There are tons of little things that don’t currently have implementations or don’t seem to have clean enough ones. I am toying around with solutions for:
- Getting multiple POP3 accounts to aggregate to one IMAP account, with a folder for each account.
- Filing/synchronizing/accessing bookmarks both remotely and on the client-side (I’m thinking of doing a linkblog-type thing on kevinmarsh.com, then creating bookmarklets to ‘bookmark’ to the remote server.)
- Getting all my contacts and appointments in one place, easily accessible from anywhere, including iCal and Apple’s Address Book as well as via the web
- Music. I need my music accessible from anywhere. The iPod is a good start, but I should do something like
rsync my MP3s to my Linux box every night and setup some kind of streaming solution. I also need to get tunes in my car somehow…
I’ll be working on these things, maybe, and posting solutions here. If you have any ideas, please let me know.
I headed over to the Red Cross donor center this evening to give blood. I’ve never done it before, and wasn’t quite sure what to expect, other than leaving with a pint or so less of my ever-so-vital, lifegiving, red fluid.
I began by filling out a lengthly survey asking various personal questions like if I had done drugs, had sex for money, had anal sex within the last 7 years, lived in Africa, and so on. (Which of course I answered “yes” to). Then after a period of waiting, I got in the chair. As soon as I sat down, I saw Jenn next to me getting poked with the needle and quickly after, streams of blood flowing into a clear plastic package. I began to get a little nervous.
One of the biggest mistakes I made was to watch them poke the needle in, which was a bit larger than I was used to. It felt quite odd going in, but not especially painful. As the blood began to run from my body, I was feeling fine. But as more and more blood made the trip from my vains to the bag, I was feeling a bit lightheaded and warm. My hand, trying to maintain grasp on a foam ball, was starting to become numb and the rest of my arm was quickly following.
Apparently, I looked pale, because the nurse asked me if I was alright. “Do you feel like your about to pass out?” She asked. “I don’t know, I’ve never passed out before,” I replied. She took that as a yes, and after I said it I felt more and more like I might want to. She layed me down, and put two cold towels on more forehead and neck, which felt great.
Meanwhile, I was still continuing. I started seeing things a little blurry, and heard the nurses talking about how I was almost done. One of them came up and asked me if I was feeling okay, and if I wanted to switch to the other arm for the “other three vials”. My thoughts at this time were mostly “Heck no, just do it in the arm you already poked and get it over with”. So she did, and I was done.
I laid in the chair for about 30-45 minutes, then when I felt strong enough to get up, I sat up and walked over to the “canteen area” and got a piece of apple pie and 7-Up. I was beginning to feel a little more normal, and after about 10 minutes, we left.
I’m not too sure if I’d give blood again, but according to studies, every time you donate blood, you save three lives. So think of it this way, every time you don’t give blood, you kill three people. That’s a pretty strong statement. If I do decide do give again, I will definately eat something before hand to avoid my biggest mistake: not eating all day before I gave.
On the positive side (or negative—hah!), I’ll soon get to find out what my blood type is!
I love Apple as much as the next guy, but it seems to me that Apple’s latest upgrade to OS X, Tiger, isn’t filled with as much innovation as we’ve come to expect (especially since Apple was bashing Microsoft in banners posted throughout WWDC).
It’s new features basically copy some third-party utilities that have been around for awhile. Granted, the implementation might be a little cleaner, since it is built into the OS (hello bloat!), but the actual ideas have been around awhile.
Two of the greatest “features” in Tiger include:
However, XCode 2 looks good, and the RSS reader integration in Safari also looks pretty clean.
I am also digging the refinements to the menu bar and classic ‘Pinstripe’ GUI elements (not metal). They look a bit more smooth.
The new displays look very nice, though.
Well, Jenn and I got another trip to Cedar Point under our belt, bringing the grand total to 2 for this season.
We rode:
- Gemini
- Witches’ Wheel
- Corkscrew
- Sky Ride
- Johnny Rocket’s (lunch)
- CP & LE Railroad
- Antique Cars
- Wave Swinger
- CP & LE Railroad
- Iron Dragon
- Wicked Twister
- Chaos
(Compliments to Jenn, who did all the hard work of remembering what we rode in in what order we rode it.)
I had a blast and I’m pretty sure Jenn did too. We will be going again the week of the fourth to further maximize our Season Passes’ value. Yay!
I just finished my first full week working at UT’s Lab Support Group. So far, its a pretty good job. The people are cool and knowledgable, and the position looks like it will be a good learning opportunity for me.
I worked on creating images for the Universities’ 40-some G4’s. It was pretty routine stuff, but in the future I will be working on some user-management and deployment shell scripts.
Next week I will work several full days, and then after my week vacation I will begin working 9-5, all week.
Oh, I get a Faculty parking pass too!
I tried to upgrade the Linux kernel on my desktop Linux machine the other day to 2.6.7 (the “latest-and-greatest”).
The operative word here being: tried.
I used the menuconfig utility to go through and select (what I thought were) the correct options. And compiling (make && make install) went without a hitch.
The kicker came when I tried to reboot the machine and boot into my shiny new kernel. It wouldn’t boot.
It only got so far when it comes up with the message:
UFS: Cannot open root device "303" or unknown-block(3,3)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,3)
Uh oh.
Apparently, the problem stems from not building ext2 support (or whatever format your root partition is in) into the kernel (as a ’*’, not a module ‘M’). Even if you do compile ext2 support in as a module, it is never loaded because it needs the module to load it! (headache yet?)
So, I have to make a Linux boot disk and try to boot from it, access my partition, reconfigure the kernel (this time making doubly sure ext2 is selected!), recompile, and reinstall.
The Joys of Linux™
I am starting to assemble some of my favorite quotes about computers, most of which relate to Computer Science.
You can view a random ComputerQuotable. (The typography, per usual, looks great in Safari!)
I also have made a few
PDF’s available, suitable for printing, here:
I am still adding to the collection, but are there any others I missed?
I was just informed by the head of the Lab Support Group at UT that I will be starting a new position on Monday! As it turns out, I will be the University’s head Mac guy 35 hours a week.
What does that mean? It means no more computer-lab-sitting and more computer-fixing! Yay!
Unfortunately, this also means I’m going to scale back my hours at Savage Consulting quite a bit. I feel bad doing so. My boss assured me that I was an integral part of the operation and I have some fairly important duties here. I have learned a lot at this job, and have been here awhile (I started at the start of my senior year of high school.) But I feel I will be an overall better fit over at UT.
I feel I’ll be able to apply some of the things I know a bit more there. They will need me to do all sorts of fun things like shell scripting and writing some AppleScript (among other things.)
Am I up to the challenge? I think so. But only time will tell. Reports from the front lines, as always, will be forthcoming.
Design and photography isn’t a full-time gig for me by any means, but it is a hobby that lets me creatively express myself that I do enjoy. I really wish I could do more designing and take more pictures, but the time isn’t always there.
However, I am announcing that some of the work I have done has been uploaded and is now available for your inspection. There is a lot more where that came from, it just takes awhile to prepare it for the web. The work that is here is separated into two sections: the portfolio (design) and the gallery (photography).
The design work is mostly logos and web stuff. The logos were created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and the web stuff is all hand-rolled XHTML and CSS. (No FrontPage here!)
For the photos, I use a Sony Cybershot DSC-S30. On my wish list is a nice, prosumer digital SLR—If I could ever afford it.
I am still trying to come up with a better solution for the gallery. The current method is clunky, at best, as it doesn’t offer thumbnails. I need to whip up a nice script with ImageMagick’s convert utility to automatically generate thumbnails and lay them out on the page, along with a link to the full version (possibly in a popup window). But I wanted to get some stuff up as soon as possible.
Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy my work.
In the words of Charles Caleb Colton, “Imitation is the sincerest [form] of flattery.” In a way I am flattered, but in other ways, I am angry and hurt. But I generally feel just plain ripped off.
Submit for inspection this page (ED—now removed). It looks to be associated with Michael Schiano, possibly even created as an assignment for a class.
Now Mike and I were/are friends and if he would’ve asked me about it, I probably would’ve helped him out or gave him permission to use my layout. But he didn’t, he just took. Kind of like he just took the name and layout I created for pixelFever!, which I let slide because it was a joint venture at one point.
My layout is not that original or anything, but it still feels distinctly “me” for some reason (probably because I created it.) I just wish people would ask.
Update: Mike has offered a rebuttal on his blog. He makes some good points, but I still wish he would’ve either asked me or attributed the work to me before he used it for a class assignment.
Commonly you know someone’s name and company they work at, but don’t know their e-mail address. Sometimes if you know other e-mail addresses within the company you can decipher their particular naming scheme (i.e., firstlast@company.com, flast@company.com, etc.)
It should be possible to send an email to simply: “joe shmoe”@company.com and have the MTA automatically forward it to Joe using an internal corporate database.
Of course, spaces and quotes are not valid for e-mail addresses.
To play some old-fashioned (but fun!) text-based adventure (or “interactive fiction”) games, use Frotz and grab some old data files from your favorite games. My favorite is the Zork series.
If you aren’t sure what a text-based adventure game is, or why you’d want to play one, check out the Brief Introduction to Interactive Fiction.
Installing Frotz
To install Frotz, simply download the .tar.gz file to your linux box (perhaps using wget), issue the command tar -zxvf [name of frotz].tar.gz then run make, then make install as root.
Running Frotz
To play Frotz after it has been installed, use the command frotz then the name of the image (i.e., frotz /etc/games/zork/zork1.dat)
To save the progress of your game, type save while running the game. It will ask for a filename. You can then load the save-state later by using the restore command.
Hours of console-based fun—but watch out for the grues!
Wow, what a busy weekend.
Jenn was dog/housesitting for her co-worker so I spent some time over there. It was nice to get away for a little while. We watched Gothika and Notting Hill which actually was pretty good.
Then on Sunday we went to church, had dinner, went to my house, and then back to church. A missionary from Kenya spoke at the morning service, and one from Mexico spoke at the evening service. It was quite interesting hearing about the adventures a missionary faces in “the field.”
After church, we went to El Camino Real. It was the first time I’d ever been there. I got the Taco Salad, and it was good, but after seeing the fajitas I wish I would’ve gotten them.
I’ll be at Scott Park from 8:30am – noon tomorrow and then at Savage Consulting until 5pm.
Who said summers are for relaxing?
It’s been awhile since I’ve taken a screenshot of my desktop and posted it. I don’t think I’ve done it since I got my iBook (November 2003).
Well, well, well. It finally comes around for a begger like myself. I’ve had Gmail for about a month now and I was just notified that I have three - count ‘em - three invitations to send to people! yay!
The first one went to my lovely girlfriend, Jennifer (of course), but that leaves two up for grabs.
Does anyone even want these things anymore?
Well, after what I think should be the last period of downtime, KevinMarsh.com is up and running again. I have finally gotten most of the issues with the new TextDrive service ironed out and things appear to be running smoothly.
Thanks to Dean and Jason for providing all the VC200, me included, with such a wonderful experience (even if it did take awhile. <g>)
Our first trip to Cedar Point for the season was today. Jenn and I rode:
- Gemini
- Snake River Falls
- Wave Swinger
- White Water Landing
- Thunder Canyon
- Mine Ride (which got stuck on the 2nd hill)
- Iron Dragon
- Disaster Transport
- Space Spiral
- Cedar Downs
- Ocean Motion
- Midway Carousel
Seeing as how we just got our season passes today as well, there will be many more trips to come!
