return void;

its been damn near a week since my last posting, and i have a good reason. most of the things i want to blog about are things i do not want to blog about. let me explain further.

i have made it a point to keep my professional career off my blog. as a matter of fact, i try not to discuss anything related to my past, present, or future employers. i dont like to discuss matters that concern work related issues, as this can lead to serious reprecussions. anything from a co-worker reading it, to a future employer reading it could possible lessen their opinion of me. its not a matter of vanity, its a matter of not burning my career to the ground.

that being said, i can cut the fat off my blogging topics. so lets move on to other things.

i spent a good couple hours this weekend and yesterday working on our invitations. they all wont be perfect, but their hand-made, which by many peoples’ standards, makes them more valuable. we printed them on our own printers, both the velum overlay and the actual invitation. the velum overlay has been monogrammed (sp) in a diagonal fashion. what i was recently working on was punching the holes in the top of the invitation and velum overlay so that we could tie them together with ribbon. exhausting.

everyday my co-workers and i work on some puzzles provided in the san antonio express. in the “s.a. life” section they have many word puzzles (and a fun chess puzzle). i am rather bad at most word puzzles as it takes too much memory to recall unusual words to descramble and generally play with them. so, in the spirit of hacking, i came up with this word descrambler. now bear in mind the dictionary being used is rather limited, as i intend to update it with one that i installed off my gentoo install. it will rescramble all the letters you type to form all possible words. every letter has to be used. this solves the “Jumble” puzzle in the paper.

next on my plate, i want to solve the puzzle that has you pick all possible words that can be written from the word provided. this one will be fairly simple and i should be able to finish it tonight. an even more difficult problem to solve is something that will solve cryptograms. this will be much more difficult as there are MANY MANY more possibilities. i would not be surprised if cryptograms are NP-complete. that wont stop me from writing something to try at least.

the only recent additions to my dvd collection has been Sex And The City season 2. i have not updated my list to show this yet. im also downloading a GTAVC dvd. since it’s the full dvd, and the playstation 2 will play burned dvd’s, i’m hoping i can download games to play. if this works out, i’ll convince myself to buy a dual layer burner ($12 a disc is less than $50 a game).

im also bidding on Mario Paint as i remember it being so much fun as a kid. a family friend of ours, when i was young, had it and i was green with envy. i intended to squelch that envy for $10.

on monday, i ran a mile to see if i could beat my personal best. i did, by a whole 60 seconds. this time i completed the mile in 9:15 (or 555 seconds). while that time still kinda stinks, its nice to see improvements. the thing about running is improvements take much longer to notice than weight training. i think i should start working on my 2 mile jogs, try to improve their time. if i can get my 2 mile time down to 18-19m (or 1080-1140s), then i’ll work on my 3 mile time. once i got that down, i’ll work on getting the average mile in the 8-9 minute range.

on a lighter note, i’ve continued my quest to clean up my 120g hdd. i’ve liberated 40g now for further usage. this will come in handy when i start ripping my CDs. i have 6g left of unorganized music in 1 (of 2) trees. the second tree will take much longer to complete and will be more of a gradual process since it contains all 18g of music in a single directory.

im working on rebuilding a gentoo system that josh donated a while back. it’s been sitting in my closet for several months. i decided it’s time i built that emulator arcade. im rebuilding all the packages, and gonna slowly start emerging the emulators that i need and such. eventually im gonna have to buy a usb jamma controller and get that setup. then i should work on building the cabinet at my dad’s house (he has all the necessary tools, i have all the necessary skills). when i finish this post, before i go to bed, i will check to see how many packages it’s built thus far, it should be done by now.

lastly, crystal wanted me to post a link to her blog.

this past weekend was relaxing. sunday i broke my habit of no more than 2 cups of coffee a day and had about 8. i was pretty wired all day, which was nice. crystal is going to use me as an official source for her Info. Soc. class, since i am now considered an actual “software engineer”. she asked me about sap, and i of course had a very biased opinion about the oracle database frontend.

to coin a new term, a previous professor of hers (who apparently taught some business computer course) referred to the tilde (~) character as “twiddle”. the joke was crystal assertively told me to hit “control-twiddle” to perform a task, which i refused to let that one slide. i laughed for a some time while she explained where she got it from. so from now on, “control-twiddle” can solve ALL of your problems!

new additions to the dvd list. seems i had a bout with the electricity but everything is back up and running.

i have been working on reorganizing my downloaded music collection, and needless to say, its rather painful. where people learned to name a file is beyond me. i’ve organized a meager 3 gigs (~30 albums), and im down to roughly 2 dozen left in the current directory. there are a few more directories, not including the 12+ gigs of stuff that was just mashed into one directory. i will not be downloading any more music until my current collection has been organized to maximize sanity.

i saw an ad in the Daily Texan this weekend for GoogleLabs. its no secret that google has been lookin to hire the best of the best, so they have been posting several ads for employement which basically equate to riddles and puzzles. these arent your average puzzles, they require some rather unique thought, you (and i _hate_ this term) have to think “outside the box” to solve them. for the last week, i have been working on a decent solution to the MIT billboard problem (first 10 digit prime in e). i came up with a somewhat decent idea, but it will day quite a while to prep the actual program.

anyhoo, back to the ad in the paper. it was a number puzzle, find the pattern. that’s my specialty. it took me no more than 5 minutes to solve it. at the bottom of the ad it said that special attention would be given to applicants who obtained a correct answer. so i packed up a cover letter and resume and explained my answer. i doubt i’d get a job cause they pretty much just want PhD’s, but even if its a 1:1,000,000, “there’s still a chance!” i’ve been turned down by google before so i would be extremely surprised if they actually showed interest in me.

time for bed, i cant keep my eyes open any more.

today would’ve been stevie ray vaughn’s 50th birthday. the local “rock & blues” station klbj is doing an SRV tribute by playin stevie and his influences all day long.

its a shame the lord had to take such a musical genius. i’ll never understand a world where brilliant and talented artists like SRV die in their prime and musicians like john bon jovi or michael bolten (sp) are still alive and still making music. its cruel and a shame that the world couldn’t hear more of his soul.

i read this time article written in 1990 about his death. its worth a read. it’s a shame because he had just kicked the twin sins (alcohol & drugs) which is very difficult to do and gave him a fresh start.

i for one mourn for his death and douth i will see another such genius in my lifetime.