October 30, 2006

DnD has continued

So I took up playing DnD again about 4 months or so ago and our “weekly” meetings lasted for all of 3 weeks before turning into monthly meetings- we’ve finally got things back on track with 2 games in a row, and here’s a little breakdown of what happened at this last one- the guys are trying to find this statue piece- they slaughtered a den of Lizardfolk looking for t and found out that they had just sold it for a can of “Holy Green Beans”.

October 7, 2006

Too Much TV..

So since I’ve been laid off, I’ve been watching a lot of TV in the background while keeping busy… seasons 2 and 3 of Deadwood, 4 and 5 of the Dead Zone, all of Invader Zim, Bones, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, Angel, Battlestar Galactica, My Name is Earl, Lost, etc. That’s a Lot of TV. Of the shows that I’m going to keep track of this season, Lost, My Name is Earl, BSG, Bones, Grey’s Anatomy, and maybe 24 are on the list.

September 11, 2006

Gone Camping

So jackie and I have been planning on going camping for a few months now with Jordan, Brad, Beth and Erin.. Since it was already paid for, we went ahead and went. We had 2 spots at orchard beach state park in Manistee, MI- very nice place. The trip went something like this: Friday: 10:40 am, went shopping together, bought an assload of food. 3 pm, got to manistee and checked in, put up our tents, and lounged

September 6, 2006

New Low.

So I just got hit with a new low… Looks like I’m inelegible for unemployment. Apparently I haven’t been in michigan long enough to warrant helping me out. when I look back on my life, this will be the moment when I said “this is as bad as it got.” I’m hoping it doesn’t get much worse at least. The depression that I’m sitting in right how is the soul crushing type where you lose the will to do anything.

August 27, 2006

QtRuby QApplication “limit of one” workaround for Unit Testing

So I’ve been working with QtRuby a lot the last few days. I’ve also been playing with unit testing thanks to drutro’s quick runthrough of it. The project I’m working on is a top-down view videogame, which at it’s base level requires loading up some images. The problem is using Qt::Pixmap requires that a QApplication exists. Now this in and of itself is annoying, but not a showstopper. What becomes a showstopper is building a test suite when each test file has it’s own QApplication- you see, you can only have one QApplication at a time.

August 26, 2006

fun with forms

I recently signed up for a form with a bunk email address for something or other… for my name, I put in something amusing rather than my real name because, hell with them, I don’t want them sending me stuff. I even checked the little box so they wouldnt… sure enough, they spammed me. how can I tell? well, the bogus account I used gave it away, but they addressed each message by the first name I gave them…

August 25, 2006

Udev + wacom on gentoo: dynamic links

I have a wacom drawing pad, and one thing that’s always bothered me was the whole way linux handled usb items- depending on the order they were plugged in, they would be given different names- sometimes my keyboard would be “/dev/input/event1”, sometimes my wacom or mouse. Udev was made to get around these issues, but I’ve been to distracted to give it much thought. lately I’ve been getting the following error messages with my ruby projects:

August 24, 2006

Pissed off vs. Pissed on

Today I find myself a little of both. I was called into the confrence room today and told that the company I was contracted to requested that today be my last day. Yes, I am officially unemployed. Fortunately I was laid off, not fired- turns out business wasn’t as good as they were hoping and they can’t afford someone to try and fix their broken infrastructure. Since they fired a developer a few weeks ago, and the lead developer put in his 1 week notice today, I can’t say it’s suprising- if they’re getting rid of me after losing two other people, they must be hemmoraging money pretty badly.

August 23, 2006

Fatso walks continue

missed friday night and saturday due to being out of town, but I’m still walking. With the exception of those two days, it’s been every night for 2 weeks. we’ve settled on the big loop around the complex, the 3.15 mile one. I’ve been pretty lucky and found people to go every night- there’s about 6 or 7 of the guys that go with me, alternating on and off. I get home covered in sweat pretty much every night.

August 17, 2006

stupid dell raid card..

so the devs are having a hell of a time with the new dev server- it’s constantly locking up on certain threads for 30-45 seconds. apache mainly, but occasionally grep and other things. It appears to be completely random. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to find the problem, and I think I got it nailed down thanks to a post on the gentoo forums (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-189180-highlight-writethru.html) that said to change some settings in the raid card’s firmware… I tested this on the prod machine since it’s not in use yet(they’re both dell 2850’s with the lsi megaraid cards) and benchmarked before and after with bonnie++… here are the results(- is original, + is new):