Doctor Who: World War Three

Just finished watching "World War Three", episode 5 of the newest Doctor Who season. And I must say, this show has everything. And I do like the new Doctor; he's a bit hip, and that takes a bit to get used to, but he grows on you. He's just quite a change from the goofy old Doctors of the "classic" series (as they're calling it now).
One of the great things about Doctor Who is that the aliens are never mindless killing machines who just want to destroy things for the sake of it (well, almost never... EXTERMINATE!). They always have some other motive, that's almost justifiable in a way. They're often lost, or refugees, or out for profit. And the Doctor handles it like no other protagonist. Were Doctor Who to be an American program, our hero would jump in guns a'blazin' regardless of the aliens' intentions. However, the Doctor is always more diplomatically minded, and wants to try & understand the aliens' situation. The great characters, combined with time travel, makes for a series who's limit is only the imagination of the writers. And they've proved to be very imaginative over the years.
I'm not too keen on the drama crap though. Rose's mum & boyfriend are kinda annoying. I know you're supposed to have adventurous natives who help out the Doctor in certain stories, but the whole soap opera drama thing is a bit much. All the old companions rarely had all this baggage from their home time. Most of them were stragglers and wanders, ready for a life of adventure with the Doctor. Rose seems too connected to "home" to really be a true companion. Oh well, she'll be gone eventually.

Computers...

Well I had a big long post typed up, but my blog software decided to eat it. Sometimes computers annoy me immensely.
Edit: The jist of my post was: I got offered the job at Peet's, though its at a significantly lower wage. I think I'm going to take it anyway, because it has growth opportunity, and I feel I'd be happier there.
Ryan & I signed the lease for the townhouse we found. Pictures to follow after the move-in, which is the end of May.
There was some other stuff here but I forgot what it was.
I want to go camping.

GNUstep

Linux
GNUstep is the future. Its still really ugly, but the desktop has a lot of potential. I do mean a lot of potential. I've started using it as my desktop, so you'll see screenshots to the left.
Mac OS X
I watched some of the previews movies on Apple.com and I was totally blown away by Dashboard. Spotlight looks neat too, but I think I'm most excited about Dashboard. GDesklets look out, here comes Dashboard.
Other stuff
So other stuff is, other stuff. Work is work, and such. Just a quick post. My email's back up, and web servers and such. Thanks Cyon. :)

Jobs

Work
Today was my day to go to off-site to a company conference and run IT support. As I was sitting there, working through my lunch hour, as well as staying until 6 PM, I started thinking "am I really putting in extra time for this company, even though I'm only a contractor?" Am I looking at this the wrong way? The way I see a contract is: the hiring company hires a contractor to perform a specific task. Since I'm getting paid hourly, I figure I should work 8 hours a day, and no more. So me putting in an extra hour, and working through my lunch hour seems like free work. Maybe what they think a contract is: they basically hire a contractor, pay him hourly, and work him like a salaried full-time employee. Doesn't seem like a fair deal, but the IT industry is saturated with potential employees, and so its an employer's market. They get the choice of a ton of people, and we get caught scrambling around accepting any job we can get. Am I a bit screwy with my understanding of contracting?
After work
So, once I finally left the hotel (way up north on Brokaw) I headed off towards 880. When I got closer, I realized that I was stuck up north, and the southbound freeway was, of course, totally packed. I decided to stop by Fry's to kill some time. I wandered around the store, payed homage to the Apple section, checked out the iPods, wandered around the XBox games, the Anime section, the TV section, the Mac software section, the SciFi section, and so on. I picked up a couple of Doctor Who stories on DVD; "The Two Doctors" and "The Five Doctors". I remember seeing "The Two Doctors" on KTEH a few years ago, and remember it being a really great episode. Patrick Troughton plays the "guest" doctor, with Colin Baker as the "host" doctor. It features Nicola Bryant (Perri) & Jamie (I don't remember his actor's name, just Perri). So with two good companions and two great doctors, its set up for an excellent episode, regardless of the antagonist.
Career
And since I am now under the belief that the IT industry is slowly collapsing at the hands of middle-management, I have an interview at Peet's scheduled. I feel pretty comfortable about it; hopefully things turns out for the best.

TVTorrents.com

So I'm kinda wary about using TVTorrents.com. They require a login, and it seems like that's a wealth of copyright offenders just waiting to be sued. If TVTorrents.com gets hit, there's a huge list of users, with associated, valid email addresses. Seems pretty iffy to me. I'm not a huge user of TVTorrents, and I think its a nice service. I think I'm going to avoid using TVTorrents.com as much as possible. Its a risk I'd rather not take.

World of Warcraft on Linux

No it doesn't exist yet. But I did find a petition to send to Blizzard to request it. Sign it. Even if you're considering playing World of Warcraft, or just like Blizzard. The more names that are there the better. And spread the word. Tell every Linux user you know. Help tell the world Linux is a viable operating system too.

I love baseball

Its games like the Giants game tonight that make me love baseball. Giants are up 6 - 0. Then in the 7th inning, they lose it. And the Rockies score eight runs before the Giants can stop it. Things are looking bleak, but the Giants score another in the 8th, bringing them down by one. Then, in the bottom of the 9th, the Giants get a great base hit, then another hit to put a runner on 3rd. And finally, a home run bounces over the wall for the win. Such a great game!

Quote of the day: Peter

Let's start a quote of the day post. This way I'll have to post at least once a day. And today's quote is brought to you by Peter, who is in China right now.

Peter: beijing, specifically the university district has the most beautiful girls in all of china
Peter: i am NOT joking
Peter: holy crap
Peter: free wushu classes

New powered by buttons

Just updated the buttons on the right. There's more now. And they're smaller. Hopefully all the URLs work right. I'll get around to adding more once I get the site validated and stuff. Cheers.

Big long fat post

So I've been busy lately, as you might see by my daily screenshot.
Ubuntu
I have (once again) switched back to Ubuntu. I got tired of having Arch's GNOME setup break on me (like once I got dbus/hal/g-v-m working, then a month later I come back only to find it broken again). So I figured I don't want to spend the time maintaining a system as much any more; I'd rather use it, so I installed Ubuntu 5.04. We'll see how long this lasts; knowing me, probably a few months.
Photos
I've added a few new galleries to my photo gallery, and updating the quality of the thumbnails (by default they were generating really crappy low-quality JPEGs. And I'd rather have slightly larger PNG thumbnails than cruddy low-res ones.
Hula
Just tonight I installed some Hula debs, and got it running on my local system. Looks really slick. The whole webmail/calendar interface is very intuative. The admin side is still really ugly, and it gives me terrifying GroupWise WebMail flashbacks from college. The Garrett's Aurora theme makes the actual mail interface very nice to deal with. Now if only someone could put Hula to good free use and make us GNOME-ers a nice mail server we can all use.
Work
So another guy has come and gone at work. He was here briefly, but got some other opportunity at NVIDIA and so (obviously) he jumped at that. Other than that, same old same old.
Life
Ngoc, Quynh & I went to Monterey last weekend. It was very nice. We had a picnic by a playground, and got to watch little kids act silly. Then Quynh & Ngoc decided to go shopping, so they wandered around looking at random girlie shops and I just kinda followed around. Near one of the shops on Fisherman's Wharf I heard some Andean music playing, and had a flashback to when I was a kid. I seem to recall my dad purchasing a tape of Andean music from Monterey once. I remember listening to the tape in the green Honda, as well as (I think) in the van. So anyway, Ngoc said she liked one of the songs, and so I went out to where the two musicians were and bought one of their CDs. Its nice to hear Andean music again. I've forgotten how soothing it is. We ate and a schmoozy fancy-pants restaurant that was trying to be way more upscale than it was, and then we got some ice cream & headed home. Oh and Laura, its "498 Foam Chiropractors"; I saw the sign again.
Art
I've been busy with Inkscape and GIMP working on a SmoothGNOME-Ubuntu variant. I've gotten a set of stock arrows that I think match the colors of the default "Human" theme. Plus I've added the Ubuntu logo as the GNOME Menu Panel icon. I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to make a GNOME spinner out of the Ubuntu logo, and so I've got about 30 images of it all slightly rotated from the previous. The idea is to create a rotating logo, but I can't figure out the sizing yet. The throbber has some wonky way of reading through the resulting gnome-spinner pixbuf. The best I can get right now is about half of the spinner is seen, and its not really visually pleasing yet. Hopefully someone will see this as a cry for help and give me some pointers. Watch for SmoothGNOME 2.0.4 soon; I've got a few bugs to fix in the icon theme.
Hacking
I've been reading my Objective-C book, and am currently liking what I have read so far. I've still got a long way to go, but there's a lot of nice, clear, and well-documented code out there for Apple's AppKit and such. Guess that's one of the perks about dealing with a corporate product vs. open source projects. I've been reading my GNOME2 developers book too, though I've been more interested in the Objective-C book lately.
Baseball
I'm really excited about it this year. I've got the Red Sox, the Giants and the A's schedules on my iCal, so I'll be able to track them a bit better. Following 3 teams gives me a better chance of having one go to the World Series this year. Let's go Oakland and You're in baseball country now and all that jazz. Its a great time of year.

And with that, I'm off to bed, to face another day.

Now Playing: Toshio Masuda - Promise