Older blog entries for eliot (starting at number 52)

Wax me
Mould me
Heat the pins and stab them in
You have turned me into this
Jush wish that it was bullet proof

So pay the money and take a shot
Leadfill the hole in me
I could burst a million bubbles
All surrogate and bulletproof

Well, this has been an interesting week to say the least. Last weekend I went to Dallas to have the first Texas Jabber dev meeting. It was at reatmon's house, so it was a limited attendance meeting. It was great to get away from school for a bit, have high speed Internet, great food and hack again. I didn't do much, but I played secretary and enjoyed the DSL. After getting back, I jumped right into the week with a call from my dad saying that my car is probably going to need the engine replaced and it may or may not be under warranty. Great. Still waiting to hear back on that one. This is our first week of school to not have a Monday off. This is going to be a long week.

I do not like the the new Dave Matthews Band single that is on the radio. I hope the rest of the CD isn't like that. Ugh.

I got a $10 off coupon at Amazon to buy any CD or DVD. The CD I want "leitmotif" by Dredg is $9.99. Hrmph. So, do I buy another CD or find a more expensive one? Iain, can you suggest a CD that you really like right now that I should try? I'm in the mood for some new UK acoustic / emo stuff. Dunno.

Poor Debian Gabber users are still waiting for me to fix the packages. I'm having a lot of trouble getting packages to fit all three distros. It doesn't help that it takes forever to rebuild C++ programs! Ah well.. I think I've almost got it.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is my busy day. I also get to decide if I'm going to apply to be an RA for the floor next year. I think I'm going to go for it. I'm going to miss not having a roommate though. :(

Every day, every hour
I wish that I was bullet proof.

Oi! Oi!

Three day weekends are just fabulous. What is even better is that I didn't eat at the cafeteria all weekend. Just splendid!

I'm eager for julian to get home so that he can see that not only did I finish the Gabber 0.8.1 manual updates, but I updated the HELP button hookups in the source. Hmm.. I think that's my first contribution to any real source code of a program. Even if it was just replacement stuff. :)

For some reason I really like the Yahoo! Messenger for Linux. It's GTK+ and has some fun things. Of course, I'm really proud of Gabber now. 0.8.1 is going to be so beautiful with GnuPG. The interface is so nice (go julian!). I'm in love again. :)

Over Christmas break I got to see some art by Robert Therrien. Fascinating stuff. My favorite is Under the Table. It's basically a huge tableset (2.97 x 5.97 x 7.93 m) that you can walk under and around. Makes your perspective on things very different!!

We're all fugitives.
Just look at the way we live.

I'm supposed to be doing a lot of homework right now. I'm tired and really good at procrastinating. Oh well.

It's been a great week. I love college. It's so great to see everyone again and look forward to all the cool classes that I'm taking. I made my first two CAD models today in lab. That was fun. :) I also went to my first Manufacturing Processes lab... that was a bit scary! I think I'm too much of a klutz to do welding. Oh well.. it'd be a great thing to know.

Ho hum.. Jabber was in Linux Journal again. It's so cool to see that Doc Searls completely "gets" how Jabber is a communication API for applications. It totally showed through in his article.

Our Internet pipe was down for exactly 24 hours (1pm-1pm). Such a pain. I can't even get to my old mail now because the server I use switched to IMAP. It was fun though to see everyone freak out. Everyone just depends on 24/7 Internet connection so much. Kind of a weird feeling.

Even when the ship is wrecked, I promise
Tie me to the rotten deck, I promise

OI!!!! Good grief it's been ages since I've been able to write a diary entry.

In the meantime.. After breaking from school, I immediatly flew up to Denver to work a bit at Jabber.com's HQ. I realized nearly immediatly that I do not want to work in an office. Of course, I was sick (cold junk) and I missed my family and friends from school terribly. I still didn't like the whole getting up, going to work and figuring out what to do for lunch routine. No thanks, I'll stick with working from home.

Following that I came home and did nothing. It was fantastic. At first I couldn't figure out what to do because I've never been bored before. I always have projects or deadlines or something. After I figured out how to enjoy having nothing to do, I had a brilliant time.

Desperate for some new music, I picked up the Coldplay Parachute CD. I was a bit saddened by the loss of the acoustic piano, but I still enjoy their drummer's jazz beats. The lead singer's voice is very enjoyable as well. He reminds me a lot of Dave Matthews.... I also got the Beatles 1 CD as I've never listened to the Beatles much and wanted to get to know some of their songs. What better way to do it? I was surprised at how quick a lot of the earlier songs are. The song is over before you even know it started. I really like Help. :)

I wasn't too happy with my semester report card.. too many B's. I only had two A's and one of the classes I got an A on was just a one credit hour class. In the constant reflection of a college student, this year will be better.

I'm in total chaos about where to live next summer. I was sure that I would go live in Denver, but now I don't think that's a good move. Ah.. I've got lots of different places to live, but I just don't know which one is good. How's the weather in Australia in summer? :) I'm also in a bit of a conundrum about whether or not to take English as a second major or just do a minor. I want English something. I figure a Computer Science Engineering student mixed with a little English would make an interesting enough background to stand me out a bit from all of these idiots taking CS courses.

I'm finally the maintainer of the campus Debian server. It hasn't been updated since a year ago. The previous maintainer was a RedHat user and didn't know about apt I guess. Loads of packages are being updated..

You don't hear many people say this, but I'm not afraid to: I am really glad to be back at school. I miss the people here and the schedule and just college life in general. highly recommended :)

Welp, I want to get back into Advogato reading. Over break I just visited fejj, Iain and julian .. I should probably branch out a bit.

I'm looking forward to classes tomorrow. Today I had Engineering Graphics (CAD stuff!) and tomorrow I have CalcI (again), Speech (with a fun teacher), Engineering Graphics Lab, CompSciII and chapel. Good stuff.

Odd.. I'm not a Journeyer anymore. Guess I'm losing grip in Advogato. Oh well.

This is going to be a fantastic semester.

Iain: Hmm.. you've struck a cord with me (ooh, I think I really used that phrase wrong). In this post you talked about Radiohead becoming old news. I've been feeling very similarly lately, yet I have a delema. I still love Radiohead. I've been looking at some new bands to try and move me away from that.. among them are David Gray, Aaron Sprinkle, Jeff Buckly, Belle and Sebastian, Sunny Day, Pedro the Lion and most notably, Coldplay. I haven't been able to scrounge up many besides Coldplay.. but I'm hoping I'll be able to find a band I like a bit as much as Radiohead. So what do I do? Just forget Radiohead because now they are popular? I feel like a deserter then. I love their style and their words.

*sigh*

And so finishes another week in the life of Eliot.

It was a good week really. At julian's insistence, I finally got some big junks of the Gabber manual updated. Hopefully will be able to finish that off shortly so he can release 0.8.0. I hear it will have message queing! Beautiful....

I sent an article I wrote about the University's censor ware (Internet filter) to the director of student activities (who happens to be a good friend of mine) after he brought up over dinner one evening how much he hated Internet filters. I was surprised because I figured him to tbe the normal Univ admin kind of guys regarding this area. Anyway.. he was really impressed with my article and wants to print it in the school newspaper. I'll need to dig up some more facts and structure it a bit better, but I think I'm going to do it. I hate the filter and I hate what it stands for.

I'm off to take a friend to Lufkin... Hopefully will be back in time for some Christmas parties!

Yay! Tests are done. I did really well on the Biblical Foundations test. Mostly because I'm really familiar with a lot of worldviews (naturalism [atheism, agnosticism, humanism, etc.], transcendentalism [new age, polytheism, pantheism, etc.] and theism [Judaism, Deism, Biblical Christianity, Islam, etc.]). The PE test on the other hand... I *hate* memorizing random facts about calories, carbohydrates and junk like that. It's so much harder because there's no main ideas to understand and digest (like Biblical Foundations), instead it's just lots of random bits of information from the chapters.

pphaneuf: Mozilla's 20001114 binary build is quite nice (using it right now). I'm sure today's build will be similar. It's been awhile since I've used Moz and I've been really happy with the speed, rendering, and general quality of this build. I haven't been able to get the Netscape 6 release yet (the installer stalls up everytime), but comparing to the PRs, I bet the Moz nightlies are still far superior.

NOW TO RELAX WITH NOTHING ON MY MIND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(I would still like to know about TinyCOBOL on Linux.. AND a WWW-based calendar/address book that syncs with my palm pilot in Linux.)

Have a great day folks.

Gah! I had a great diary entry done. Then I hit the menu option I've never used before: File -> Exit.

I'll keep this one short, considering I have two tests tomorrow morning and it is getting a bit late already.

Want to know how busy I've been? I've been so busy that I didn't know Netscape 6 was released. I missed the big party! Oh well.. today's Moz build is beautiful! I wish that Netscape's chrome's would install in Moz!! There's already some cool ones.

It's amazing that with all of these companies and portals and such that we don't have one simple thing: a portal/webcalendar/webaddressbook that can synchronise with your email program and especially your palm pilot. Why is this so hard? I'd love to use Netcenter's calendar and have it in my sidebar and such.. but what's the use of that when I need to keep another one on my palm pilot and another one in my school intranet and and and.. Not to mention all of the places I keep address books! This is just sillyness. Hmmm.. how much effort would it be to do this myself?

Hrmm.. speaking of sidebars. An advogato sidebar would be super. That'd be really cool actually.

I need some help.. I need to get a COBOL compilor installed on a Debian box here at school for a class to use next semester. We've been looking at using TinyCOBOL, but it doesn't compile on Debian! yacc/bison complains of many errors and continues on. If you didn't know better (like me at first), you'd think it worked fine. Too bad there are no COBOL compilors in Debian. The lack of COBOL compilors for Linux seems strange.

I need good search sidebar. One that has boxes for Freshmeat and Kuro5hin and Google and Price Watch and eBay.

Wow Moz is smooth. I'm in love.

Lava lamps are wonderful.

I don't want to be an American. To be associated with today's American culture is embarrasing. I wonder what the weather is like in Australia at this time of the year...

In other news, I had a great weekend. I'm glad last week is far behind me. I had a great date to the school's big banquet, she was gorgeous and we had a fun time. It's great going to formal events with good friends instead of finding a real date kind of thing.

Today is officially the start of Update-Gabber-Manual Day. I've got LOTS of catching up to do. julian and Dave have been busy the past month or so. Now it's my turn to be busy.

I LOVE MY CANON REBEL 2000. Oh, I'm having SO much fun with it! I can't wait until the book I ordered about it comes so I can have more fun with it. I'm going to develop three rolls today and I'll get them scanned in and on a web site for my family and friends to see. I'll post it here too if anyone wants to see the quality of the Rebel. It's a beautiful thing.

On to Gabber!

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -- Gandhi

Today I slept. I believe this morning I also went to Student Senate to see my bill for campus recycling be debated on (someone put one bad phrase in the bill and it caused debating for 20 minutes). I think I also went to Fine Arts class after that. It all may have been a dream.

This evening I rounded up a crew to get a roll of film done for this weekend's Camera Capers. Basically, you find some funny or odd thing to do with your floor and take pictures of it. For lack of better ideas, we took pictures of us asleep all over campus. In the student center, in the chapel, in several classrooms, on a plane, in a truck bed, on a society fence, etc... It was pretty fun. I hope the pictures turn out well!

julian: Ah, how I love live Shakespeare!!! Even reading it aloud in a group setting is enjoyable. I have yet to make it to the Houston Shakespeare fest, but I have wanted to go quite badly for years.

I have been invited by a professor/friend from Houston to prepare a paper on CS Lewis to present at Baylor University in January. I'm contemplating it a bit.. It sounds intriguing, but I'm not sure if I have the time to do research or pull together a good thesis.

I believe my Canon is waiting for me in the mail center. Now to actually go there when they are open.

Schweet.. I just got an email from someone in regards to my article being published in the December 2000 issue of Web Techniques magazine about Jabber. I haven't even gotten a copy yet. Be sure to pick up a copy!!

I'm tired. Sleep will come very quickly tonight. Unfortunatly, morning will come much quicker.