I've been watching a fair bit of anime lately. As such, I thought that I should share what I've learned about it. Everything here is still unlicensed, so you can find it floating around in the usual places.
Darker Than Black - Darker than Black is a near-future sci-fi anime. The premise of the world is that there are people who have special powers (such as teleportation, body changing, etc). People with such powers are called "Contractors" due to the fact that, in order to use their powers they must perform some task in order to "pay for" their power. One character from the first episode must place small stones in a perfect grid, for example. So far, 10 episodes have been released and I highly recomend it.
Kirarin Revolution - This show may be the most saccharine show I've ever seen. That said, every episode so far has made me laugh from beginning to end. This show falls into the romantic comedy/drama category. The show is still releasing new episodes in Japan (they're up to 60), but a group has only started subtitling them lately.
Shinigami no Ballad - Shinigami no Ballad seems to be a series of unrelated episodes aside from the primary character: a reaper named Momo. Each episode revolves around someone's death and how it affects the people around them. The reaper, aside from her primary task, attempts to give the people left behind hope by occasionally poking at them and being slightly cryptic. I've only watched 2 episodes (of the 6 that were made), but I will probably watch the rest.
That's it for now, I've started watching a few other series, but haven't made it far enough to make a real judgement yet. To be continued, I suppose.
Nearly a month ago, I signed up for a Bank of America account online. I did this because BoA has an ATM on the JPL campus and I'm always in favor of easy access to cash. Part of my deal with BoA is that I get free online banking, free bill pay, and an account with no fees so long as I have at least one direct deposity a month. I figured that would be easy since JPL uses direct deposit.
When I tried to set up my direct deposity with JPL, they told me that they absolutely, positively had to have some sort of authentication of my account number and routing number. They, of course, asked for a voided check. Since I have no checks with my BoA account, I told them that I couldn't give them one. They suggested that I get a letter from the bank simply saying what my account number and routing number were and that they were, in fact, mine. Sounds easy, right?
For my National City savings account (which I'm tithing into), all I did was call and my home branch faxed me over a letter by the afternoon. For BoA, I tried calling them twice. Each time, they told me that what I was asking was impossible. I then decided to try to go to a branch. There is a branch less than a mile from JPL, so I headed over after work. They told me that they couldn't help me. They couldn't even look up my account information since the account had been opened "out of state."
I thanked the people at the branch for their help and told them that I wanted to close the account since it was useless to me without direct deposit. Turns out, I couldn't even do that there since they couldn't look up my information. Thus, I called BoA support again and told them that I needed to close my account. THIS time, they were willing to help me. Once I explained the situation around my desire to close, the customer service woman immediately offered to have the exact letter I needed mailed to me. I decided to go ahead and have them do that as it was easier than closing one account and opening a new one elsewhere.
Moral of the story: A bank will do anything to keep you from closing the account--even what they told you was "impossible" just a few hours ago.
Today was my first day of work at JPL. Nearly all of the morning was spent in an interminable "orientation session" in a room whose temperature climbed continuously during the session. The experience was made tolerable by my striking up conversations with a few other people at the session. One of them is another hire from Rose whose name I have yet to learn (though he, of course, knows mine). Another was returning to JPL after spening the last two summers as an intern there. He was working on a project that is (according to the deputy director of the center) over-budget and late. In fact, the DD told this person that he was "screwed" when this person told him what project he was working on.
After the session, I met with my new 2nd tier boss. My 1st tier boss is going to be away for the next two weeks, unfortunately. My 3rd tier boss I have met before, but did not see today. I was told that I would be working on a cal-val system for the OSTM project. Since my 1st tier boss is gone for the next two weeks and the scientist in charge of this part of the project overall is out until the end of the week, I am in limbo for now. I'm likely going to use the time to get back up to speed with C programming (since I haven't programmed in C since Graphics last Fall).
I think JPL will be a very different experience for me. During my first year, I am supposed to come up with a plan to use half my time for "training." I'm going to use some of this time to get more familiar with C++ (despite the ugly thing that it seems to be). I don't have a firm idea of what I'll spend the other ~48 weeks training to do, though, so any ideas would be appreciated. Also, since I am a on salary, I can make my own hours. For now, I'll try to keep an 8 to 5 schedule, but part of me wants to try the noon to 9 approach.
Tonight, for dinner, I made spaghetti. Normally, this is no reason to pause. This time, however, the entire dinner was "organic." I didn't set out to have an organic dinner when I went grocery shopping this morning, but I found that the organic food was of similar cost and so decided to experiment. I found that the spaghetti itself was of higher quality than what I was used to, but the sauce that I purchased was just average.
This post may include spoilers about the newest season of Doctor Who. If you don't want to read these spoilers, I suggest skipping this part.
I've been trying to keep up with the current season of Doctor Who which is being shown in Britain. So far, every episode has been impressive. I am rather irritated, however, that the last episode aired (the one aired yesterday) ended on a cliffhanger for the second week in a row.
Spoilers End Here.
In watching science fiction of late, I have come to notice an odd feature common to many different settings--Psionics. Psychic powers in sci-fi seem generally to represent the magic of the future. This, I find sort of odd considering that one could just as easilly attribute such things to highly advanced technology. Often times, it seems that psionics are introduced to add a person or group who is just slightly ahead of the curve compared to most of society (you see this in Babylon 5 and Star Trek). But in other settings, it seems like there is little reason to introduce the idea of psychic powers due to the already high-tech setting (this is most notable in Doctor Who). In the latter of these kinds of settings, psionics become the catch-all excuse for lazy writers who don't want to explain plot devices.
Don't take my being harsh on Doctor Who as my thinking that psionics are a good thing to include in sci-fi. I think that psionics are a cop-out for what is essentially the "magic of the future." Unfortunately, I doubt that psionics in sci-fi are going to go anywhere as they represent too easy an explaination for writers. Maybe those writers should go back to fantasy writing where magic is a conceit of the universe rather than grafting it onto sci-fi as psionics. Writers could also take the very reasonable stance of just allowing for straight up magic and calling it as such. Some sci-fi universes allow for a techno-magical future to considerable success (Shadowrun comes to mind here, though there are undoubtably others).
So, I was flipping through the channels on my TV in my hotel and one channel was showing the end of Return of the Jedi. I like RotJ well enough, so I decided to watch it. The thing about it was though, that the music was all screwy and off. I believe this is due to the station using products to subtlely speed up movies using various time-compression techniques. Unfortunately, this resulted in music that warbled worse than anything I've heard in recent time. It was simply awful. You can hear a recording I made with my laptop here in case you doubt it. I suggest trying it just to see how awful it is. None of the awfulness was added by me or my sound card. In fact it sounds slightly better than usual since some of the highest frequency stuff wasn't captured.
So about an hour ago, I ended my apartment hunt by signing a lease for a little upstairs apartment in Altadena. I'm going to be paying $1100 a month for it. The best part about it is that it is within walking/biking distance of JPL. It is probably faster to get to JPL by biking/walking because then I can take a path down a hill rather than driving around it. Unfortunately, since my things are still in Indiana, I probably won't be able to move in until some time next week at the earliest.
I've started playing around with Code::Blocks to get familiar with C++/wxWidgets. I haven't done much yet as wxWidgets seems to involve a bit of voodoo to get started.
At 6pm tonight, I have another session of the pickup D&D game that I played on Monday. This session will be to finish up the rest of the plot, supposedly. We'll see how that goes later.
Today, I emailed my boss about finding housing and he shot me back an email with some of the listings from the JPL secret housing list and I'm going to go visit one place tomorrow morning.
So this afternoon, I went looking for a gaming store using the Yellow Pages as my guide. It turned out that there were two listed on the same street (Colorado Blvd), so I decided to start there. It turns out that the street my hotel is on turns into Colorado Blvd once you go about two miles. One of them I was never able to find. I even parked my car and walked to the exact address (as near as I could tell). It seems like the one I was not able to find had been bulldozed to make way for some sort of eatery.
The other gaming store (Game Empire) was a decent little shop. I bought a used copy of GURPS: Mage: The Ascension for $5.00 and came back later that night for an open D&D game that ran until 10.
The game went pretty well, though eventually there were 11 players. I played a half-elf Wizard. The game was the third in a set of 3 games which were supposed to collectively be an entire adventure. Unfortunately, we didn't get all the way through it because it took a little while due to the 11 players and the general slowness of the game. There was quite a bit of meta-gaming and some rather primitive ideas from the players. I had to twice explain that killing things is not necessarily the best way to get experience. The only reason killings this is worth XP is because you are overcoming an obstacle. I believe my advice fell on deaf ears. C'est la vie.
The GM had a Cool Thing, though--the Critical Hit Deck. I picked up one of these for myself as well. I was slightly disappointed because the deck itself was not very generic and is mostly D&D specific. It was still a good buy, I think.
So today I found out that my stuff won't even be leaving Anderson until Thursday. This is probably fine as I doubt that I'll be getting an apartment too terribly soon.
I'm finding that most of the apartments that I'm interested in learning more about when I search using google's housing search are listed using WestsideRentals.com. Unfortunately, you have to register and pay $50 to be able to see addresses or contact information about what they have listed. I find this unacceptable. The internet is for free, people.
One place that I was interested in that I saw on Craig's List now has an interest/offer from someone else. The nice lady who owns/manages it told me she'd give me a call if the other person decides they don't want it.
I tried taking the path given to me by google maps between my hotel and JPL today. This was a mistake. The directions told me to get on I-210 which is in fact a more or less straight shoot to JPL. Unfortunately, it was wall to wall traffic, and I got off at the next exit. I will have to find a better path before I start next Monday.
Today, I traveled from Anderson to Indianapolis to Denver to LAX. All told, it took about 6 hours for the flights. Another two hours were spent driving to Indy/to my Hotel.
There were several strange things that happened during my trip:
Smiley was on my flight to Denver. Apparently she was going to Microsoft (and flying first class).
There were little TVs in the backs of every chair on my flight, these TVs showed DirectTV programming before takeoff and during the first 25 minutes of the flight. After that, you had to pay $5 in order to watch. (Movies were $8).
There was a man of (probably) Persian descent wearing a headscarf on my first flight. I watched him constantly during my flight, once again making me realize that I may in fact be a racist. To be fair, he was acting funny.
I did not wear a seatbelt during my entire first flight and was not bothered about it once. I also listened to my iPod during landing (dun dun DUUUN). On my second flight, I was told almost immediately to put on my seatbelt (probably because I was in an exit row).
When Hertz asked me what kind of car I wanted to rent, I asked for a Prius. It was awesome because I got one with 3 miles on it.
I took a bunch of random pictures using my phone, but I can't copy any of them off because my bluetooth adapter is in a box somewhere in Anderson.
Well, I've been up since 2pm yesterday (EDT) and I only got a bit of sleep during the second flight, so I'm going to rest now.
Right now, I am packing up my laptop in preparation for my trip to California. I haven't slept yet, so my 3 + 3 hours of flying with the 1 hour layover will be interesting. Hopefully my sleep schedule won't be any more messed up once I arrive there. I have a lead on a rental place in Altadena, but apparently there is some competition for the space. It's time to go, and go I shall.
So, this morning the people from the house moving service came and packed up everything that I had that was still unpacked. It only took them a few hours to finish packing everything, I was sortof impressed. My flight leaves at 7 am on Sunday and then I will be out of Indiana for good (more or less).
I haven't been doing much for the last few days. Just more packing. I have, however, been watching movies that I'd been meaning to watch for quite some time:
Lucky Number Slevin - I expected this movie to be mediocre at best. Strangely enough, though, it is a very good movie. It has Bruce Willis, Lucy Liu and Morgan Freeman, so there is some star power here. It sortof reminds me of the Ocean's (new ones) movies in its presentation style, so if you liked them you'll probably like this one.
Hotel Rwanda - Incredibly depressing, but still worth watching. Personally, I think it is worth watching just to see how bad the massacres were in the mid-90s.
Ocean's 12 - Not quite as good as the original, but still a lot of fun. If you liked the first one, you'll probably enjoy this one. Just don't get your hopes up too much.
I finally got MySpace support working in XPost. It turns out that I probably would have had it working a week ago, but in a big block of text where I was sending information to MySpace I had a small error.
Did you catch it? I was sending the value of "postDay" twice. This meant that when I got it back in their preview page, I was getting a value of "day,day" for the value of "postDay". I have no iead why their server would do such a thing when presented with a second copy of a field during a POST request, but that is in fact what it seemed to do. This caused the hash they gave me to be wrong when I automatically fixed it during the second post and is why the error was showing up as an error with my timezone. There was nothing wrong with my timezone, per se, there was something wrong with the date they were using.
So earlier today, I decided to take a second stab at getting MySpace support to work in XPost. My previous attempts, according to the error message given by MySpace, had invalid dates. Well, I had fiddled around with it to no evail, so I decided to do the most straightfoward thing I could think of to ensure the appropriate date: scrape the one that MySpace puts on by default. For reasons that I cannot understand, I seem to still be getting errors when I post. These errors are still about the date. Perhaps the error's cause is elsewhere.
On a side note, C#'s language semantics make regular expressions just plain ugly. For example, to strip the "hour" field out of the webpage, I use this expression:
\\(\\s*\"postHour\"\\s*,\\s*(?<val>\\d*)\\s*
Now, I understand that Regex strings aren't supposed to be particularly readable or pretty, but it is just irritating to have to include two slashes in order to use some of the most common Regex wildcards. Also, the whole <val> thing just to get a subexpression seems silly. Why would I have a subexpression if I didn't want its value seperately?
Of course, had I not needed to match against quotes ("") I could have cut down on the number of slashes using the @"string" string literal construct in C#, but since I did, I was SOL.
Today, I went to Cingular/ATT to get a new phone and contract. This was a monumental struggle. Since my number had to be moved to a new account (my mother had previously been handling it), I had to call the Cingular Transfer Service (tm) number before I could get a new phone. The people in the store were, for whatever reason, unable to do the transfer themselves. Luckily, I got them to waive all of the fees associated with moving it over and only had to pay to get my new phone--a Motorola RAZR V3xx. It is a decent little phone. Lucky for me, unlike Andrew, my phone doesn't have any bizarre cripplings as far as I can tell.
On my old phone, I had taken a few pictures that I wanted to hold on to. I didn't, however, have the stuff necessary to copy them off my phone onto my computer at the time. Luckily, since both my new phone and old phone have bluetooth, I was able to send them all over in about 15 minutes (no bulk transfers unfortunately, just a phone in each hand pressing the same key combination over and over again).
I get free unlimited Internet on it for the first month, which I have used thus far in a roundabout scheme to put a few mp3s on it to use as ringtones. For now, I'm using the victory theme from Kirby's Dreamland. I haven't come up with another good idea yet, but I'm certainly willing to take suggestions.
In non-phone related news, today marks the longest period of time that I have been in Anderson since I began my Rose career. I leave town in 6 days and will be gone for the forseeable future.
Today, I began in earnest to clean out my room to prepare for my move to California. On Friday, people from the moving company will be coming to box up my things, and on Sunday I will be flying out. There is quite a bit of stuff in my room that has collected over the years and so it takes a while to sort out things I want to keep from things that are simply going to be thrown away for lack of a place to store them.
In going through my things, I came upon a box that I mailed to myself from Rose during my freshman year. I knew what was in this box, and had been avoiding it. This box had only been opened once since I mailed it to myself, and that was to get something out that someone else wanted. At the time, I had hoped to never open it again. This box, of course, contained everything at all relating to Sarah (the first one). Most of what was inside was stuff that seemed sentimental at the time: notes, pictures, the occasional ticket stub. I tossed everything except for a few pictures that I kept for posterity.
Going through this box, however, made me realize something that I had known in the back of my mind, but had never really put together. Of the women that I have been seriously involved with in my life, all of them seem to have cheated on me (except Terra, but that situation was...complicated) (EDIT: apparently I was incorrect in my judgment on this only 2 of 3/4). I am not saying this to stir up any trouble amongst those with whom I have been involved; I am more saying it because perhaps at this point I should wonder if the failures in these relationships were not my own. Although possible, it seems unlikely that this situation is only coincidence.
I have not thought all of this through, so I'm going to try to do it now on this page. Feel free to nod off or TL;DR the rest of this post.
I started dating the first Sarah near the end of my senior year of highschool. I would say that I was more than a little attached to her; I even believed that I loved her. Perhaps I did, anymore it's hard to say. She was bright, pretty and had just enough of a sarcastic edge to interest me. Unfortunately, she was also from a very different background and her Christianity was very important to her. My own disbelief in religion became a serious stumbling block, but I tried not to be too harsh. It is important to remember that I was a much less angry person back then than I have become since that time. Regardless, we dated for perhaps 3.5 or 4 months, maybe a bit longer. It seemed like forever, though, as we spent almost every evening together and worked at the same place. Unfortunately, I believe that this constant companionship likely led to our end. Within months of the beginning of our freshman year (Some time in September to be precise), it ended.
Throughout this relationship, I had difficulty with my mother as she didn't like Sarah for some reason. Perhaps she just didn't like me spending all my time with her. Regardless, this relationship taught be to tell my parents nothing about my dating life (less "drama" that way). It also is at least partially responsible for my becoming a more angry person. I am not trying to blame Sarah at all. I took the end of this relationship very poorly and became bitter. Nearly all of that bitterness is gone now, but such things change a person if they aren't paying enough attention. If I'm angry, so what?
So, I sulked around for a while. Eventually, I did find another girlfriend. I believe Dess was a junior at the time. She and I date for several months, but neither of us really connected with the other. At the same time though, neither of us really wanted to be alone. Thus, the relationship dragged on for months. This relationship, however, ended well and I was more sad to be alone than sad to have lost Odessa.
My relationship with Odessa is one that I think about least, but probably did some of the most to change me. She challenged my conservatism and ultimately is probably responsible for making me change from the simple-minded, Fox News-watching conservative that I was in my youth to the more utilitarian liberal that I am now. I also learned from this relationship that I need to be willing to end a relationship. Unfortunately, this is something that I have yet to get right.
During the summer after my freshman year, I became involved with a Terre Haute local named Terra. Our relationship, such as it was, was complicated. She was a great girl, who I often think back to longingly. I hope that she is doing well, I have not heard from her in far too long. Unfortunately, I was young and stupid and thought that I could "do better" or some such nonsense and thus never really took the idea of being involved with her as seriously as I perhaps should have. I hope that I did bring her a few fleeting moments of happiness during a time of difficulty, rather than making it harder for her. I do not regret that she and I did not become more, but neither am I particularly happy about it.
Its hard to say what I learned from my relationship with Terra. Perhaps it was simply, "people won't keep putting up with your bullshit."
Finally, there is but one woman left--Imani, the second Sarah. I met Imani my freshman year. She was an aquaintence of Hillary, who was a friend of Rob, all of whom were in my Mage game. She and I didn't become involved until I was a sophomore. She and I began dating rather close to the beginning of my sophmore year. Sometime near the end of the year, I realized that, despite having dated her for much of the school year, I was not becoming more attached to her. There was not a particularly good reason, I simply didn't feel toward her the way I had felt before. And thus we broke up...the first time. We got back together and broke up various times before I graduated. I don't know why exactly I kept getting back together with her, though I believe it has something to do with rather being with someone than with no one. There is probably also something to do with the fact that she essentially lived in my room and was friends with all of my friends. There is quite a bit that I could say about my relationship with Imani, but I don't feel like writing three years of my life down in one sitting.
My relationship with Imani ended at the same time as my time at Rose. Now, I get to move to the other end of the country and begin the search for love again. I think it will help to not have any attachments or baggage this time. Who knows, perhaps I will finally find a counterpart...
I don't often feel the need to embed things in my blog posts, but today I feel differently. I first saw this at ACEN and thought of it again today. I encourage everyone, even those not normally interested in such things, to partake in the glory embeded below:
Since I knew that I was going to be unable to host my own email server for an unknown period of time, last week I began looking for an alternative. After looking around a bit, I found out that Google had created a program that lets you use their service to provide email for a domain. So far, it has done pretty well as an interim solution until I can begin hosting my own email service again. It lets me get email through POP3 which is sufficient (though I much prefered IMAP since I use multiple computers). It also provides a catch-all address which is necessary for me due to the sheer number of pseudo-real email address that I've given out of the years.
With regard to more pressing matters, I set a date for the moving people to come to my house to box things (another company is coming to actually move them). This means that I have to have figured out what I'm going to take by the 15th at 9am. This will probably involve me going through stuff and throwing much away.
Obligatory XPost news Earlier this morning, I got a reply back from Tumblr about their not having an authentication-only option in their API and they said that was a good idea that just hadn't crossed their minds yet. Their response makes me think that they'll probably add such a feature in the near future. I was quite suprised that I got such a quick response from them (or any response at all, really). When I was having trouble with my blogger account, it took nearly a week to get a response. I wasn't even a member when I first emailed Tumblr and I got a response in under a day--very impressive.
I added support for Tumblr to XPost a few minutes ago. Luckily, it had an API, so it worked the first time that I got it to compile successfully. As before, Tumblr support is currently only in subversion. I'll work on getting a release together sometime after I am in California.
The weird thing about the Tumblr API is that it seems to have no independent authentication mechanism. The only way to check to see if you have a valid username and password is to do a post and see if it works. I sent an email to their support group to see if this is indeed the case. Hopefully it isn't, as that is a lousy way of doing things (though I suppose it does send passwords in cleartext anyway...).
So, I went ahead and generated a new PGP key. My public key is available from the standardplaces. My new key ID is 0x144FB8CA. If you're interesting in cross-signing, drop me an IM.
In other news, I'm beginning to get my move together. I was contacted today by both the people from the vehicle moving and home moving people to set up dates to move my stuff to Pasadena. Unfortunately, the home moving people can't give me a firm date for picking up my stuff and will only give me a range from June 18-23. Hopefully, I can get what I need sorted out so that I won't need to be here when they move me. I would be very sad to have to fly out 1 or 2 days before my first week of work...
Lastly, I've been working on MySpace support for XPost. I've made some progress in that I can successfully authenticate and can almost post. Unfortunately, I'm getting some sort of bizarre timing bug. I think it is related to the timezone settings, but I'm not sure. If anyone cares enough about mayspace to help me bang my head against it, I'd appreciate the help. I'm beginning to think the MySpace stuff is reaching the point where I need a fresh set of eyes. Incidently, MySpace is as irritating to reverse engineer as it is to use--perhaps moreso.
When I installed thunderbird on my laptop, it also installed enigmail the PGP/GPG plugin for thunderbird. Since my laptop hard drive died in January, I hadn't bothered to reinstall enigmail, so I'd let my use of proper email signing go. Today I decided to look into it and found out that I had 4 PGP keys that had been created since I began playing around with PGP. Two of them were active and two were expired. Unfortunately, I only had copies of two of the secure keys--one active and one expired. I decided to revoke both of them since the one that was still active that I had a key for had no revokation date. Unfortunately, that leaves one key active that I don't have the private key for (I believe it was lost with my old hard drive). Luckily, that key expires sometime in November. I'll be generating a new key today, maybe this time I cna keep better track of the revocation file...
A little earlier, I commented that I was annoyed that I couldn't just "Run Command" a firefox window. After poking around a little bit, I realized that it was because the of the way mozilla-launcher handles URL parameters. For anyone that's interested, all you have to do is change the try_running function in the mozilla-launcher bash script. My ugly hack for fixing it is below. I've testing it approximately not at all (aside from the fact that it seems to do what I want it to do), so YMMV.
try_running() { declare s retval=2 # default == can't find an instance
# Try mozilla-xremote-client on each candidate screen. for s in "${candidates[@]}"; do DISPLAY=$s $remote -a ${progname} "$@" retval=$? if [[ $retval -eq 0 ]]; then candidates=("$s") # for future calls return 0 fi done # OK, now try again and see if we should prepend http:// if [[ $retval -eq 3 ]]; then for s in "${candidates[@]}"; do loc=$(expr index "$@" "\(") words=$@ DISPLAY=$s $remote -a ${progname} "openURL(http://${words:$loc}" retval2=$? if [[ $retval2 -eq 0 ]]; then candidates=("$s") # for future calls return 0 fi done fi
# Might as well do this error interpretation here case $retval in 1) echo "Unable to connect to X server" >&2 ;; 2) echo "No running windows found" >&2 ;; 3) echo "Browser doesn't understand command" >&2 ;; *) echo "Unknown error $retval from mozilla-xremote-client" >& ;; esac
So, I mentioned earlier this week that I installed Gentoo on my Rose laptop. Thus far, it has been going reasonably well. I'm getting the full 1600x1200 resolution; I have a working media player, needed IDEs, etc. Now, there only appear to be three problems left to solve.
Firstly, I haven't been able to get the official ATI drivers working for the video card. The main problem is that I can't use the hardware OpenGL acceleration. I haven't yet had anything that I really want to run in OpenGL, but that will likely change.
Secondly, the W200 network driver is very buggy. It has a tendency to randomly drop connection (especially after an extended on time). Worse yet, it occasionally causes hard locks when it is being initialized. This is especially problematic if I turn it off and back on again after one of the random connection drops.
Finally, I've yet to figure out how to spawn firefox to a webpage from the "Run Command" dialog. It seems that if firefox is already running, calling firefox again does nothing. I'll probably poke around for at it a bit more. Overall, I'm rather happy with the setup.
Today, I decided that I wanted to watch Full Metal Panic - The Second Raid. To do this, I needed some sort of Video player for my laptop which now runs Gentoo. To that end, I started playing around with various media players which were available through portage.
mplayer - For the life of me, I was unable to figure out how to make it maintain aspect ratios on resize. The internet was less than helpful, so this one got rejected
xine - This maintained aspect ratios, but studdered regarless of how I played around with the cache settings. I think it may have been a problem with h.264 support, but that is pure conjecture.
kplayer - Yes, I realize that it is just a kde-ified version of mplayer, but for some strange reason it worked. It had no problems with aspect ratios, no problems with studdering (at least when playing from the local drive, playing from a samba share over wireless was...unpleasent).
Well, it has been 5 or so days since I left Rose-Hulman and Terre Haute for the forseeable future. Since then, I've been sort of unproductive. I did manage to get pretty much everything moved from Rose to Anderson without incident.
I've been working on this and that. Today, I finished installing Gentoo on my laptop. It is nice because Gentoo now has a package for the W200 wireless card that the laptops from our year use (even if it is masked and requires some fiddling to make work).
I also, just a few minutes ago, fixed the Xanga support in XPost. Unfortunately, the fixes are only in subversion for now since I don't have a machine up and running to build the release for me. Also, I doubt that I will be nearly as concerned about Windows releases now that I don't use windows except for playing games (i.e., what it was designed to do).
I've been trying to get into contact with my relocation coordinator out at JPL to little avail. Apparently she was out of town until today and wasn't at her desk any of the times I tried to call today. C'est la vie.
