Well things seem to have wrapped up to a fairly good night, except I’m not sleepy lol. I seem to be getting better at Clan Arena  Quake is rather addictingly fun, and if the resolution on character models was increased, would perhaps come closer to the current commercial grade of graphics, rather then just good. Also got to join Weasel for a few rounds in RvS before calling it a night.

The real problem is I’m not sleeply :'(.

Today has been marred both with bad and good news, I reckon the bad, will be the last shell I need watch dropped, but the good, effectively ensures the future. So, I guess ’tis time to cast the reel, and hope to enjoy the coming age.

Darn, youth is so wasted on the young :-P.

Stylist thoughts: What I would like my journal to look like

The current site style was selected because it’s fairly simple and provides a good bit of space in its layout, even if it is rather plane.

Irregardless of the finer details, the ability to coop with content breaking out of their boxes is somewhat of a necessity. I often post snippets of code, command output, or even action logs here, from whenever I’m working on my own crap. Although my terminal runs 80 columns wide, there is no such garruentee when I reach for the pre tags. Because of how Blogger handles titling untitled posts, much the same applies to the archive barlet.

I don’t have any problem with web design, although I prefer working on server side code rather then doing the visuals, should we say, I find it a more rewarding experience for the amount of effort I put behind coding.

Last night I took the liberty of configuring Blogger to notify me by E-mail whenever comments are made here, dang, Live Journal did spoil me with all the notification features! Blogger however seems a smoother platform to rely on, my only real complaint is the site templates. One of these days I’ve gotta take some time and create the look / feel site design I want, which is much easier to do here (for free) then paying Live Journal for their equivalent level of control.

After being notified of a comment made today on one of last weeks entries, I also searched through a few pages of posts just to make sure I haven’t missed anything. My apologies if I’ve missed any comments left between 2010-01-30 and 2009-11-13. It’s rare anyone actually leaves a comment lol.

Things have finally settled a bit, this is perhaps the closest to a proper day off yet: played Raven Shield for a few hours on the [SAS] Proving Grounds, took a break for chores and followed that up with some Quake Live, then went back to the [SAS] Proving Grounds for a couple hours. Then a few rounds of Clan Arena in QL before dinner.

I don’t play much Clan Arena in Quake Live, because it is rarely my `style` in the public servers; maybe more formal matches might be better. CA games basically amount to a round based last team standing form of competition, where everyone starts out with a Mega Health, and virtually all standarded weapons, plus plenty of ammunition; the catch of course being, there are NO power ups, no health kits, no extra ammo. You best have rocket launcher skills as well ^_^. Managed to get in a few good team games, before ending up in a mixture of 2vs2 / 1vs2 games, giving great chance to practice weapons selection and application. I also learned of a spot on one of my training maps, where you can rocket jump over (or camp on top of) a wall. One cool feature of Clan Arena mode, is you can rocket jump freely without taking any damage; it lends itself to a very fast, furious, and high octane form of combat. Although, it often becomes a crazy melee.

For lighting things up a bit, Charles Dickens Great Expectations, and Wanted. The former redefines the expression (from the more modern vernacular), of “Gee, what a small world! While the latter, is a gritty but enjoyable action flick, with some very nice fight scenes—that kid is to fighting ability, what a Terminator is to durability.

A day behind schedule, but I’ve also taken the time to burn a SMGL disk, that I’ll likely setup on my desktop, and experiment with porting code to x86_64, as well as playing Quake Live under Linux. Sourcemage is a GNU/Linux distro, that I actually found when Googling for some git operation lead me to their wiki; it also looks like a distro on par with my tastes. I was smiling the other night, when I read a section header in the install docs, about knowing thy `compiler`, until I realized it said `computer`, and my glasses really needed a cleaning lol.

Of friendships, promises, and commitments

As if there wasn’t enough stuff to throw off my focus (on non-SAS matters), looming in the shadows is where a friend will drawn their own line in regard to whether they will stand with [SAS] or apart from it. For me, it’s very hard to take, because I knew, before helping bring this person into the group, that in all probability, they would have to face this cross roads in time (in fact, rather then sugar coat that outlook for my friend, I poured a lot of salt on it early on, and left the decision to rest on their own head).

It’s the second time in my own history here with [SAS], that I will have ever have considered throwing in the towel if person XYZ chooses to leave; the first and before this, the only time, was when I spent a period of time trying to keep another very dear and tired friend from losing his faith. Some people have had the same feelings about me, that’s one of the reasons I stand tall and walk hard through the storms. I’ve always enjoyed being with the people around me, because you never know how long GOD has put them there. The thing that hurts me, is knowing that the friend in this particular question, will have to go through that rough decision, and there is nothing that I can do to make it easier for this person. Because if I could remove the issue from ever having to come up in their membership, I would trade an arm to lift that weight. All I can do, is watch, wait, support, and accept, whatever my friend chooses.

As to where my own path lays in this, I know two things. When the storm started, I made a decision very early on: that if I ever lost my place in [SAS] trying to fight it for the sake of my team as a whole, that I would sooner eat dirt and shallow chicken vomit, then serve under (thenow) NTF_LTC_Rouges command, if he started a competing unit; I won’t serve under any man who would break his word the way he did, out of spite. Like wise, my thinking reminds me, at my core… there is just this stubborn, ornery, stiff necked, tough fscking son of a bitch, who just will not lay down and die.. if it feels like walking on glass, I’ll stand on my legs and fight on, because

and for how many times in my life, I’ve had to come to that conclusion in both [SAS] matters and with my own family—I will never go back on my own word, and I gave that the day I committed myself to this TEAMs future. I will not make a liar of myself, no matter what comes of that choice, because being loyal to the vision, was a promise I made to myself, and something I have never wished to break. I’ll not stoop down to someone else’s level, and that is ironed across my soul even more, after calling Rouge on his own integrity issues; and I’ve done that to his face plenty enough times for it to matter. It is a bygone and stone age concept, but my honour will never yield to a lesser path.

Once an [SAS] man, always an [SAS] man, and I am an [SAS] man, overly tried and true to be sure, and they can type it on my tomb stone in bold if they want, because here I stand, come and get me…. WHO DARES, WINS!

Somehow it figures…

that when I finally find something therapeutically healing to do, my family has to stab until my hearts no longer in doing anything.

Some times I think, rule #0 of surviving life, is to remember that there is no one who cares.

All he could think about was I’m too young for this.
Got my whole life ahead.
Hell I’m just a kid myself.
How’m I gonna raise one.

All he could see were his dreams goin’ up in smoke.
So much for ditchin’ this town and hangin’ out on the coast.
Oh well, those plans are long gone.

[Chorus:]
And he said,
There goes my life.
There goes my future, my everything.
Might as well kiss it all good-bye.
There goes my life…….

A couple years of up all night and a few thousand diapers later.
That mistake he thought he made covers up the refrigerator.
Oh yeah……….he loves that little girl.

Momma’s waiting to tuck her in,
As she fumbles up those stairs.
She smiles back at him dragging that teddy bear.
Sleep tight, blue eyes and bouncin’ curls.

[Chorus:]
He smiles…..
There goes my life.
There goes my future, my everything.
I love you, daddy good-night.
There goes my life.

She had that Honda loaded down.
With Abercrombie clothes and 15 pairs of shoes and his American Express.
He checked the oil and slammed the hood, said you’re good to go.
She hugged them both and headed off to the West Coast.

[Chorus:]
And he cried,
There goes my life.
There goes my future, my everything.
I love you.
Baby good-bye.

There goes my life.
There goes my life.
Baby good-bye.

There Goes My Life—Kenny Chesney

Wasn’t there enough suffering before GOD invented the toothache?

For the past couple days, my teeth have been on the blink again, lol. I just spent most of the day with an excruciating pain between my jaw, ear, and forehead, of which being stabbed in the face with a knife would hurt less. I could take the amount of toothache pain itself for a week without flinching, but it’s the extra pains it causes that get to me. Having the pain at the base of my ear, makes it so even the the sound of the radio hurt, which rules out playing most games. My forehead aching like a headache from the seventh level of DooM, just makes it a pain to concentrate on rocket science lol.

I started the antibiotics on a schedule, so I won’t need to worry about taking it during working hours, and spent about an hour / hour and a half putting heat on it, to try and sooth the pain and make sure the fuck doesn’t swell up on me again. We also picked up a thing of naproxen, benzocaine, and pizza fixings; my interest is in the last two. Yes, my stomach is never far from mind o/. The benzocaine one, is basically a mild anesthetic for dealing with dental pain, a friend recommended  clove oil for the same purpose, but the supermarket didn’t have it.

Hopefully the antibiotics can keep this from getting nasty and the benzocaine product should help deal with when the pain gets nasty. FWIW the naproxen is probably better then paracetamol/aceteminophen that I’ve been making do with. I also have a small bit of Hydrocodone/Aceteminophen that the dentist proscribed for pain, but really it’s roughly equal to Tylenol lol.

When I take something, you know I’m hurtin’, because I’m more apt to slam my head into a wall first.

Updating Qt, hehe.

Tonight I updated SASs TeamSpeak 3 server, and discovered that my TS3 client was too darn out of date to work with it, haha. After updating things, I also noticed in the nifty about dialog they shipped, that the version of Qt used, denoted the GNU LGPL v2.1.

It has been a good while since I updated Qt on my windows system, last time was about one year ago. So I dropped by Qt’s website to download an updated SDK, and also found that they had MinGW and Visual C++ 2008 library packages available. Last time I really focused on Qt/C++ development, Microsoft Visual C++ was just becoming supported by the Open Source Edition (OSE), having long been supported by the commercial editions of Qt.

In perusing the website, I noticed that GPLv3 is now also a supported license for Qt. They really have gone through a few licenses over the years, I still remember when the OSE was a chose between GPLv2 and their own Qt Public License agreement.

While I really hate doing cross platform development in C++, Qt is both the least painful widget toolkit I’ve ever seen, and really makes the process *a lot* less painful. Well, as less painful as dealing with template implementations between GNU/MS C++ compilers anyway.

It is note worthy that the SDK only includes the necessary library files to link using MinGW, the port of the GNU Compiler to Windows. So if you plan on using Microsoft’s compiler, you will want the vs2008 package, or the source code if you need to shoe horn into an older version.

One thing I like about all the *decent* operating systems shipping a system compiler on their install disk, that usually means pre-compiled packages will be in sync with your compiler. Microsoft Visual C++ is not quite so lucky, since being a separate product, most people shipping binary packages of libs/headers, usually support 7.1 or 8.0 instead of 9.0. Oh well, maybe when VC10 is released :-/.