Entries from August 2004 ↓

So I took a couple days off from work and went up to my parents home in VT. I’ve been working on my thesis and relaxing … and working in the store. My mom is a physical therapist here so I was able to got to her work and get some PT work done. Electrostim (sp?) is killer. They basically stimulate you muscles with electricity and heat to relax them. It made a huge differecne in my back and it’s making some progress with the bruise in my arm (apparently the muscle is full of clotted blood and it’s slowing down circulation to my hand. Crazy. On another note I have to plug developerWorks again, they have some of the best articles around, onLamp is the only site that comes close. Although I’m hoping Novell will start something similar soon. Last night I started reading:

This article on using sax as a network event stream. Smart
And there is a set of articles on using twisted .

In other news I have a gmail invite, let me know if you want it.

I was on the bike trip yesterday and about half way through I screwed up and locked my back tire this made me skid off the road into gravel and I was launched over my handle bars and I landed more or less on my head. My helmet saved my life. WEAR YOUR FREAKIN HELMET. Anyway my face is kinda smashed up and I have some whiplash. Also my front teeth are pretty smashed, I’m going to the dentist this morning about 11. Hopefully I’ll be pretty set after that. I’ll put some pictures up at least of the helmet as soon as I can.

So I woke up this morning full on believing that it was wednesday. (I still brought my bike for the after work biking club). But other than that I was sure it was weds. Imagine my surprise and joy to find out I got an extra day this week to stuff AND I didn’t miss my Tuesday meeting. Pure Joy. In other news all the usb ports in my desktop computer decied to cook themselves. So that’s cool. Guess who’s buying a new motherboard today?
linkorama

Although not as new as the Angus Diet the Hackers Diet seems pretty cool. It makes a lot of sense and I’m gonna give it a year long whirl. (Wait … that’s a long time).
Recipants , besides having a righteous name, seems like a decent little app. I’ll be putting this on unsure at some point. Bleh perl.
Frontwheeldrive is not a site about cars, it is a site about awesome.
Street Tech has some good reviews/info/stuff.
Does this seem cool to anyone else?
Bender’s Compter Dating Service - Discreet and Discrete
Wow. Also check out the guy’s review of Michael Moore’s latest film.

“My ass hurts, I need a beer”
– Downstairs neighbor / contractor at IBM

So I have been macless for almost a week and the switch over to my desktop is almost finished. I have all my thesis writing, all my music and movies, all the odds and ends that I carry from computer to computer. I have my iPod, Casio Camera, and scanner working without a problem. I bought buzzco’s Cerwin-Vega’s and hooked them to my Panasonic SA-XR25 run through my computer, iPod, and tvtuner. The crowning jewel, Mail.app saves all it’s mail in the standard unix mbox format, so I was able to save all my mail in evolution.
I still need to get my hp photosmart 7760 working and my wacom tablet doesn’t behave quite right. I also have one outstanding problem someone might be able to clear up for me. I have my camera, usb stick, and iPod that all use scsi emulation of usb. Every time they grab the first available device, since I’m usually only using one at a time they always grab /dev/sda, I would like them to consistently use the same device. Any hints?

So the gnome desktop whore that is mr. eli dow brought me the solution I was looking for. udev, dbus, HAL, and gnome-volume-manager. Well he recoommended udev and hal. I got the rest from my old friend google. I will be setting it up tonight. Wish me luck. Here are the pertinent links:

UDEV Primer for new and vetran Linux users.
The Gentoo UDEV guide
A gentoo forum thread

There may be others at some point…

Today a bunch of clarkson grads got together and had lunch near IBM. Decent time, but crappy food. I had some good conversations with Oz though, so that’s cool. I went biking with Bisti, Zamir, and Kelly the other day. Towards the end it was really kicking my ass. I had a lot of fun though I even got to flip over my handle bars with just a couple scratches. I’m wearing my helmet next time though. We rode around Vassar Farms, I don’t have any pictures but bisti has some in his gallery I believe.
In other news:

I am mrburns. Who are you?
This dudes pixel art is pretty freakin cool.
Wanna kill an afternoon at work? City Creator
Still want to kill more time? Create a south park character
That is a big pig.
Creatures in my Head is also damn cool.

I finally broke down and bought a mountian bike. Jeff Bisti came along and helped me out. I get to pick it up tommorow and it should be badass. I got the Giant Iguana in red and black.
I have a wacom tablet setup on my desktop which is cool. Hopefully I’ll have more time to play with it. I don’t often have anything to post about work, but I did get a laptop upgrade now I have a T30. It’s running gentoo and XP at the moment. Also, I scanned more photos.

Scituate, MA
Potsdam, NY (these are night photos)

So this weekend was the annual Zeta Nu Alumni Association Golf Tournament. We went up to the albany area and played at a public course in Amsterdam. In all the were 25 of us. It was a great time. I got to catch up with friends and got spectacularly drunk thanks to a couple 40’s of hurricane.

We played four man scramble, my team was Cory, Swider, Lotito and myself. Some general suggestions for golf cart operation:

No matter how good of and idea it appears to be, DO NOT attempt to bail out of a golf cart going full speed. It’s faster than it appears.
If it is raining it is easy to do a 360.
People at the golf course are not impressed by 360’s.
Running over golf balls messes up ‘fair play’.
Swinging at your ball from the golf cart does not approximate polo.

Needless to say it was a lot of fun, we had a very chill party/cookout at Steve Coates house in Troy, NY. Also Thad has a pretty rad apartment, considering it’s in the armpit of New York (aka. Troy).