Entries from October 2004 ↓

So day 3 of stay at home and finish shizzle I should have finished before is well underway. It would be going well if it weren’t for the freaking cats. I don’t know what their problem is but they just keep running around and knocking shit over. So far the prize goes to simon for taking out Buzzco’s Playstation with a jumpslide onto the entertainment center. Some people call them pets, I call them fuzzy jerks who don’t pay rent.
I’m going to potsdam this week for dual causes, visit Doug and talk about defense, got to the House for a big stinking Halloween party. I also plan on getting a few hours in at the cosi lab. In other news I started running my two other sites zetanu.net and http://harborviewgeneralstore.com with gunther / A small simple set of php scripts that makes maintaining a small mostly static website a lot easier. I plan on using it to run my code section as well. Now I just need some code…

I mean if I didn’t have a choice and I had to drink pee, I’d drink my own rather than someone else’s. — Danielle

So I built gnome 2.8 on my desktop at home because nautilius decided it didn’t know what kind of files it was associated with. And well, frankly that’s crap. I like how easy it is to associate applications now, the new themes are sexy, and I don’t have to deal with this spatial nautilus stuff no more. So great, sexy, sexy sexy. With all the sex in mind I decided to build 2.8 on my work laptop too. Started it this morning … emerge: (3 of 111). The worst part is it’s downgrading a bunch of packages I recently upgraded. On the upside I get to listen to my hard drive grid away all day.
In other news I have to pee.

So I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night, I really enjoyed it, although I think it might have been better with a sour ending. It brings all kinds of questions forward as to the nature of love, destiny, etc. Not as good as garden state though. I’ve had a run of seeing quite a few good movies lately. Napoleon Dynamite, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Garden State, the Tao of Steve, Dodgeball. Wait dodgeball was horrible, yaaarrrr.
In other news I’m leaving work early today to volunteer at the Childrens Home in Poughkeepsie. Jay Huies group is going to help clean up, decorate for the season, and hopefully make the place a little nicer.
So rhythmbox on my home desktop has totally biffed. it just starts and dies. Then it restarts itself and dies again. Repeat until box is useless. I dont even know where to start to try and fix it. The problem seems to be spreading as well. Now Nautilis has picked up Rhythmboxe’s evil tricks. Time to try Ubuntu?
da links

Skinning gmail to look purty
1,049 federal rights depend on marital status. I don’t like how Kerry says he’s for couples rights just as long as we don’t call it marriage. It’s a lot better then just shutting the door like Bush wants to though.
That’s all I got.

There is a convenient store next to my apartment. I usually don’t go to it since they close at 10 and it always kinda smells like pickled eggs and feet.
Now a weird store is par for the course in Poughkeepsie, but this one has recently gone above and beyond the call of duty. First they got a clown. The clown sells flowers out of the bus stop in front of the store. If you walk by she’ll holler “FLOWERS ONE DOLLA!!!!” Creepy but since I don’t take the bus it’s no biggie. Then Buzzco’s Mom came and visited him, made friends with the clown and told her where we live. Naturally the clown’s mother came to visit us.
Since then they seemed to have invested in card tables and junk. First they got a card table full of old VHS cassettes that look like they served a previous life in a rental store. Now they are selling ladies shoes off a table in front of the store. They also have a U-Haul truck for rent, a western union station, and damn cheap 40oz’s. I’m waiting for either a scary flea market or black market pets from South America.
Links:

Figgy threatened me with this. Apparently everyone else has seen it but it terrifed me.
Someone actually bought a used chicken nugget. On the upside it’s shaped like a wang…
Can we trust Jesus to fight the War on Terror?
Compare this with the hundreds of dollars of electronics you prolly carry around with you. Kinda puts things in perspective.

In python a function call always assigns values to all parameters mentioned in the parameter list, either from position arguments, from keyword arguments, or from default values. If the form “*identifier” is present, it is initialized to a tuple receiving any excess positional parameters, defaulting to the empty tuple. If the form “**identifier” is present, it is initialized to a new dictionary receiving any excess keyword arguments, defaulting to a new empty dictionary.
It’s amzing what you find in documentation. On another note, does anyone else have trouble with system time in linux? mine is never right. I’m thinking about scritping rdate or even setting up my own time server

Another round of debates, I havn’t seen a lot from John Edwards so I’m interested in seeing him in action. Cheny is evil. Along the politics line there are two great entries over at wikipedia on Bush and Kerry
I was surprised how much I didn’t know about Kerry being from Mass originally. I was dissapointed how much I didn’t know about Bush considering he’s our president. Interesting note about the Bush Wikipedia article it has been locked do to ‘revision wars’ on the Wiki. I haven’t seen this kind of thing happen and it’s kind of interesting they have a mechanism to deal with it.

McSweeney’s has some decent ideas for renaming the midwest.
The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990 - 2000. Amazingly these are some of my favorite books.
Gmail is now providing an atom feed.
Sharp Ideas has an excellent hack for a security aim bot here.
Finally, cleaning pennies with TACO SAUCE