Thoughts on Life

I had one of those moments today. The kind where you take a step back and say to yourself..."Am I really that old?". My brother turned 18 years old. Logically, we are only four years apart, so if I'm almost twenty-two years old...and he's eighteen years old...I'm sure the math more or less equals out. Subconciously, eighteen is like that turning point age or something. Seventeen I was fine with, but eighteen...suddenly I feel rather old...like even though I haven't aged, it's more like a "where did the years go" thing. I guess it's all a part of getting older, like when I saw my cousin for the first time in like four years and he was like four years old then and is now like 8 or 9 and looked so much older. Or when I saw Bryan from church, who was the cute little kid that sang "Jesus Loves Me" and now he's in Middle School or something! I don't want to feel older...I'm doing all I can to fight off adulthood. Armed with my orange Tank and whatever childish ways I can hold on to and get away with.


I'd also like to mention a blog I came across through an article featured on digg.com. It's about a graphics designer and his family's struggle with homelessness. He's a very good writer and his thoughts and rants come from the heart and you can relate to what he's saying. He also speaks of the problems associated with getting support from foundations setup to help people in such a situation and of homeless people that acentuate the stereotype of being homeless. It's an extremely interesting blog, and I suggest you start from the beginning of the archives (around the beginning of Februrary) and read up.
View From the Sidewalk

Powerbook: One Month Review

It has been a little over a month so I figured I'd write up a review of how things are going. I'm going to try to relate some of this to my first post on it (back in January) and go from there.
First off, it's still a bueatiful piece of work. I'm sitting on the back steps outside, the backlit keyboard still looks and works great, it's still quiet. The weather widget says it's 52 Degrees fahrenheit out here and the sounds of the night sorround me. The computer has been on for over 24hours, it's not too hot, and never really gets too hot unless you use it on the bed, and that's not too bad. I've had on it on for 6 days before, close the lid, pack it up and take it where ever and within a second it's back up and running. It doesn't use that much power at all in standby and battery lasts long enough so that you can generally use it on and off most of the day without a charger. The battery life right now reports three hours and two minutes, which is actually the highest I've seen it on a full charge in a while, usually it's about two hours and 45 minutes. Maybe it's trying to look good for the review. I mentioned that nothing pops out at me wanting attention. This is still mostly true, really the only obnoxious app was Entourage and I fixed that setting. The fan is extremely quiet even when on and it generally takes a quiet room to really hear it.

The speakers are okay, but if there is just a little too much external noise in the room, you aren't going to really hear the speaker sound. It has gotten a little dusty over the past month and I need to clean it up, but it generally hides it's dirtiness well. The case is well made, except sometimes when holding the front corner it makes a slight creaking noise, but that hasn't been an issue beyond that. I do have an issue with how Mac OS X handles network profiles, it would be nicer if they develop an easier way to switch your profile at different locations.

That's really all I can think of right now, if you are looking to purchase a powerbook, feel free to comment or email me questions and I'll try to help you.

Online Dating

After doing a micro-rant on #linuxcult and an out loud rant through my house to myself, I still feel the need to blog this.

Your average online dating website has a profile, somehow they get you to fill it out, some take you through a questionaire, some just straight out ask you questions and you fill in the blank. The problem is that you have to be truthful about yourself, something impossible to do because of a built-bias for or against yourself that you can't entirely get away from, and then the person whose profile you are reading has to have been truthful about him or herself as well, which is of course impossible as previously mentioned.

Then you have the questions in general, a true or false, or yes or no answer can't convey your personal feelings about some of the questions they put into that form. So sure, you and the match might have said "yes" to a bunch of the same general questions, but you may have had very different motives for saying yes.

Interests. I tried out, what was it...match.com maybe, with the "test" you take to get the profile. Most of the matches that came back, one of the major factors was a shared interest in "computers". For her, "computers" might be "i luv 2 AOL", or "i like to chat with friends and download music". So now, this matching computer just matched an AOL user up with someone that hates AOL, hates Windows, hates the intel based x86 hardware architecture even! Who has rooms full of computers, the makings of a server rack that could power a small business, and a big interest in hardware and electronics (the kind with little components, not the gadget kind)

I know that all that information will come out within a few conversations and is probably trivial in the grand scheme of online dating...but I still felt like getting posting it...so quit complaining and leave a comment....

Valentines Day

This might have been the best Valentines Day I've ever experienced. Yes I spent it with my love. No, said love wasn't of a particular gender (or any gender for those of my mature audience that would like to reverse engineer that farther). It would seem that tech people in general don't generally care for Valentines Day. Which is how I got to spend most of the day around other people interested in technology. I spent the afternoon at the Microsoft TS2 event (seminar) thing. They discuss where Microsoft is headed for the year, and I go because of my job. Afterwards I checked out Compusa, hoping to run into those intel mac things...none in sight. After a bathroom break, I was off to find a wireless connection, which turned into "hunt for a parking spot in downtown Greenville cuz they have free wifi!" which then evolved into "OMG where did they move the main library of Greenville, cuz you know, maybe they had wifi...or books...or both"....but in the end, it was 6:10 and in my process of getting lost, I would up right around where the Linux User Group meeting was, and since I had to be there at 6:30 anyway, I popped into the parking lot...no wifi there by the way. The topic was Snort (intrusion detection ) and it was rather interesting, especially since Snort comes with IPCOP, and I plan on and have run IPCOP but never really stopped to check out the Snort feature it had. So that was my day.