Kyle Smith

Man, 4 liters of beer is a killer. I managed to hold it in for about 2 hours before I exited the Roxy and The Whole 10 Yards. And then I booted all over Main Street. And the edge of Main Street. And then the public parking lot. And now it’s time for bed, ’cause I’m fucking tired.

Update: first, I’d like to apologize to anyone that had to use the crosswalk in front of the Roxy last night. Second, I realize it’s not quite Easter yet, so the title is a misnomer, but I think it’s close enough.

Man, it’s been a long weekend. Even though time flew. And DST didn’t really help. Yesterday I did get a bunch of COSI work done during the afternoon, but it went downhill from there. I tried to do some IBM work last night but failed miserably. I ended up walking down to Videorama with John and renting The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was surprisingly good. I also started installing Gentoo on my laptop. Managed to get the drive all set up correctly, but for some reason it refuses to use my bootstrap partition, even though it’s been blessed (with Holy Penguin Pee even). My kernel also seems a bit screwed up — it drops to bootmon almost instantly and then powers off when I exit from it.

Today I actually started on a variety of homework, including the new IS415 assignment and the Applied Linear Algebra assignment from Friday, but I didn’t finish either. This evening I spent watching Ripley’s Game, which wasn’t quite as good as the first.

Of course I also had to watch Adult Swim while I wrestled with getting MonoDevelop installed and to update D-Bus/HAL/G-V-M. And I succeeded. MonoDevelop is pretty cool. Perhaps my learning a new language (C#) will spark my interest in writing some code.

Been filling out more paperwork than you can shake a stick at just to take three graduate level CS classes.

Cheesefry: I feel your pain. I *hate* it when that happens.

Update: turns out you don’t *have* to fill out most of that paperwork anymore. You just need the permission number from the instructor.

I spent much of the rest of the day running around trying to set up things for the training that COSI will be doing in several weeks and for the open house tomorrow. Needed to reserve a room, arrange to have a projector, figure out parking, and determine what we’re doing for food. 3 of the 4 things are done. Just need to get a quote from Aramark or someone for the lunch we’ll provide for attendees.

Anyone gotten Mono working under OS X? From some of the posts on Planet Gnome and from the official Mono site it sounds like it works just fine, but I’m wondering what I really need to do to get it up and running. I came across Erik Dasque’s blog today after Miguel linked to him. He sounds like a pretty funny guy. And he had a screenshot of ?MonoDevelop? running under Mac OS X, which looks pretty cool. I’m not quite on the Mono/C# bandwagon yet the way Miguel and some other Ximian/Novell folks seem to be, but I would like a high level, platform independent language to write stuff in. And I unfortunately, as much as I love it, I don’t think Java is it.

Of course, I say that as I consider starting a cool new project that would utilize Java and J2EE technologies to do its thing.

…what a surprise! The QOTD has been passed on to me.

I’ve been so lazy the past two days. I’ve done a few errands and bought some new hardware (like a Radeon 9200 and a 17″ Sony flat-panel display). But for the most part I’ve done nothing but sit in my room and somehow killed two days. There are a bunch of computer related projects I want to work on as well as some homework, but I can’t stand to touch my computer for more than a few minutes at a time.

To answer’s Mike’s QOTD…

The first computer I ever used was a Tandy something or other running some DOS variant that my brother Darryl bought back in 1992 or 1993. The first computer I ever used on a regular basis was the Apple Macintosh Performa 630CD that my parents bought for me for Christmas in 1994. It had a whopping 250 MB hard drive, 4x CD-ROM, 8 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 20 MB), and a 66/33 MHz processor. The reason for the funky speed was that the clock ran at 66 MHz but the processor itself only ran at 33 MHz.

It’s a little early in the day to post the next QOTD, but what the heck, I’ll probably forget to pose one later in the day. So… what is the first programming language you learned, and what did you use it for? (don’t get all technical about that really being two questions; the first is rather boring without the second).

My response: the first programming language I learned was C++, from one of those Learn X in 21 Days books waaaayyyy back in 1997 or 1998. Of course, I was using Mac OS 7.x/8.x back then so there were very few C/C++ compilers available for the platform (Metrowerks CodeWarrior and Apple’s MPW are the only two I know of), so I didn’t really *use* C++ until a year or two later when I purchased CodeWarrior PR1 (for *full* price, mind you). It wasn’t until I learned True Basic and Visual Basic in my freshman year of high school that I truly understood C++ so I began writing simple console apps. With the advent of REALbasic, I started doing serious coding (I started using it back when it was CrossBasic 1.0r17, IIRC), including network apps, a serial number/registration module, and some simple utilities.

I’m going to go out on a limb and pass the QOTD on to James Kraetz, as I think he might be one of the few people reading PC over break. I would pass it on to Mike McCabe, but he’s otherwise occupied. Oh, and Mellon Dog will *so* kick Lime Cat’s ass.

Another tangent: I think it’s time someone came up with a tagline for Planet COSI. My current recommendation: Doesn’t Cause Anal Leakage (courtesy of The Oblongs)

So Cheesefry has an interesting idea. Things are a little slow on the ol’ Planet COSI right now because people are already beginning to take off for break. clarkbw has been gone for almost a week now. Apparently Steve left yesterday or today. And the rest of us are hard at work trying to get things done before we split tomorrow or Friday.

It’ll be interesting to see if Donnie accepts the challenge, since he’ll either be home or on his way there.

The question for today brought me back to early Y2K when I spent weeks getting LinuxPPC 2000 to run on my 300 MHz G3 minitower. At the time it was a real pain in the ass because I couldn’t get my modem to connect reliably to my ISP. I don’t quite remember where I obtained the CDs from. I might have burned it at work one day. Several months later I blew away Linux and it was almost a year later that I installed Yellow Dog on my computer and started using KDE 2.2 (?) and GNOME 1.2 (?).

Why am I posting so much today? Because I’ve got homework to do, dumbass!

It appears that someone has taken the title from Randy!

I find it pretty cool that the Mars rovers are advanced enough that the controllers can do this whenever they want. And now compare that software to the average CS major’s programming homework. *shudder*

I find it quite frustrating when a really cool idea pops into my head right and I suddenly get a burst of motivation to go do something with that idea only to be thwarted by a series of class in progress. It happened this morning. Again. About ten minutes into TC210 (Theory of Rhetoric). I started thinking about complex adaptive systems (CAS) and immediately want to go try something. Only I have classes stacked at 9 AM, 10 AM, 12 PM, 1 PM, and 2 PM three days per week and the hour break in the middle isn’t really enough time to do anything except get some lunch and *think* about reading email. By the time classes are done at 3 PM, whatever inspiration I had is long gone.

And in completely unrelated news, I learned something new about Gentoo’s emerge tool today. Instead of doing “emerge –pretend …” and then running the same thing again without the “–pretend”, it’s more efficient to do “emerge –ask …” because dependencies don’t have to be recalculated!

“To be a god, at least a creative one, one must relinquish control and embrace uncertainty. Absolute control is absolutely boring. To birth the new, the unexpected, the truly novel—that is, to be genuinely surprised—one must surrender the seat of power to the mob below.

“The great irony of god games isthat letting go is the only way to win.”
— Kevin Kelly, Out of Control

Went bowling with the IBM crew and some other people that have worked for Big Blue in the last year. I ended up rolling 80-something the first game a whopping FIFTY for the second game, and I didn’t even get the prize for lowest score! (Parul beat me!)

It’s seeming like a bad day for hardware. Mike McCabe’s laptop bag got dropped and his laptop got trashed, and lately my keyboard has been flaking out — Panther seems to think I’m hitting some of the function keys, which quickly gets annoying when it favors Mute and Expose’s Show All Windows feature.

I don’t roll on Shabbas!