Just Another Dave

Go me!

Life in general has been pretty damn busy. I spent a few days being frustratedby my guitar and then went out and purchased an Epiphone Gothic SG

. It’s been a treat to play an instrument that I don’t constantly have to fight with to keep it in tune. At this point, I can’t play a damn thing. But I’ve been trying for spending 30 min doing fretting exercises 2-3 times a week. That’s all I’ve really had time to do so far, once other things settle down I should be able to spend more time figuring out better exercises and things to practice.

Excepting last week which got mucked up by a work-trip down to Canmore I’ve been doing pretty damn good about getting to the gym in the mornings. I can’t say as I’ve made much progress in terms of strength but I can’t really have expected to anyways. The big accomplishment so far has been to be regular about working about and not pussying out during the workouts and cutting things short. I gained a few pounds over the last week so the 10lbs I’d lost in the first 2 months of moving out have all but disappeared. I’m not terribly chapped by it though. I know it’s going to be a bit of a battle to cut the fat I’m carrying.

The apartment has been coming together really well. I’ve got a lamp to hang somehow from a concrete ceiling in the bedroom and a speaker cable to pin up so we stop tripping on it, but after that we’ll be mostly ready for our housewarming parties finally. Bit of cleaning to do, some research into how to make the chocolate fountain go, and a lot of trying not to stress out over what people think of the place.

A little over a week ago I bought a slow cooker so Friday I took a page from the cookbook that came with it and made “Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic”. It proved to be rather tasty. The leftovers from that chicken as well as a roast chicken purchased earlier that week became soup this weekend, which shall be dinner tonight. While cleaning Saturday we also made a couple cups of rice so we can make fried rice Tuesday night. I’m so domestic it hurts.

That’s all for now, I guess we’ll see how long it takes for me to post again.

Life’s been treating me pretty well this past month.

I’ve been good about something things (try to de-stress and such) and not so good about others (diet… exercise) but overall I’ve been pretty happy about how this month has gone. Ultimately it’s time for me to develop a new routine and stick to it rather religiously.

Over the last couple evenings I’ve attempted a repair of the poorly designed floating bridge on my guitar and restrung it.  Spent a few minutes strumming away before I made supper this evening. I’ve been debating trying to pick up guitar again as a winter project. Other contenders for that spot are also getting my HAM license and working on my geek cred. I suppose it would be possible to do all of these things, but I don’t know how likely that really is.

Yesterday also brought an upgrade of wordpress to the blogs I host. 2.3 seems to be pretty neat. They’ve added tag support as well as a tag-cloud widget for the side bar.  It figures that such a thing should exist as just 3 days ago I found a cloud widget that works on the existing category system. I guess if I’m to start tagging things I’ll need to reconsider my current categories.

I’ve also seen talk of a Debian User Planet which somewhat intrigues me.  I think I’d be more inclined to write and thusly post more technical articles if I knew people who’d get some use out of them would actually be exposed to them.  Though for such a thing to happen I would need to be able to generate an RSS feed for just a single category and I haven’t found a way to do this yet.

To be fair, if I expect people to read what I write, then I need to write more compelling content and post more frequently. I suppose that would tie in with the above. Establish a routine that involves posting to the intarwebs, practicing guitar, studying for the HAM license, and working out. Oh yeah, and work and socializing and sleep.

oi.

There is a new home!

We officially have our apartment! We’ve managed to snag a two bedroom halfway up a 14 story high-rise on the south-side. Close to work for me(relatively speaking, 27km commute one-way is now 9km), close-ish to work for Carla (she works downtown now).  Dave gets a room for an office, we get some privacy and independence, with a little bit of best-friends-that-live-across-the-hall just as icing on the cake.

Walk-through, lease-signing, key-getting and move-in this Saturday.  Joygasms abound!

The first pipe I bought has seen a bit of abuse over the last 2 years and I’ve started to become displeased with the way it’s been smoking.  It’s not entirely surprising either. So many different blends have been through that bowl. It’s been time for a good, thorough cleaning.  The question is, how do you clean a brier bowl?

After joining the pipes.org forum and spending some time reading over the maintenance section the solution seems to be the “Salt and Alcohol” treatment.  Wherein you remove the stem, block the shank, fill the bowl with kosher salt, then top it up with alcohol.  Let it sit for 12-24 hours.  Remove the contents of the bowl, let it all dry out, and repeat.

We’re currently at the “let it set” stage.  Here’s to hoping I get to enjoy my first pipe again.

Just stupid busy.

I’ve been fighting with server bitchyness the last week or so now.  Apoc seems to have a memory issue somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find it yet.  I’m not sure if it’s hardware or an issue with the new Xen kernel I’m running from etch.  Eventually I will get this resolved. I still need to move the jabber server off the VM server and onto the new seraph.  Need to get another disk in seraph and mirror them too. So much stuff to do.

I spent yesterday layed out in bed with a fucked up back.  It still hurts this morning but I’m hoping I’ll survive the day.  I guess maybe it’s time that I actually see somebody about that.

Apparently I can’t frame a shot with my phone to save my life, but at least I’ve got something. Had a douchebag crawl up Gia’s ass just off whyte ave last night. Brad had opted to not park behind me as he would have been past the sign; too close to the intersection and thusly, illegal. Didn’t stop this cunt-rag from parking 10 inches off my bumper. Only upside was I got to use one of the tickets I printed off of youparklikeanasshole. What did we learn from this? 1) Bring the good camera more often 2) It’s a good thing dave doesn’t own a big, metal vehicle 3) It’s time to make up some custom tickets to leave on windsheilds 4) People is bitches, and bitches must die. (Thankyou, ninjastan)

Carla just washes her hair.

I’ve been sucking at the being healthy thing the last couple weeks. Not that I’ve been sick, per-se, but I’ve been eating like garbage and I haven’t seen the inside of my gym in a couple weeks. We need to change this. I’m nearing some very unhealthy weights at this point.

I was going 3 days a week, and while I felt better, I really couldn’t say one way or another if I was making any progress. Am I insane for thinking I’d see difference in a month and a bit? To the untrained eye, yes. So tonight we’re going to start documenting things. Pic-shures. This is part one of the plan. I’m thinking a weekly thing. Don’t worry. I’m not thinking about posting the pics weekly. You may get some later on, if I’m particularly happy with the progress.

Secondly, I need to get my diet and sleep-patterns under control. They’re working against me.

And lastly, I need to get my ass in the gym. Consistently.

Speaking of sleep, I need to do that. I’ll check in with the New Plan, as soon as it surfaces.

I have spent all morning playing Wii Bowling.  I took my Mii, who’d never bowled before from 0 to pro.  I’ve now managed two 200+ games.

I fear I must actually do something with today or I will feel rather… unhappy with myself.  So that something is going to be installing working on a spam filter for my main mail server.  The time has come. Details to follow of what I do.

Alright. Here’s the deal.

I’ve got 3 days off, to myself. I’ve got a list of shit I want to get done. I’ve got my TV, my laptop, papasan chair, and the Matrix box set that desperately needs re-watching.

I think we all know what needs to happen.

As club curator, founding member, and a Past President, I am hereby taking
your resignation into consideration. Due to the unpreparedness of the club
to transition to a new president, I regret to inform you that we are going
to change your official status to Outgoing President and you will be
placed into a 3 month probationary term as acting president while we make
other arrangements.

At the end of the aforementioned 3 month period, taken to be occurring on
or around the Consumerism Celebration in late December, we will be
evaluating this specially formulated presidential term. There will be an
outgoing interview of our longest running president as well as the
establishment of formal relations with the Outgoing Presidents new
business partner.

We appreciate your understanding in this matter, and hope your new
ventures provide new challenges with which you can test the skills you
have acquired while working for our cause, as well as grow into your new
position.

Dave

Past President

You have now convinced me that upgrading to the 118dB Twin Supertone kit from Hella is worth my money.

I would very much have liked to see the reaction on your face after you tried to change lanes into me without shoulderchecking because you were too busy talking on your cell phone when you mistook the noise produced by my little hatchback for the end of all things. Perhaps I shall get you next time.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything of any substance so I thought it might be prudent for me to post a bit of a recap of the last little while.

I took my brother and his gf to get Lego Star Wars 2 at EB games Wednesday night. They did the right thing and bought a legit copy. I picked up a cheap copy of the incredibles game (though the original, not the second one which was a two player that I thought I was getting and carla wanted to play…) A few minutes after we get home pete comes down saying he can’t get it installed.

After a few minutes of yelling at it, I start googling for the error and we realise that a large number of people are having issues with this release. It’s a know problem that Lucas Arts hasn’t released a patch for. Luckily, there is a fix for this, and we can thank the pirates for it. They fixed this a little while ago, and basically we copied all the files off the cd, replaced one of the files, burned that off and installed from our new master. Works like a charm.

Go Lucas Arts, you cocknobs.

Went to Edson yesterday for a pitiful amount of work. Though I did get to listen to a number of great interviews from IT Conversations. There were to guys I listened to that had incredible passion for what they were talking about (Asterisk and Identity on the Web), and while listening to them I was thinking to myself, I remember when I used to sound like that. Fast forward a number of hours and I’m on campus waiting for Carla to finish up so I head up to RATT and meet up with some LSD folks. Lo and behold, I find myself preaching for damn near an hour on the history of the open source movement. That made me rather happy as it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to rattle of the tale of serendipity that is the coming together of the GNU project and the Linux kernel.

When I get a change to sit down again, I think it might be time to impart on the world my thoughts on the shooting in Montreal.  I’m going to warn you all now, there’s going to be a lot of seething anger, and I’m going to bring up a lot of shit about Columbine that most people have forgotten.  And I’m going to become part of what I hate. I’m going to take what should be a time for mourning and turn it into “current event focused prosumer generated content in the blogosphere”.  I think I’m going to go puke.

So I’m nearing the end of three full days off. In a row. This is a damn vacation for me. I can’t say that I’ve accomplished a lot this few days, but I feel damn good.

Saturday night we went out to the park to a house party Bryan invited us to…  I kept thinking that I really shouldn’t have to justify going with “I need to fill up anyways”, but that was the hilight of the trip.  The party sucked. I guess I shouldn’t be entirely suprised by that. We ran back here… hung about for a bit, then I dropped Carla and John off.  Lame.

Yesterday I woke up fairly early and got a fair bit of computering done.  Carla finaly rose from the dead and I headed over to her place with the intention of going out shopping for clothes. Over an hour later, after she made brownies, we finally set out to find clothings.  I came home with some styluses for my Treo, the new Tool disc and Awake by Dream Theater.  Yeah…

Last night were over at Johns, he’d tried to round up a good group of people for a fire, we managed to add Ellie, but everyone else decided tobe sucktastic.

Today could be considered a write-off.  Been on a torrenting binge.  Signed up for last.fm. I’m testing KDE on my workstation right now.  Installing ubuntu on a machine for Carla so she can stop using my MythTV frontend as her desktop (threw a 9800 Pro AIW in her machine so she could game a little too).

Last night we started talking about Tat’s again.  I’m really wanting to get the debian swirl done.  I should start looking into how much it’ll set me back.