Zomg teh Blargs!

Heh heh heh

Make your own here

My brain sucks with names (and faces, and associating the two).

It seems to index by first letter, number of syllables, and general complexity/uniqueness. Gender's in there somewhere, too.


So, Mark and Mike are equivalent in my brain. This is annoying when my boss' boss is Mark and one of his underlings that's in charge while he's away is Mike.

Fortunately, last names are far easier to index by the above method, and due to the nature of my job many of my coworkers are former military and don't look at me strange when I refer to people by last name without a Mr. in front.


That being said, I have many of the access card numbers of various overseas LAN techs memorized (from typing them in when LAN/server rooms are held open).

So why can't everyone be a number?

Apparently I'm getting a few hits a month from people googling for UHF antenna instructions. Maybe I should edit that post or make a new one with more actual instructions.

Ehw. Two of them came from AOL search.

The pulling-my-hair-out below may have just come to an end.

All day Saturday I was Googling like a mad man trying to find a solution to evas not compiling. Part of the problem is that I was googling the whole "evas_engine.c:942: error: invalid type argument of '->' (have 'struct ')" line straight out of the shell, which for some reason had fancy quotes in it (replaced with normal apostrophes above). It wasn't until this morning explaining the problem to someone else in #sporks that I tried googling the first part of the line up to the first '.

I found this: The Rasterman speaks

so, one simple 'echo "x11-lib/evas -cairo" >> /etc/portage/package.use' later, and it's off and compiling like a champ.

I think I need to send an email to the maintainer of the e17 overlay for portage (yes, I use Gentoo) to take cairo out of the USEable options for e17.

99% of the time, open source software is awesome

I'm currently sitting in the 1%.

http://pastebin.com/f238d77c6

At least fluxbox is quick to compile.

ETA: for those curious, the above is what happens when I try to update e17 aka enlightenment dr17. I've been using it for over a year and it's been really good to me but now that it compiles some chunk of the programs but not the rest, I can't use it (sigsegv on x startup).

Here's a list of the Android apps I've played with in the first two weeks of having my G1 (and what I think of them):


OI Shopping List: It's decent, but I preferred the J2ME 'SmartShopper' on my Motorola phones. Once you check something off this list and hit 'clean up list' it disappears forever. In SmartShopper you could switch between a setup view (selecting which things would be on the shopping list, adding new things, etc) and the actual shopping list. When you checked things off the shopping list they disappeared off that screen but stayed in the main list.

OI Convert CSV: Makes the above shopping list tolerable because I can import a previously saved list instead of having to type everything in each time.

OI File Manager: Prereq of OI Convert CSV, but it makes poking around the FS kinda fun. Nothing too fancy.

Twilight: a combination Sun/World clock that tells you sunrise/set times locally (as determined by GPS; no memory of last location, which kinda sucks) and for other cities/airport codes around the world. Sunrise locally is kinda important so I know when to put up the flag, and times in other places is handy cause I'm calling European and Aisian places for work every so often.

Terminal Emulator: Does what it says on the tin. Note that the restrictions inside Android itself make it nearly useless, but having ping is handy every once and a while.

ToggleWiFi: yes, this is an app that lets you turn wifi on and off. Having it on (one of) the home screen(s) is better than digging through 3 menu options to do the same.

Toggle GPS: same as above but for GPS.

Power Manager: one of the necessities according to lots of people out there, it works pretty well

Rings Extended: also one of the necessities (according to others) but I'm not sure I get it. I have yet to see what it does that I couldn't do with the native ringtone manager.

Bubble: a level based on the accelerometer data. I haven't needed it yet but it's fun to play with.

ConnectBot: very very handy SSH client (see other post below about controling my home computer with my cell phone) that I can't say enough good about. It works. It works very well. My only annoyance with it right now is that while it supports multiple concurrent connections to different hosts, you can't have two to one host (where 'host' is one of the saved profiles). I may be able to had two profiles that do the same thing and get around that but I haven't tried yet.

Orienteer: A fairly simple compass, but it's already come in handy tweaking the direction of my UHF antenna. It also has a second screen to show the raw GPS data (if GPS is on).

Sky Map: This is an awesome program. While I haven't posted my astronomygeekyness on here yet, let's just say I have a lot of time at night to look at the stars. This app combines data from the clock, GPS, accelerometer and compass such that when you hold the phone up to the sky it shows you a sky map of what you're looking at. It's unbelievable how well it works considering how new the G1 is. I can stand outside at work, look up, go "what's that star" and hold up my phone and find out. I'm not sure if there's something similar for the 'other' phones/PDAs/things out there, but if you're a star geek this is a major selling point for the G1.

Flashlight: Probably the most simple and useful app, it turns up the brightness, turns off the auto-dim/auto-sleep, and displays a white screen. I've oft used my RAZR screen as an impromptu flashlight before but my wallpaper isn't that bright. This is another case of "why didn't I think of that" that I use probably 2 or 3 times a week (with blacked out windows in the bedroom I need it more than I thought I did).


Hmm, I thought there was a list of the other apps I'd downloaded (but uninstalled) but I can't find it. The ones I remember are a few games, a brain-age type thing, and a j2me emulator that I couldn't get the jar/jad from my SmartShopper into (browser balked at downloading it cause it's unsupported and there's no option to install from the SD card). Oh well.

I'm blogging from my phone.

Is this a great country or what?

-- ETA: I need to work on the css to make the colors a tad higher contrast for this screen.

Fusion we can believe in?

Dr. Nebel is his usual cautious self, but the fact that they didn't disprove Bussard's work and want to build a bigger one is a Good Thing!

Connectbot + EDGE + G1 + 3 computers running sshd.

Getting the hosts.allow on my home router to recognize the phone was a PITA, so I just set it to allow another computer I have access to. So I ssh into that computer (type that password), ConnectBot automatically runs the command to ssh to my home routerbox (type that password), then I ssh into my home desktop (type that password), and su (type that password).

But the keyboard's useable enough. Connectbot remaps the right 'alt' key to / (otherwise it'd be alt+.) and the right shift to [tab] (otherwise it'd be alt+q). Both ConnectBot and the Terminal for the phone use trackballpress as ctrl, which works well. So, 4 passwords, crontab -e, the editing, and trackball+x,y,enter and I've edited my crontab from work without touching a company computer.

Yay.

gah, it took me so long to remember how to get to the admin section that I forgot what I was going to say.

oh well.

Calc II and Operating Systems in the first half, and UNIX in the second half.

Well, at least Calc II should be a challenge ;)

In other school news, my Religion class starts tomorrow (omg I'mma be in an actual classroom! with chairs! and a teacher! and .... ZOMG other students!) so I've taken the past 2 days to get myself sleeping on an ~8:30-4:30 schedule. Sunday didn't work so well (woke up at 2pm and couldn't get back to sleep) but today worked.

I got a B- in my Irish class and an A- in my ethics class, so that worked out ok.

Talk-Polywell.org :: View topic - Found this during google search on Polywell Fusion

W00t!

I decided (mostly on a whim) to take advantage of the early voting and do it today instead of on 'lection day proper.

It took about an hour (40 minutes of standing in line to get into the room) but it was pretty painless.

This way, I'll be able to go to bed right after work on the 4th and get up early for my first night of my first classroom class in over 5 years.

Now where's the 'ignore' button for all the political stuff?

I've been falling behind in my Irish studies class since week 1, but did alright in my Ethics for IT class...

Until last week, where I spent the whole weekend working on a paper for the Irish class, neglecting the Ethics class completely.

Now I have a 4-6 page paper on an ethical decision I've made recently, due last Sunday at midnight, plus this week's homework for both Irish and Ethics.

And I can't come up with a damn thing. My brain really doesn't work like that. What a lot of people would consider ethical dillemas, my brain just does automagically. According to a little test the week before last, I'm a die-hard deontologist. My brain has it's set of rules and just makes decisions based on them. I cannot think of anything in the past year that required any serious hemming and hawing, certanly nothing that could be expounded on to fill 4 pages.

and now we see the title of this site in action:

BLARG!

(for now)



Over 4 feet tall, with a 44" wide reflector, 11" long elements and a pair of 33" feedlines.


And duct tape. Lots of duct tape (mostly on the back of the reflector which is all cardboard and tape and foil.


I get all 4 channels I care about very well (would be absolutely awesome if it were outside, but the cardboard would fail and the apartment people would probably bitch about it).

More pix: