"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"
Well, every so often I get the urge to change wallpapers. Sometimes this urge is so strong I end up making my own wallpaper. And so after about 2 or 3 hour Gimp session, I have created this:
I started actually hacking on that GNOME Streaming application that I want to make; the one Jorn and I discussed back in May of 2004. I munged up the GUI a bunch, and wrote up a nasty bit of code that actually works with the munged GUI as well as stream.
A million thanks to Jakub and his ORIGINAL web gallery! I've finally gotten around to getting all my screenshots moved into ORIGINAL format. And yes, I once again have a photo gallery! I'm probably not going to back-post a lot of my older photos, but if you want some, request it. I'll post some galleries as I go from the present on. But for now, enjoy the simplicity of ORIGINAL, as well as the same old screenshots in a new format. And I'll be hacking on the style a bit too, to try to get it to meld in a bit more with the blog's layout.
For those of you familiar with the glxgears benchmark for video cards & drivers in Linux, I present to you my latest video card, the GeForce 6800 GT 256MB:
Stayed up pretty late last night hacking on Lindelë. I split it into two backends, and am only going to currently work on the Gstreamer one. MPD will come later. I ported player-gst.{c,h} to use PlayBin instead of (the deprecated) GstPlay. In the process, I seem to have uncovered a weird bug in Smooth, where hovering over the ListView causes a seg fault. I've also managed to once again break the eos catching. I have no idea why it works in 0.1.1 but doesn't work in CVS. No new features or anything, but some code clean-up behind the scenes. And today, I've played World of Warcraft all day. My my what a weekend.
At work today it was one of my co-worker's last day. We're all contractors here, so we have limits to the length of time we can get. There seems to be about a 3 month changing of the guard period where all the "old guys" (the ones who's contracts are soon to expire) start to leave one by one, to be replaced by the fresh ones. Its a very sad ordeal to observe. From my perspective now, I am seeing it as the fresh new guy, coming in to a new place. I can only imagine what its like to have to leave, after working for a year with the same guys, getting to know them and learning together. I've seen seven of these guys go, and seen the replacements come in. I was the first of the new guard. Some even had to *train* their replacements. This seems like a repulsive thought. Its like training your assassin. Once you've dumped all your knowledge onto them, you get the ax and are tossed out onto the street.
I had a dream last night that was rather odd. I dreamt I was a cast on a TV show, and one day our director called us all together for a meeting. He told us about this job in a movie his friend was directing, and that one of us was to land the part of this really cool character. Turns out I was the one chosen for the part. Me and the other cast members all celebrated, and we were both happy and sad. Then my alarm woke me up. I think this dream stems from a desire I have to feel wanted by a company. And I think this desire of mine is beginning to really consume me.
Mr. Furley's funny; you can't deny the humor of Don Knotts, but I miss The Ropers (Norman Fell and Audra Lindley) oddly enough. I though Stanley was really annoying, but when I saw the episode that he announced he sold the apartment complex, I was kinda sad. Mr. Furley is too drastic a change from the Ropers.
Just watched the first installment of The 100 Most Memorable TV Moments. I love shows like this; those shows that have clips of old TV events. They give me chills, listening to people talk about what it was like when they saw it. I especially love sports events, or "sports miracles." For example, "The Giants win the pennant" event I saw recently on Sports Night. Gave me the chills listening to Dan talk about it, and how Russ Hodges strained voice just kept saying over and over "The Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant." Its moments like this that make me excited to be alive. I hope that in 40 years, I'll be able to watch clips of the Red Sox 2004 World Series and get the same feeling. Oddly enough, its things like this that make me say "I love TV." I hate the crap they play on TV now, but the older stuff is amazing; it captures American history the way it really happened. That was back when media was honest. Oh well, gonna finish my "Three's Company" episode and then go to sleep.
I got a hold of my Ubuntu CD's today. I ordered 10. Looking at these sexy CD's, I've decided to do a simple install of Ubuntu stable (version 4.10 "warty") onto my desktop and my laptop both. I'll record all the steps I have to take, and where I have to break down and manually interject my own stuff into the configuration files, or open up a terminal emulator and do some terminal "magic" to get things to work. We'll see how easy it is to get Ubuntu into a working desktop state for me, including DVD playback, MP3/MPG, QuickTime, WMA/WMV playback, 3D acceleration, Windows emulation, wireless networking, advanced power management stuff (sleep, suspend, standby)... everything a normal desktop user would need. Of course, I have some obscure requirements that won't count against Ubuntu. I need to tweak stuff this way. Most users should get by just fine though.
So in my ever-going quest to make my computing more "I don't want to think about it", I've gotten tired of the shoddy suppose ATI puts into its Linux drivers, so I've started browsing over the recent Nvidia cards. On a whim I purchased a GeForce FX 5700 from Fry's but it turns out that card's worse than my current Radeon 9700. I'm now under the impression I should just suck up and drop $450 into a GeForce 6800 256MB. Assuming that card doesn't have anything wrong with it (like my last "suck it up and deal & buy an expensive card" GeForce4 Ti), this card should last me a good two or three years. After all, all I really play is World of Warcraft. I think, with some money I get for my upcoming birthday & Christmas, I'll dump into a new, top o' the line graphics card. And hopefully my monitor isn't dying any time soon, since I won't be able to get a LCD. Too many toys, so little money.
