return void;

im supposed to be packing. i cant however due to an addiction to ratchet and clank.

yesterday was one of those days. late for work, no gas in the tank, post office wouldnt take photos, and it was a downright nasty day.

i took off early to get my passport taken care of. had to rush home and pick up my birth certificate, barely made it there on time. guy at the counter informs me that very few places in town actually take the pictures. bastards neglected to tell me that the first time i went there.

i brought down a load of crystal’s things so we’ll have an easier time moving. gonna rent a U-Haul and move everything in one fell swoop. gotta call SBC and tell em to piss off cause im switchin to TW. im gonna love doin that. we’ll be getting cable. it’ll be the first time in over 1.5 years since i’ve been able to watch TV at night. not too excited, but i am looking forward to watching more of the educational type of programming. i dont think i’ll be watching much prime time reality TV since those shows make my skin crawl. oh, and the simpsons will be nice to watch again.

i’ve been experiencing problems with my main gentoo system. apparently when you upgrade gcc to a new branch, you will encounter problems. i’ll post more details about it later as i work through it. i have some articles open at home about the matter that i’ll post to help anyone else who might be having the same problems.

got a handful of new DVDs so i will be updating the list tonight. i should start making a list of all my CDs as well.

i dont know what to say, it seems game companies these days are staffed by idiot designers.

capcom is the worst of em all. they’ve released 3 street fighter games in the last year and all of them will be Live compatible, but will do not have online components for the PS2. the most recent abomination is yet ANOTHER rehash of the same old characters, in a stripped down game without any decent gameplay modes, specifically an online mode. up yours capcom.

polophony digital / seca recently decided to screw americans once again. they have decided to strip the online mode from the game in favor of this “B-Spec” mode. apparently some genius at seca decided that people would rather watch cars drive without doing much than to actually race friends online. way to go numbnuts, brilliant design choice.

i will be opting against these games this season however and am now contemplating getting several other games. i’ll continue to follow all of them loyally through EGM (13 years subscribing and counting). i’m still contemplating Killzone.

i should never have used -U on my updates.

apparently xfce4.2 beta2 was released about 2 weeks ago. all but xfce-panel seemed to be masked, so that means i cant seem to finish updating my system!! i haven’t gotten back to that damn eterm problem yet.

be very careful when you do updates in gentoo. -U can seriously impair the health of your system, so always stick to -u if you have to do updates.

nothing like sitting and waiting for a newer ebuild.

i was reading these comments about how Microsoft is not afraid of Firefox, and someone used a Ghandi quote in reference to linux:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

that’s very appropriate and has thus far been the cycle of linux’s life. we are currently at the “fight” stage of that statement, as they used to laugh at linux’s inability as a desktop OS.

searching more, i found some very good quotes:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-Aristotle

Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, and it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash! Be water, my friend.
-Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Become the change you seek in the world.
-Ghandi

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
-Goathe

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
-Henry David Thoreau

Obstacles are those frightful things we see when we take our eyes off our goal.
-Henry Ford

Don’t do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.
-Henry Rollins

For every problem, there exists a simple and elegant solution which is absolutely wrong.
-J. Wagoner, U.C.B. Mathematics

What lies between us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not go where the path may lead instead go where there is no path and leave a trail.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don’t want to die without scars.
-Tyler Durden

ok that’s enough for now. every one of those quotes is worth remembering. here’s a quote of my own:

Do not become satisfied with mediocrity; its the downfall of man.
-Jason Switzer

ok, gotta get a couple things off my chest. at work, i developed an ASP.NET application. it was developed in Windows, and was supposed to be ported over to Linux (Mono Project) for the client. the transition was fairly simple, most of the problems came from not getting the classpath correct. Mono worked as it was designed to, and we had no problems with both WebForms and using Windows compiled DLLs directly.

that being said, this system was developed on a Windows server running IIS. the clients’ webserver: apache. i can imagine the pure frustration you can forsee with configuring apache. apache’s config files are the worst in the OSS community. they could almost be considered a language and enviornment in their own right! needless to say, i spent countless hours attempting to get Apache to handle ASP requests. wanna know the secret:

1) set up config files (specifically, use ‘-D MONO’, set MonoUnixSocket to /tmp/mod_mono_server)

2) exec: % /usr/bin/mod-mono-server.exe –nonstop&

3) exec: % chmod 777 /tmp/mod-mono-server

4) start apache2

the important idea is that mod-mono-server.exe handles requests that are passed over the socket /tmp/mod-mono-server. you then need to have apache hand the request over to that socket. if you want, you can also have it bind to a port and have apache send the request there as well.

secondly, we’ve started porting an important website that was previously written in ASP.Net to JSP and Servlets. its an interesting conversion because it doesnt exactly do callbacks and doPostBack like ASP does, but i need to look into Struts more to see if that can bridge the gap. i started porting the connection broker library to Java and this could prove to be a valuable business asset. i am currently using NetBeans to do all my development, and i must add that i LOVE it way more than Visual Studio. its way more developer friendly. built in CVS support, built in javadoc automatic creation tool, and built in intellisense/javadoc browser. i hope we can do more work in the JSP enviornment, because i much prefer Java over C#.

gotta go, time to go home and eat dinner.

forgot to blog another this article about best buy.

up yours, best buy. you created this system to attract business, and when someone finds a way to legally exploit it, you spurn them away for outsmarting you. how dare you think you’re smarter than the people who obviously outsmarted your system to begin with. you made your bed, now you have to lie in it. if you dont like the idea of people actually getting their rebates, then perhaps you shouldn’t offer them. if you think you can prevent me from selling my goods on ebay, whether i bought them on a “mega-sale” or not, you must be delusional.

always shop newegg. dont be profiled into buying some piece of junk you didn’t want to begin with.

this article makes me so made, i almost want to go and do exactly what it says pisses best buy off.

crystal and i signed a lease on sunday to move into Escalante apartments on Dec. 1. i put in my 30 day notice at my current complex to be officially out on the 6th of next month. that’ll give me 5 days for moving.

the apartment had some big special, $799 with $199 total move-in. first month is free, no matter how long the lease. cause crystal is currently a student, we also get to knock another 5% off. total came down to $759 a month. signed a 6 month lease, so i only pay (on average) $666 a month. its a first floor apartment, ~1000 sq/ft. 2 bed/2 bath. the living room is angled so it feels more open and roomier than it probably is. i get to keep my desk and dining table!

speaking of which, i bought 4 folding chairs from world market. 2 for $25. i bought 2 (and 2 cushions) on saturday to replace the 2 that are currently broken. i wanted to make sure they’d work (height and all) before i bought the other 2. turns out there was a crack in one chair and a tear in one cushion. we took em back to exchange em and buy the other 2. however, the lady behind the counter rang it up wrong and i ended up getting the other half of the set for like 20 bucks!! i snatched my receipt ASAP and got out as soon as i could. i saved something like 20 dollars. never overestimate the power of the uneducated.

anyhoo, i read this today and it made my toes curl. it should not be read as a bush bashing article, more of a diebold bashing article. how could you possibly fuck up a voting machine?! i mean, what is there to it?! here’s the main function of the voting machine:

vote vote(Candidate whacko){
whacko.votes++;
}

how can you possibly fuck up something as simple as a voting machine?!!? just add one for pete’s sake!! i fail to understand how this could possibly go wrong. i suppose its another example of pushy administration ruining another project.