Older blog entries for whytheluckystiff (starting at number 21)

I am having fun with 802.11b.  I hope you are too.
Finally some hype that materializes into me being able to 
walk two blocks up the street and write my diary entry at 
the park.

I'm pretty liberal with my certifications. When I certify someone as a Master, I'm generally thinking they've written something that's of real value to me. Or they're in a project that I respect. I'd suspect many people certify Master only if the candidate is notorious. Also, I honestly haven't certified anyone as an Apprentice in a long long time. I think most of the people who bother to post and provide information are generally involved. I don't like to make people climb ladders. Especially since certification here at advogato is generally an expression of appreciation and esteem. I never take it as a hit against me when my certification is lower than some other well-groomed, well- trained advogate.

I have been actually really involved in a number of projects lately. I find that I need to be more vocal. I have the Sneak Attack Syndrome, where I never post to a mailing list because I'm too busy hording everyone else's posts for the day when I will make mine. I say to myself, "Oh I don't want to clutter the list." Come to find that I'm reading the same participants' messages over and over again. Not to mention that if I send a message to a list with some advice, that message is archived and eventually applied to search engines. I am going to outline my recent wireless adventures so that when the next person enters the search "NETGEAR MA301 FREEBSD", there will actually be a useful guide, loving prepared with style sheets and reasonably-sized paragraphs. Scented? If only.

I have been contributing fixes to the Ruby/X11 library (which is a fine implementation of the X11 protocol). I've also been getting involved in linux-wlan, bsd-airtools, dbtcp, and sylpheed. I'm also rejuvenating DX0. This next week I'll be digging into NoCatAuth alot more and building a wireless network for me and my neighbors. I just know I'll burn out sometime, but I hope not.

There's nothing quite so fun as tracking down a friend
who's going to the University of California San Diego
and persuing through the university site, gleaning
information, and discovering a wealth of graduate
students' homepages.  Pictures of parrots, facts about
cricket (the sport), station wagon adoration, and
continual crypto links.  But I tracked him down! I must
have spent an hour on the pictures of parrots.  That seemed
like the right way to go.

I live in Salt Lake City. There has been a nice fog on the mountains of late. And a sprig of extra green. I have resisted the departure of summer all year, but I suppose winter's timing will be right. Perhaps you live in the mountains too and you know how it is to have the darkness of space all around and cool, empty winter with an air that echoes. In those times, a tall building is a good place to be. Tall enough that you can't tell if snow is going up or down. And if you're working, you have something to keep pace with.

It's nice to throw away all my old JavaScript and HTML books. I just couldn't think of anything that I'd ever want to do with either any further. Need shelf space. One thing I think JavaScript has taught me is that scripting languages are capable of replacing most uses of compiled languages and can be preferable. Of course, Perl and Python and Ruby are definitely demonstrative of that lesson, but the fact that any of that DHTML stuff ever worked in a single browser is amazing. I think the trap of loosely formed HTML and the resulting DOM with the interpreter parsing alongside the browser and I am absolutely convinced that more can be done with the scripting languages on my system.

On the note of throwing stuff away: I want to throw everything away. My first apartment had a bed and a lamp and Scrabble. Didn't even have a computer. (I said I was done with computers.) Yeah. Scrabble's a great game.

Today I have strep throat.  Finally a reason to use a
sick day and write in my diary. I won't be covering
WTC and Jihad because I am uninformed and the issues
are too big for me to make my official public
statement
. I did hear Bush and I did hear the Sec. of
Defense. Under my breath: "Tally ho."

I'm going to be diving back into open source stuff
very soon. I've had so many ideas that I can't just shelve.
I'd really like to make a Debian distro that focuses on Python
users. It's an idea I've had for awhile and I'd mostly
do it for myself to lug between machines. (But I'm sure
other people could use it.) Basically, most distros focus
on end users and I want a distro that helps me set up a nice
dev environment. I want Vim 6, Python 2, Zope, anything
Python related. I'd actually like to take it to the point where
the distro installer, the packaging system, perhaps even the
window manager has Python hooks or is entirely coded in Python.
I'm not saying it would be the ultimate package for
everyone. I'm just sick of having to pear down whatever distro
I'm using and install all the packages seperately. And Python's
a great language, I'd love to help further it's influence.
Oh, and if there's already a distro that can do all
this.. feel free to let me know so I don't go on and do something
terribly exhaustive.

I'm also trying to work out a plan with the school
district in which I attended high school. I've
been teaching a C programming class to high school kids and I'd
like to some part-time teaching at the school during the
day. The kids I've been teaching are making awesome progress
and I'd really like to reach a wider subset of teenagers.
Part of me can't wait to see if one of these kids will turn
out to be the next RMS. Or perhaps the next Dmitry Sklyarov??

Been enjoying the new Sparklehorse album It's a
Wonderful Life
:
I wish i had a horse's head,
A tiger's heart,
An apple bed
Also, I've been watching old episodes of Space Ghost
Coast-to-Coast from this archive. You've got to see the episode
Sequel (1999). The close-ups on Birdman's face gives me
such laughter that I could be stretched beneath a horse
stampede and easily come out chuckling. Other good episodes:
Boat Show, Girl Hair (with Hanson), Chambraigne. Well,
until later..
No new information is available for this user.  Life
has not changed at all.
 having bad dreams about a certain congressman.  he
keeps calling me to go have a martini lunch with him.  and
yes: i have tried smashing a neon sign on his head.

so i started a class for fourteen to eighteen year old kids to teach them programming topics more advanced than they were finding in their classes (memory management, threads, gui, data structures & sorting, etc). these kids are great. very excited and interested. my only dilemma is that they insist on C++. naturally they all want to do game programming for MSW32. i should have figured.

what i can't believe is what came out of my mouth when i started into talking about MFC. "MFC is a layer Microsoft has introduced so you can access the API through C++ classes." i said this as if everything was just A-O-K. the one that coats is the only one you need. i think i need to introduce FOX or WxWindows or VXCL or something. quick! something!

and then there was that article yesterday about Microsoft-sponsored organizations sending letters to various Atty. Generals (including Utah's). I am going to riot. I'm ctually just leaving right now to go riot. you know it only takes one person to riot. that's right. oh you didn't know that? yeah well it's better because you get all the credit.
(whytheluckystiff picks up his keys and begins to leave, but suddenly has images of a congressman riding down the center of the road on a huge pair of scissors.)
Oh, if you are into smart dance sort of stuff-- like 
Moby--  better yet DJ Shadow-- then you should hear The 
Avalanches.  There's a new album that came out a few months 
ago called Since I Left You and it's stunning.  So 
I'm just trying to spread the word and all.

The shelling community is a fine troupe. Take ls2k.org for example. The admin (jalist) took a pay cut and the community jumped in and donated funds and purchased accounts through his hosting service to keep the site alive. And the great thing is he paid everyone back by offering hosting to a bunch of newcomers who never had a chance before. It's symbiotic.

I spend too much time on little projects.. maybe you do too. An eggdrop script, a GUI frontend, and whatever. I'm wrapping up a PHP extension for a really stripped down inspired-by-XML-to-not-be-XML format called Psychoo. I'll post here when it's done, just in case anyone's interested. I use it for documentation and data modeling and it's helping me speed up my site implementations.

I got Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing in large edition softcover. I've skimmed it before and I mostly wanted it to have a printed edition with all of the random photos. He says it in the book, but I reiterate: It's a fine coffee table book. Finally my houseguests will have some exposure to SQL.

Well, there's that article on the front page about shutting our sites down in protest of the DMCA. I'd truly like to riot though. To be part of a mad crowd that overturns a bus.

I'm probably asking for it by posting anything in this
current state of mind.  I've seen other people act the way I
am right now and instead of being sympathetic, I figured
they were involved in a self-inflicted pity (which is
disgusting, right?).

Well, yeah. My dog died on Sunday. She was totally beautiful. A chinese pug, one-and-a-half years old. Just a baby. And I woke up thinking that it was a beautiful morning, with such a lush sunrise. But she was downstairs choking on her own foam, throwing seizures that ate away her brain.

See, I'm totally in that dumb pity thing I was talking about up there. It was just so difficult to see her eyes glazed all of the sudden, and find myself stroking her fur for the last time. I'm sure it's all combining with my parent's divorce and my dad's nervous breakdown and too much work.

Time to go play skee-ball and get my mind of off it. But then what after skee-ball's over?

If you are less than eleven hours away from the beach, 
I envy you because I am eleven hours away from the beach 
and I would do anything to get just a bit closer.  I want 
that air and that heat-- so, yeah, a hot beach please.

death to parents Okay so my parents filed divorce papers a month ago. I guess it could be final soon. I wonder what the point of family is? I guess it's whatever I want it to be. I took my fourteen-year-old sister to the California with me. She's a riot. I don't see a point in ever losing her.

She used to draw these little comics. One where a guy is wearing sunglasses in a limo and he calls his wife and tells her these stories about how he's going to go start a church in Florida. The wife is totally crying and going crazy the whole time. You can tell the guy's just having fun and he's not going to start a church or anything. It's funny too how every time she gives me a comic I laugh loudly but then she just looks down and says, "Nah they're stupid." So I don't ever want to lose her.

I really want to move out of web programming and get back into software. There's something that's more fulfilling about app development. Maybe it's memory management. I think it's just a preferance for C (and a growing appreciation for C++) above Java and server-side scripting languages. Maybe it's just a "grass is greener.." kind of thing.

Oh, who cares? Blah blah. I'll cheer up in a couple months and post some really darling entries about unicorns and stuff. If you want to talk: _why on irc.openprojects.net.

30 Apr 2001 (updated 30 Apr 2001 at 06:27 UTC) »
Does anyone else feel like Doogie Howser when they sit 
down to write these?  I need to get a little heartfelt 
synth in the background.  Nah, I'm sure we can all envy his 
dedication to personally disclosing himself to a word 
processor.

Had strep throat all weekend while my LiteStep distro site went nuts. The LiteStep community is quite a spectacle. Very nice bunch of people. A good mix of designers and coders.

Strep throat + allergies = a night job. I always hallucinate when I get sick, so last night was no exception. My brain starting thinking that my whole job through the night was to wipe snot on my pillow. About 3:00 in the morning I realize how sticky and gross my pillow is, so I flip it over and my brain is like, "WHAT?! I HAVE TO START OVER AGAIN!?" At least when I'm sick I can get people to be servants to fetch me water and soup and stuff.

I took a whole sick day to check out as many Python modules as I could and just played with them. It was nice to have some time to play with Sleepycat's BSDDB and some APIs. Zope has got to be such a cool environment to work in. I'm also so impressed with the recent release of REBOL/View 1.1. I've played with it on FreeBSD, Linux, Windows and BeOS. It's amazing really. The portability, the libraries, the cakes of syntactic sugar!

Well, I tire so easily. Down I go..

20 Mar 2001 (updated 20 Mar 2001 at 19:58 UTC) »
i saw the microphones last week in concert
and was affected in healing from a previous listening to 
eminem.  eminem is a very stupid name.  there used to 
be some kind of kid's music band around here and they were 
named ellemenopee and i wanted to kill myself because 
of it.  i wanted to kill myself after hearing eminem because 
it was so worthless and i figured that if a human is capable
of being so worthless, then i'm worthless, but then i heard 
the microphones.
the microphones was one kid named phil elvrum. he had a decent showing of fans (24). he didn't want to play inside the venue, though, so he took everyone outside and built us a fire. see, he has a lot of songs about the moon. so we all watched the moon while he sang his songs about the moon. you can tell he knows alot about the moon. i wouldn't be surprised if he was the official bard for the moon itself. i wouldn't be surprised if the moon sings songs about phil elvrum. plus, i just read cosmicomics by italo calvino. and even though it was a psuedo-boring book, it had the moon in it. so it's worth mentioning i suppose. his latest record is well worth purchasing. and if you get it on vinyl, then it's got this pop-up inside with sunsets and atmospheres. the songs have a nice element of surprise how that you're never going to see what's coming for a fall until it's coming back down on you faster than you are going in the first place.
i decided to go back to linux from freebsd because i can't stand wrestling with the jdk under freebsd. it's just not intuitive to me. the whole setup. so i set up the RC1 for progeny debian. it was the best experience i've had so far. how many times have i installed a distribution and been staring at gnome-kde-enlightment all mashed on top of each other when X starts? every time but this time.
well i hope your week is going nicely. i haven't written in a while, but i faithfully go through diary entries about everyday. it's nice to have such a collection of entries to go through using the RECENT link on the home page.
oh and i got a spongebob squarepants doll for my desk. he says bring it around town!!

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