As I’m writing this Jeremy is in his kitchen pounding out chicken. Juice and ice projectiles are flying about the kitchen. He came up with an idea to solve it called a Chicken Shield. I started to think about how many ideas are brought up in random conversation and dismissed as the talk continues. The Chicken Shield will now be forever documented here. In my blog.
Sometimes when deciding what to eat I think about where the food is at that moment that I will consume in the future. The hamburger patty sitting in a box in the freezer at Wendy’s or the sour cream in the caulk gun they use at Taco Bell are all patiently waiting for me to decide their fate. Somewhere there is a cow eating grass that will spend it’s final minutes as a steak on my plate next year. Sometimes I get god like thoughts that I have the power to control what lives and dies but then I realize that if I don’t eat it somebody else will. What will you consume in the future and where is it at right now?
About 30% of my e-mail spam is related to mortgage applications. They go something like this, “We got your mortgage application and would like to follow up on it.” Recently I have been getting the same kind of spam on my answering machine at home. I get the feeling it’s sneaky companies harvesting whois information. Both my email and phone number are listed on a few domains. Is this happening to anybody else?
As most guys, I have never really been a big fan of Valentines Day. Instead of a rant I decided to do a bit of research to see just where this holiday came from and how it got turned into the big competition it is today. There has to be a dark secret somewhere, right?
Yes.
Well not entirely dark but it is creepy none the less. It seems there are a few different legends about St. Valentine. One involves him being a martyr because he performed forbidden marriages for young couples. Young men were supposed to be single so they could fight in the army. Think draft dodger. The first Valentine was sent by him, from his prison cell, to a young woman that he loved.
Other legends involve spring ceremonies of fertility where young men would cut goat hide into strips dip them in sacrificial blood. They would then run around gently slapping women and crops with the goat hide. The women didn’t mind because it was supposed to make them more fertile for the year.
This starts to be replaced by exchanging hand written notes around the 18th century. Which is fine until the corporations get involved. Who would want to hand write a personal note when they can be cranked off a press for you? Not me. The jewelery companies became involved and we now have the spectacle that exists today. The longer you are in a relationship the more extravigent the gifts are supposed to become. We have to keep outdoing ourselves every year.
I would prefer to chase chicks around with a blood soaked goat hide strip than pay $50 for a dozen stale roses or some hip widening chocolate. How about you?
As you may know I have been a dedicated SuSE use for a few years. Most distributions support many desktop environments but have only one that they focus their development on. SuSE uses the ‘K’ Desktop Environment or KDE as their primary desktop environment. They maintain packages for several others but the default is always KDE and is the best supported. Gnome is second followed by several others. As I was researching for this entry I ran across some features screen shots for SuSE from Novell. From what I can see they are all Gnome based. This makes me think either somebody wasn’t paying attention or SuSE is switching to Gnome as their default desktop environment. However the current SuSE Live CD uses KDE as it’s default.
After a few weeks of using Gnome 2.6 both at work and at home from SuSE I have noticed a few things. Most important is that Gnome Terminal is horribly slow. Even on my snappy Athlon it devours resources like a football player at a free buffet. I do have a pimped out xterm config somewhere but this is about default installs and what I can get to from menus. The rest of Gnome seems to run very well. It’s theme support extends to more of my default applications such as Gaim and X-Chat. This is a big plus over KDE which left most GTK theme based applications wearing drab federal prison garb.
Both environments took only a few minutes to setup my default keyboard shortcuts and quick links. From SuSE Gnome wins for speed and KDE wins for Konsole and default applications. So far it’s almost even. An update article will come when I get both of my workstations up and running with Fedora Core 3.
If you have a better suggestion of a Gnome default distribution let me know!
Don’t worry this isn’t a rant. It’s more a description of the campus coffee machines that kept me alive through my college years. During the colder months of my time of higher learning I spent the first few minutes on campus shivering in front of the coffee machine. After putting in the same quarters multiple times the machine would prompt me for my selection; cappuccinos, coffee, hot chocolate. Then comes the full cup of half cup. Since I always like to think my cup is full and I can’t see paying $.10 less for half the coffee I always choose the full cup picture. At this point the machine spools up like a jet. It closes the blast shield as if one malfunction could cause me to lose my manhood. After some grunts groans and spits it goes silent. The blast door waits an exorbitant amount of time before raising the blast shield. I then proceed to grab the cup out and burn my fingers while unfolding the little paper handle. After sitting down I take the first sip, the paper handles flex just enough to spill coffee on my pants while the first sip enters my mouth and proceeds to burn the top layer of skin off my tongue.
The campus coffee machine. One of the few things that has tried to both save and kill me at the same time.
For those of you that don’t know isnoop.net has a program setup to distribute Gmail invites. I received a thank you note today from somebody that got one of my donated invites. It seems isnoop has more invites than they can give out since Gmail recently gave out 50 invites per user but I’m sure these will eventually be used up. If you have any donate them!