Year: 2011

Yesterday, Alice proved her utility. When I went to work Friday, I decided to go “Live fire”, leaving dixie home and bringing alice. Where as the day before  I had brought both. Except for a few cases, I rarely use my laptop at work, except to version control my notes and stream 94.9 The Bull.

A fellow programmer is implementing the backend that makes the code I’ve written on one of our projects, work. So we were sitting in front of his work station trying to get a couple things sorted. Very conveniently I just brought alice and set her up to remote access the development server the way my workstation does. What proved so useful, the battery life was being reported as over 12-hours: allowing me to focus on the work at hand, and not keeping track of when I would need to go get my charger.

Of course, alice still needs a workable OS but hey, no girl^H^H^H^Hcomputer is perfect. I could arguably live with Windows 7 Starter on it, but I rather like XMonad. Considering how slow Cygwin has been on more powerful systems, I really don’t want to try it on alice. So far,  I’ve yet to solve my booting issue with OpenBSD, and tests using X11 forwarding between dixie and alice, by way of xming/putty; does not make me think it’s gonna work. So I think alice will end up with Ubuntu Netbook or some other Linux distro, for the sake of ease of access to Google Chrome—Mozilla firefox can go suck rotten eggs.

The sad thing, since alice seems to be >= dixie on resources, it will probably work perfectly in a ‘normal’ laptop capacity :-/.

It may sound rather odd, but after a work week, I feel like I’ll go batty if I don’t touch code before Monday :-/.

Hmm, what of use to me, could be whipped up in a weekend…

Today at work, an idea caught my fancy: since I don’t need an uber-expensive laptop if I go with separate laptop/desktop setup. I thought, well gee, maybe a netbook would work in place of a laptop. So far, seems to be awesomeness.

I found an ASUS Eee PC 1015PE model at a really good price. Originally I was thinking that all it would be useful for is a glorified terminal: SSH into vectra at home and the server at work (when needed), to run Screen, then use X11 forwarding for the rest. Sadly this little netbook seems to be more snappy than my laptop, although it’s likely just as useless for compiling stuff. Which is REALLY sad IMHO because my laptop is only about 5 years old, and this netbook beats it on every performane spec save the CPU: an Atom N450 instead of a Sempron 3300+. I think I like the Atom more…

Windows 7 is quite nice and I do like it, much as I expected, but I would prefer a BSD or Linux based system. My only real complaint so far, is the keyboard places the FN key where my fingers naturally expect to land on Control. My fingers are deffo having a hard time adjusting though, since the auxiliary keys (like home/end) are even more cramped than what my laptop uses, and I am extremely used to my laptops keyboard, hey, it’s been 5 years with Dixie.

The main problem is resizing the partition to make room for a suitable OS, as there are no optical or floppy drives built in, and I’mt o cheap to buy one. So I’ve made a thread over on DF seeking some advice.

One perk of a journal, is that as it is my journal, it’s well open to the occasional excursion away from the topics I gravitate toward; if you’re thinking food or computers, you’ve obviously crossed paths with me >_>. Generally, like my grandmother, I make it a policy not to discuss politics. My journal even reflects that, and arguably, entries here that are associated with that particular subject, could probably be counted on one hands worth of fingers lol. Most people I know are rather miffed with the current pucky load going on about government shut-downs and such, and like I noted, I don’t really discuss politics with anyone.

What I’m thinking tonight, is perhaps our beloved founding fathers and federal ancestors got things wrong when they organised the balance of power between our three branches of government. Checks and balances is a fine, and very necessary thing. Unless perhaps, you believe in the divine right of kings means nothing will ever go awry. Something like the King of England is never going to happen in the USA, assuming that Kurt Gödel was wrong about our Constitution. The only problem is, we will never get a damn thing neather!

Something that most know about me, is that I do not believe in political parties, and am unlikely to ever associate myself with one, unless it’s gonna lead to a mandated change in schooling in America—the kind of change that would transition high school Algebra (etc) into the first couple grades. A number of people also know, that if I could build a model of my own “Ideal” society, it would likely be one that reserves the lions share for those that contribute to society. The kind where every person has essential rights but where the full rights of citizenship only come with service, reward those that help make the world a better place, as opposed to the majority of us, who just take up space. That probably sounds like something out of a Robert Heinlein book, but I’ve never read it, nor any of his works.

Or in short, I have a very different view of politics than most people: one that’s likely more pragmatic than idealogical. I believe that ideals are fine things but progress is better.

One of the principal points of American government, is balancing out the equation so that you can’t Totally Screw Up unless enough people are in favour, and of course. Problem is that much like the Articles of Confederation, to many people need to agree on the details. I also seriously do not want to know how many Americans have no idea what on earth the AoC were, let along that it refers to what we had before the US constitution, and not to the Civil War between morons. Alright, so I’m a history lover, so sue me. Another principal point of American government is the balance of power between the states, which is, well, just going to upset people anyway you slice it.

In my opinion, there needs to be more executive application and less political circle jerking. How do things get done? Identify what needs to get done, figure out the direction, then make it happen and assess the result. There is probably a good reason that the best progress in this world, tends to happen under applied direction, not micromanagement. The government could seriously benifit from an understanding of Commanders Intent.

A perfect example: if it isn’t harder than putting a man on the moon using only a stick of bubblegum, odds are someone is qualified to focus on applying the intent behind a direction. If it is less involved than building a replica of the LM out of spare parts in your garage, odds are that focus-agent has people to focus on ironing out the smaller details. If it’s less complex then getting 13 colonies to agree on something, you probably don’t need a lot of people in Congress to agree on anything. Things should proceed on down through the chain with balances plugged into that, not hell will thaw out before things come back into balance again.

Like the old saying goes, shit rolls down hill. Not up it until it rolls over and lands on everyone.

Had to take a vacation day because my mother’s appointment with the doctor that by the time we would’ve gotten back to Duluth, there wouldn’t be much sense going in to work. On the upside, I got to take a few minutes to stop by Petsmart and get the bird a new cage, and got to do a little bit of “Work” while waiting around the doctors office.

Originally, we had the bird in the cage until my feathered nephew (AJ) took off flying, which set Mike flying, which resulted in a game of find where the parakeet landed; AJ being smart enough to return to his cage! After that, the Mike got netted in, but with the move, it’s been a case of stuck in the cage. So now, I’ve setup a larger one to compensate, which concindentially was probably cheaper than the original one lol.

By now, I have moved just about every box three or four times. My bedroom was basically done in two days, one to get the furniture moved and another to organise books. Nearly a week after this all started, the living room is starting to look, remotely livable.

But I think I’ve come to hate boxes  o/