im currently using the C# port of it, and i must admit that it is not only VERY powerful, but has a VERY clean interface. my hat is off to its creators.

back to fixing baselayout

been 5 days, i didnt feel like blogging over the weekend, my apologies for the delay.

this morning before i left for work, i did an emerge -uD world. i come home to see eterm borked out (stupid libAST). some windows were actin funny, so i rebooted. it’s been about 3 or 4 months since the last power outage, so i supposed a reboot is acceptable.

little did i know, my 75% world update borked my system royally. apparently baselayout-1.11.x has switched over to the new udev for the 2.6.x kernels. if you’re gettin problems, check this. just hope you didnt do an etc-update. if you did, and you’re still on devfs, you got a lot of work ahead of ya. i’ll have to rebuild my kernel, grub (splashimage doesnt work for some reason), and all applications that deal with the devfs. that last part basically means im gonna have to do am ‘emerge -e world’.

side notes: i was filmed this weekend by crystal’s group in an interview discussing Blu-ray. was kinda fun, but mostly caught up on reading some of ol’ Hank’s book. GTA:SA was released today and i was hopin to go pick it up. i recieved $50 in the mail and a $25 dollar debt was paid back, so it seemed like the perfect time to burn that money. so i went to the bank to get my cash. apparently im behind in my “JBNANC” fund (or “Jason Badly Needs A New Car” fund). its only $150 bucks shy, but that’s enough to make me skip GTA:SA this time. it isnt online, so i dont have a problem waiting a while. if i can manage to save maybe $100 this month, i’ll get a game or 2. there’s a ton of games being released this month, so saying “No” will be very difficult. luckily i have Mario Paint to assist in this matter.

time to go run, im training with ankle-weights now, so maybe it’ll help improve my speed.

i cant sleep, yet im very tired.

i decided today that i was going to vote LIB as they have the most likely chance of snaggin that needed 5%. it’s also been big news that even though ralph nadar is under the IND platform, he’s pullin a key 1% in some swing states (read: florida) where it’ll have a dramatic difference on the REP/DEM outcome. this is good, as he should do everything he can to screw up the results for either party. this nation needs more than 2 political parties.

this was an interesting read, as i know several people who should’ve read the sarcasm in that.

it seems gentoo will be getting a facelift. this is nice, as it’s LONG overdue.

building a gentoo system without a net connection has proved to be a MAJOR pain in the ass, but everything seems to be rolling along on that. friday is too close.

i’ve got 4 dvd’s in the works right now. by the end of the week i’ll hopefully be able to add them to the list (most notably Fahrenheit 9/11).

lastly, i’ve been reading “Smile, You’re Traveling” by Henry Rollins lately, and its a fairly good read. sometimes it may seem like he’s trying too hard to be intellectual and it really shows. it’s like watching a VJ on MTV try to explain neurology. its still a good book thus far. its interesting to read about this guy’s travelling; he seems to be out of LA 3/4 of the year.

“For making langing immediate time, incrediby. Broken moving not now stupid motor on flaming. I declaration emergency!”

i’ve recently become addicted to board games. not games like Sorry or Clue, i mean games like Chess, Go and Shogi. i’ve found myself more interested in the eastern variant of chess (shogi) to be more interesting because the game is more fluid. there is no concept of “forward, not backward”. captured pieces can be played, and normal pieces can be promoted. it sounds like it would make things much more difficult to master than plain old fasion chess.

chess is still a lot of fun, but Go makes chess look like chutes and ladders. the sheer magnitude of Go’s possibilities is enough to make your head spin. i am terrible at Go, but i am practicing and learning. i bought a book that helps explain the ideas needed to master Go. i’ve been playing mostly unrated games on 9×9 boards. this makes it easier to focus and you dont have that additional baggage of the game being rated.

on a side note, i’ve found that compiling while in frame-buffer mode can cause SERIOUS performance hits. while bootstrapping a gentoo stage1 install, i found there wasnt much speedup on a 2.4ghz intel processor over my 950mhz athalon. once i switched to a normal console (ssh’d in), things went MUCH faster. it took a mere 5 minutes to compile a kernel. that’s very impressive if you ask me. getting the mono project up and running has been a real struggle and has required some real cleverness.

i promise to post more frequently this week, its just hard to keep all professional matters off this blog.

so i mentioned earlier that i’d write a program that solved the word puzzle that had you spot words within a word. i did, problem is this.

my webserver is a 110mhz sparstation 5. im running a 2 year old version of debian. in debian years, that’s probably the second youngest release since their development cycle appears to be a release once every 2 years. im runnin an old version of thttpd on the machine. apparently the CGI timeout is a lil too short. a 2.4mb dictionary file is a lil too much for my workstation to handle, as it took 9 minutes to solve “loath”. i at first thought it was just the browser timing out, but upon further inspection, it appeared the program was being killed after maybe a minute. so i gotta do an update, if not a homemade install. argh!

damn thttpd developers put configuration options that cannot be set via a script or command-line. who does that?! compile time only config options?! i dont mean compiling with support for certain features, i mean the CGI_TIMELIMIT cannot be set manually. i will eventually be switching to lighttpd on a gentoo box. im tired of dealing with a half-assed debian system. once you go gentoo, you never go back.

on a more positive note, i won that mario paint game! not too shabby for $7.

on, on a parting note, read this: clicky-click