The hardest part about writing down what I’m thinking is coming up with a title. I’m pretty sure WordPress requires a post title before publishing. This brings me back to the days of designing crazy layouts on pitas. I always just used the date for my post titles then. But anyway – avast ye, make way for a boring post.

Right now, I’m not sure if I’m in a good patch in my life, or not. I’ve probably thought more about myself and the world in general in the past 4 months than I have in my entire life. I’ve been slowly trying to teach myself how to deal with situations that I have little to no control over, and it is pretty difficult. I remember back when I was younger, I cared so much what people thought about me and I really wanted to be recognized for something – anything. Now, I don’t even care, but my life at this point does feel like a waiting room. I have, hopefully, about a year and a half left of school. The idea of not finding a job right after school terrifies me because I want to be stable. I don’t want to end up living with one of my parents and working a dead end job like everyone else I know. I want to be able to live the life I’ve always wanted to since I was young. Not finding a job is a very real possibility, but I’m trying my best so that this doesn’t happen. One of the qualities that I like about myself is that I’m extremely independent; it’s done more good than harm, for the most part, so I don’t see it as a bad thing anymore. I’ve recognized that I’ve lived about a quarter of my life (or so I hope) and I really want to do as much as I can with the amount of time I have. I think this idea is due in part on why I’ve wanted to take so many risks over the past few months. I don’t think I’ve made enough mistakes in my life and the ones that I have, I’ve learned from greatly.

I am pretty excited about Moogfest, though. The lineup hasn’t been fully announced yet, but I really hope a lot of good artists will be there – ones I actually listen to. I also hope that tickets aren’t expensive; I’m sure a lot of free shit will be given out and I love free shit. I’m going to see the Crystal Method live next weekend and I’ve not listened to them since I was in middle school. Their past couple of albums have just not been that good, but from what I hear, their shows these days are amazing so I’m really looking forward to going.

I’m also going to buy myself an iMac.

Chillax. I’ll still use my ThinkPad, but things have gotten to a point where using Linux has not grown past anything but a great OS for a server, and if I dare say, a novelty on the desktop (or laptop in this case). Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux to death. I’ve been using it since 2001. I started out with RedHat and moved from it to Mandrake, to Fedora, to Slackware, to Debian in 2006. I can build a custom kernel, patches or not, like something fierce. Frankly, I’m tired of how capricious it is. I’ve used a myriad of distros, and while some are better than others, they all essentially work the same. I’m tired of using VirtualBox to perform tasks in Windows that can easily be done in OS X that cannot be done in Linux. OpenOffice sucks and I have to use Microsoft Office. Gimp feels like a bucket of rusty nuts and bolts. There are no seriously good audio players – they’re all either too slow, terrible at managing playlists, ugly, or defective in some other way. I’m tired of using drivers that just cut the mustard. More is needed than just the minimum in functionality. There are other reasons as to why I no longer feel like dealing with Linux on a daily basis anymore, although they are trivial, but they’ve piled up over the years. I’ll still try to work with it on my server, but for now, I’m going to have to switch over to OS X come mid-August. Yeah, I know I’m a heretic. My 18 year old self would carve it into my arm.

I do start school again in 3 weeks. I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve been meaning to redesign the layout for this site, but I just haven’t had the time (or desire). I’ve been working quite a bit lately, so I’ve really not had much time to do anything. It’s been about a week and a half since I’ve had time to spend just checking SomethingAwful and my other slew of sites. I did go to Asheville yesterday and picked up some grape shisha from HookaH-HookaH, and I had a chance to try it out. It was better than I expected, although it looked pretty disgusting. I’ve never actually tried any that used honey instead of molasses, so it was pretty different. It certainly was easier to separate and there weren’t as many twigs as I usually find in Starbuzz flavors.

I finally bought a new server. Yes, Alice has been laid to rest and has been superseded by my new server, mogwai. Mogwai is an Acer Revo R1600 running Debian stable 64bit. I bit the bullet and built a kernel for it without CIFS support and I’m not even going to transfer files to it using SSH (I know, right?). Instead, I’ve found that NFS4 provides throughput speeds way faster than either of those two (why I even used CIFS before, I don’t know?), not to mention it no longer takes an hour to build a kernel.

This afternoon, I ordered a Bodum Santos.

I’m pretty excited because I’ve heard the coffee it makes is really good – not bitter at all, and there are no grounds left behind. Unfortunately, I’m just not manly enough to use it with a butane burner, BUT I’m going to be daring and bring a hot plate to school with me in the fall. If you look up a demo of one in action, you’ll be jealous. And you’ll want one. Amazon sells them for $50 and they retail at $120.

Also: of Montreal sounds like Phoenix. And I don’t have to work tomorrow. Sa-weet.

I finally received my first paycheck of the summer on Wednesday and splurged on a new skateboard.

ABEC 3, 7.75′. I just hope it’ll be here by the end of next Friday since I’ll be gone to a happy place after then. I slept from 6pm until 6:30am. And Valve needs to release Steam for Linux already because the new version sucks under wine.

For the longest time, I’ve had to deal with audio delaying at the beginning of every song/movie. I could never figure it out until this morning. Basically, when I would play something, VLC would freeze for 5 seconds before playing and I couldn’t figure out why.

Under ‘Preferences,’ click ‘All’ under ‘Show Settings,’ and open the ‘Audio’ category. From there, click on the ‘Output modules’ subcategory and make sure the correct audio output method is chosen; in my case, I chose ALSA. Save your settings, and the initial audio delay should be gone. I think the delay was due to VLC trying to find a suitable output method.

Now only if I could figure out why gnome-screenshot doesn’t include the title bar in gtk-window-decorator under compiz.

glapi/glapi.c: In function ‘_glapi_check_multithread’:
glapi/glapi.c:178: error: expected expression before ‘void’
glapi/glapi.c:178: error: too many arguments to function ‘_glapi_init_multithread’
glapi/glapi.c:180: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘knownID’
make[2]: *** [glapi/glapi.o] Error 1


I found a nifty trick while browsing /tmp this evening. By default, Linux saves a copy of every video you view on YouTube. I’ve not tested this with other video sharing sites, so I’m not sure if it works with them. Find a video you want on YouTube, wait for it to completely download, and then in your terminal, browse to /tmp. You should see a file called Flashxxxxx where xxxxx is a random string of characters. You can move this file anywhere you want and play it back in VLC. Unfortunately, it’s not an SWF, but it is an FLV; you can convert it to SWF should you choose to do so.

Xorg 1.7 fixes video lagging and choppiness. Saweeeet. Also, happy birthday to me.

My Debian graphics issue has been fixed. I’m not exactly sure what the specific problem was, but it works now. I found this while looking for virtualization support in the kernel:

This is a very simple module which allows you to run multiple instances of the same Linux kernel, using the “lguest” command found in the Documentation/lguest directory. Note that “lguest” is pronounced to rhyme with “fell quest”, not “rustyvisor”. See Documentation/lguest/lguest.txt.

If unsure, say N. If curious, say M. If masochistic, say Y.

:3

After hearing about Docky being separated from Gnome-Do, I went to try out the alpha version. I found that there are no Debian binaries – no worries, right? I can just build it from source…right? Wrong. I don’t know about other distros, but Docky refuses to build on Debian. The maintainers don’t even know why, or care. They don’t even know their asses from a hole in the ground and blamed the issue on Debian itself. Nice one, guys. I keep getting the error: No package ‘mono-options’ found and I have libmono-getoptions2.0-cil installed. No, my mono GAC is not broken. So, what have we learned from this? Don’t release a package “for Linux,” if it only builds on Ubuntu.

The Debian issue I’ve had since at least June has been resolved. I am now back on testing (squeeze). See this report for more information. The real reason why I’m happy is because I was able to get myself off of ATi’s fglrx driver. I have a Mobility Radeon X1300 and Linux support for it dropped some time ago, leaving me stuck with the 2.6.28.9 Linux kernel, since that’s the last kernel the last drivers support. I’ve been trying for years to get the open source radeon drivers to work and I got them finally this past weekend. I had to compile everything basically from the ground up and build it into the kernel and it worked. Now, I get fewer FPS than I did with the proprietary driver, but it works. Compiz works wonderfully and I can now resize video without X crashing. There’s also no tearing and I can play video in VLC once again. So, yeah, as a result of this I can use the newest 2.6.31 kernel – with ext4 and grub2. I’ve been using reiserfs since the days of Woody and it’s time to move on. I don’t see a future in reiser4 so I see no point in holding out for it.

Some bad news is that the primary drive in my server may be dying. It’s an 80GB Hitachi Deathstar Deskstar that I pulled from a dumpster in 2003. Since 2004, it’s been making bizarre noises that are a mix between beeping and clicking. I guess it’s its own African clicking language or something, being a computer and all. Starting last week, the clicking has become more slow and frequent. I ran a SMART check on it back in 2006 and got back no problems. I’m running an extended test as I type this so I’m hoping things are okay. Just to be safe, though, I have a scheduled cron script to back up all the important files on it to the secondary drive. I don’t really want to buy a new hard drive so I hope everything is okay. I actually depend on this one for a lot of things.

I wish I had a bigger tank for Mossby and Trigby. They’ve gotten so big, but I can’t afford a larger tank right now and I don’t have the time to maintain anything larger than what I already have. I’ve promised them that when I’m finished with school I will get them a bigger one – one with a filter so I don’t have to constantly change the water from their nastiness. I should really clean my room up a bit. There are wads of paper everywhere from where I’ve been ripping pages out of spiral notebooks. Oh, I watched Watchmen this evening. What a let down.

I do not look forward to writing this paper for my ethics class. The length requirement isn’t long, but it’s going to take a lot of rambling to fill it up. I’m finished being sick, finally. Luckily, it wasn’t anything serious. The only real odious task for this week was cleaning out Mossby and Trigby’s tank, which I did this morning. It was disgusting, to say the least. Their water was cloudy and smelled awful. Mossby has been proudly sitting on top of the rock this afternoon. I don’t know why. Watching Trigby eat three whole grasshoppers this past week was hilarious. Mossby was supposed to get two of them, but that didn’t work out…unsurprisingly. I watched The Girl Who Leapt Through Time yesterday.

It was pretty good and there weren’t any boring moments. The next one up on my list to watch is Perfect Blue. I have no idea what it’s about, but I hope it’s good. Also, it’s been a long time and the Debian installer is still broken. The root password and users set at installation are not actually saved and network manager is broken. The last time I used it (couple weeks ago), it didn’t detect any of my network hardware even though it was recognized by the kernel. Both of these problems have been reported, but nothing much is really being done about them. I’d like to switch back to Squeeze, but I can’t until this is fixed.