Month: January 2009

An utterly boring day…

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Almost no sleep, and more then a bit of annoyance to start off the day… Gotta love family, eh? SO nice to only be considered, when it is /as good as/ a ploy for getting cooperation with their own endeavours (shove off!). Managed to have a good lunch, better then most meals of late; I haven’t been eating that much. Really, about all I’ve been eating much of is a Special K cereal with berries; I gave up most junk foods last year, lol.

Managed to get several rounds on SWAT 4 today, good to see that I am still limber ;). From recent ops, I think it is about time I release my personal skin; the no armour version is technically a bug, but I actually like how it came out hehe. Also found out about a few tanks I never heard of before: the Panzer VIII “Maus”, Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte, and Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster. Looking over the docs, ffs – like a navy destroyer with tank threads kind of big! I wonder if even modern day technology, could get a beast the size of the Ratte moving across a battle field for more then 10 minutes and a few metre lol. I’ve also heard that a newer MS Gundam series is running on Sci-Fi, note to self – check further.

Really, it’s been a very boring and uneventful day. I’ve also gotten absolutly nothing done…….. *sigh*

I really, really, really need some R&R

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Hmm, it has most certainly been a long day. My mind has been focused on issues, both of a very pleasent and unpleasent nature most of the night, not even coding has provided much distraction from the rest of my life. Hmm, at this point, I think I am sick of my own thoughts. It’s only 0830Z (0330R (local)), but I may as well hit the hay. There is nothing that I can get done, that I actually feel like doing, or am capable of doing at this point. I wonder, what was the last time I actually had some peace in my life? Has it really been that long? Probably has, my friends would know it better then I would.. (f*** it) it really has been a long time. I’m not sure if I honestly remember what the word means anymore, I so rarely get any with the way things are these days lol. It’s 16 degrees out, but I think I would rather march in the cool air, then sit idle tonight. I never seem to sleep that well anymore, for at least a ~decade I guess. but I know, sleep soon, or there will be sunlight through the blinds before I doze off. Already been there once, not really in any mood to repeat that incident.

Oh, how I wish I could get out of here…. even if for just a little while.

At long last… Friday cometh, thank ye GOD.

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Finally, I’m off work until Tuesday – and will probably be mad as a hatter before night fall :. This morning, I was some what disappointed, it was only around 15 F (around -9.5 C) by the time I woke up; people were told to expect much, much colder xD. Never the less, I still equipped for with an extra layer just in case. Usually, I’m out with nothing on but a T-Shirt or a moderate-level of jacket until I can see my breath, then I consider a 3rd layer (I consider my T-Shirt *as* one layer, lol). Took an old light-duty jacket out of the closet, that was getting a little to short in the draft for regular use; but it had a great lining for such a thin jacket lol. Also conveniently one that tends to keep the air tucked in close to the body, in this case warm air from the house. Put my usual light/medium jacket over that for a hood, it has a mesh like lining on the inside, for whatever it’s value; usually I wear it as a rain coat, not for cold weather purposes haha. Then donned the fleece for a final layer; the heaviest form of dress that I will actually wear, lol. I figured with the wind, I should wrap my face in the scarf, then put up the hood and secure it all with my boonie style hat (usually, I only bring it out on rainy days lol), but couldn’t find the dang scarf; which is what I really wanted :-(. All in all, I could’ve done with just my regular jacket and that scarf though, when I set foot outside I couldn’t feel a damn thing – except for my bare face and knee caps.

Before I left work, I put on one jacket for the trip home; and put the rest in the pack, since I always shred my layers upon arrival lol. By the time I got to the car, I was already hot and took it off. It was only 27 F (around -2.45 C), so it wasn’t cold out in the least! I grew up in South Florida, where anything under 90 F (around +32 C) is considered a cool day by local standards… After moving to Georgia, if it is above freezing, I don’t even notice the temperature without a wind chill >_>.

I prefer colder weather, and usually enjoy being out in the rain; maybe I am just a strange person. Although I miss Florida a lot, I really, really, really!!!! do not miss the heat that much. I’m just naturally warm to start with :

I was some what hoping to get to the Library today, but unfortunately not in the cards. I’m rather interested to see what they might have, if anything interesting; on various mathematics topics. Generally, I laugh my ass off whenever I pass their computer section (Foo for dummies and learn XYZ app/OS is about as good as they get), but I do remember they *used* to have some good books on Aeronautics once upon a time, so maybe I’ll get lucky. I still remember my surprise when they upgraded all their computers, I was surprised their budget ever heard of something faster then an Intel 80486 or Pentium Pro o.00.o. They only completed the switch from card catalogue to a computerized system in the mid 2000s, so I guess that is a good sign… Haha, I never thought I’d say it, but I actually miss the old card catalogue. The computer based catalogue, utterly sucks for trying to find anything; it makes Microsoft’s search engine look sexy. One nice thing about the card catalogue, it went quite nice with how the library organizes the books on the shelves; so usually I have to settle for using the computer to find what shelf I should check, then visually grep (vigrep anyone? hehe) the asiles for subject matter. I tried checking their website, but it’s been down for weeks; can’t find anything from Googles cache, so it doesn’t look like the computerized card catalogue is available online. The place that is hosting the new central library that opened recently however, seems to have a database of all libraries in the county, so maybe I can scope things out.

An interesting thought also occurred to me, but nah… fate is so rarely on my side lol.

On another note, I really should look up the organization system used by libraries here, and see if I can leverage that further to my advantage (hey, it’s been years since I used the old-style card catalogue ^_^). A quick Google turns up a few ideas for what I should search for next; combined with my memory, should be fairly easy for me to look up the system in use; if it is one of those anyway… EDIT: looking at the online offerings for the county, I am oddly reminded of an issue of xkcd, and their website is *so* old-style IE it hurts almost as bad as their catalogue hehe.

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How it is possible to spend hours filtering across the web, trying to learn parts of mathematics bit by bit until the clocks gone by…. And not be bored :

Headache or eye strain, yes occasionally, but not boredom lol.

Perl promotes laziness

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#
# We need to open a set of files for writing, and reference the paths later;
# the hash gives us a nice way to work with them later.
#
my %lgfiles = ( pidfile     => "${datadir}/${0}.pid",
                errlog      => "${datadir}/${0}.err"
                ...         => ... );

# but how do we open the set of files?


# this is a lot of typing, but common style in some places
open PIDFILE,   ">", $lgfiles{pidfile}     or die "some message: $!";
open ERRLOG,    ">", $lgfiles{errlog}      or die "some message: $!";
open ...,       ">", $lgfiles{...}         or die "some message: $!";


# this is better, but still too much typing
{
    my $msg = 'some message:';
    open PIDFILE,   ">", $lgfiles{pidfile}     or die "$msg $!";
    open ERRLOG,    ">", $lgfiles{errlog}      or die "$msg $!";
    open ...,       ">", $lgfiles{...}         or die "$msg $!";
}


# this is handy
#
# open each key in %lgfiles for writing to as KEY
#
while (my ($k, $v) = each %lgfiles) {
    open uc($k), '>', $v or die "can't open $v: $!";
} 

# same thing, but faster to read (IMHO)
#
# open each key in %lgfiles for writing to as KEY
#
map { 
       my $fn = $lgfiles{$_};
       open uc($_), '>', $fn or die "can't open $fn: $!";
    } keys %lgfiles;

For some reason, the intregration of regular expressions, qw/quote words/, map {} @list, grep {} @list, the $_ default variable, and the do_something or die $! thing are my favorite features of Perl. While in most other languages, the only great feature I get to enjoy is the trinary/ternary ?: operator, when there’s a place that it improves readiblity and reduces visual clutter ;-).

Ok, so my biggest beefs about Python 2.5 is no ? : and having to import re, hehe

Day dreams

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Recently, I’ve been drueling a bit at the T-Mobile G1, if I had the money to spare, it would really be worth it, in it’s own way lol. Especially the fun of bending it to the functionality I require from such a gizmo, although honestly; I don’t care much for such mobile devices. In America, we’re stuck in a country where it pays more to rehash last years crap then be innovative; just look at Microsofts last 30 years of products.

I doubt, if I’ll ever meet a gizomo smaller then a laptop but bigger then a pen, that I won’t consider unneccessarily “downgraded”, short of importing an old Zaurus PDA or building something myself. Heh, if I had the kind of cash Mark Shuttleworth has, I would really have some fun :-). Enough cash to cover the educational-in-betweens, and the cash to see just what is possible with modern technology…

And then sale it and go broke in the process of competing with same ol’craps that tries to set the users expectations, not go for the gold.

Days thoughts, thus far

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Managed to get to bed early last night, was only up to around 0330R haha. Dreams were a mixture, of pleasant and unpleasant; the former parts still being on my mind. I also woke up to some good news: an unexpected day off work! Which is good, because tomorrow will likely be a living hell…. as usual.

I’m tired, and it’s only 1736R. Really, I think the dog is the smart one lol, Willows been sleeping all day >_<. Last night, I posted on Daemon Forums asking for suggestions on a lightweight web browser to replace Firefox3. I've used Firefox for a really, really, really long time; but 1.5.x was the best hehe. I found Fx2 disappointing in terms of usability, and Fx3 has been totally useless for me on Windows, and a major pain in the ass under FreeBSD. I also went through Links 2.2, and tested it thoroughly; I could live without CSS support, if only it supported tabbed browsing in the GUI. Links is really a very nice browser on the user side, it also boats great speed and highly legible display. Today, I did some heavy testing on the FreeBSD and Linux builds of Opera 9.63. For a long time, I used Opera, first in the 8.5x and later into the early 9.x before switching defaults. Dillo2, Arora, and Midori are next on my hit list; but it would be awesome to adapt Opera as my standard browser again. I'm a person that very much likes to use his own personal environment, rather then someone else’s can of spam.

I also enjoy software that are both portable, easy to manage, and don’t make you unlearn things just for changing Operating Systems. One of my big beefs with Firefox for example, Unix edit->preferences Vs Windows tools->preferences. It adapts to what the user would expect, which is honourable for such a program I guess, but pisses me off ^_^.

Opera is one of the better proprietary products I’ve encountered, and one of my favorite web browsers. Unlike Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, there is no need to extend it in order to get the most bang for ya buck either 😉

Writer’s Block: Tricky Questions

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What is your first reaction when someone says “I need to talk to you”?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

“About what?”

What else could I possibly think of on first contact? >_>.

Ok, so my mind just works like that, lol — I can’t help it 🙂

Hard Target

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Caught an interesting action movie on, Hard Target. I’m not a fan of Jean Claude van Damme, but I was well impressed. Throughout the entire action flick, I couldn’t help but wonder who made this movie… the planning and use of the camera was awesome; in a way, that I have not seen for years lol.

I also had the train of thought, some where along the lines that if John Woo didn’t have some influence on this, I’d eat my hat! Sure enough, Directed by John Woo, and executive produced by Sam Raimi, which really explains a lot. The shots in the movie alone make it worth watching, the ingenuity during fight, fusion of gun play and close quarters, go well beyond what you see in many of the more recent action movies. Not quite the invincible hero syndrome of the 80’s, or the regular 90’s flair but without a doubt, superb! Hard Targets a must see for any action movie goer lol.

Also good to see a techniques using a pistol in each hand, combined with Van Damme’s foot work; which can only be outshone by the bayou lovin’, moon shine drinkin’ uncle lol.