Divine Lunacy

Just sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip. It started from this green on black konsole, aboard this Full ATX.

The idea of “upgrading” totem, a graphical frontend for Xine ( Ksi-n ), came to my mind. Linking against outmoded libraries is always sad, so I began to upgrade most of Totem’s dependencies. Xine compiled without hassle. Next game GTK. My past experiences compiling GTK haven’t exactly been pleasant ( nor have my experiences with Qt ). GLib compiled fine, Things seemed to be off to a good start, but next came pango. Pango didn’t go so well.. I couldn’t get pango to compile for the life of me. I reinstalled all dependencies, including Xft, Freetype, Fontconfig, and their dependencies. Pango 1.8.0 would not compile. I eventually got Pango 1.7.0 to compile. ATK and GTK compiled fine, but then all my GTK applications ( totem, Firefox, Gaim… ) were broken. I ran through configuration, compilation and installation many many more times, to no avail, Until I tried to start gaim as root and it went, ( I didn’t realize I was root in that console ). Mario still could not start GTK applications. I figured the only thing that could cause that was a discrepency in the .bash_profile’s. I was correct. Mario had LD_LIBRARY_PATH = ~/kde3.3.1/lib. Removing that and running su - mario fixed my problem. This version of the story is greatly simplifid. I was down for upgrades for about 48 hours. omewhere along the way, I ended up switching to X.org. ( yippee? ). I never did get totem compiled; there was an error during configuration and I was too exhausted to look into it, but one day, I will complete my media player upgrade goal. For now, I will stay away from upgrading GTK. ( alghough, I am noticing better performance now )

As if that isn’t enough happening for one 48 hour period, my family semi-spontaineously went cross country skiing yesterday. I don’t know the name of the place, nor do I care, I wasn’t particuarly impressed, I have been to better places. After the skiing, we went to The outback steakhouse to redeem a gift certificate obtained by finding glass in our food on our last visit ( gift certificate, free dessert, and personalized service from the manager ) I am a brown bread attict, after finishing off the first loaf, our super-awesome waitor returned from the kitchen with two more propped upon a single knife, along with some wholesome whipped butter. At the end of the night, when the waitor came to wrap up the unfinished food, I requested that he wrap up the remaining brown bread; He instead included two uncooked loaves, which I have yet to indulge in. P.S. I recieved more duct tape for christmas. Santa knows me all too well.

I recieved a new monitor for christmas ( … no surprise… ) It is a sony SDM-S94. 19 inch. I am using DVI-D, which allows be to be nice and lazy because the pitch/Centering is automatically Adjusted. The native resolution is 1280*1024, which makes everything look all the more awesome. I completely redid my x11 config file. Now all my high res fonts are loading. ( sexy ). I even gave myself a nice present by recompiling my kernel. The kernel is good on the memory, but I forogot to compile some modules into it ( cough firewire cough )… I’ll get around to that when I need it though. Ever try suring the internet in higher than 1024*768? There tends to be a lot of real-estate on the side.

Joe got a Dell Axim… Does that mean we can be geeky and beam eachother stuff while walking through the hallways again?

A week off from school??? No math class? Eh, that pregnant lady has lost her sanity anyway.

I finally recieved the thinkgeek pi shit that has been in my mother’s closet for oh so long… Now what about that Hex shit? I know it is up there… One step at a time. Christmas Doesn’t end till 6^th… Perhaps I will be wearing the dead people shirt on the 7th. I will ust have to wait and see. Meanwhile, I should stop rambling at myself through the form of typing. See how messed up my train of thought is? No, you don’t because you haven’t seen all of it, but I bet you wish you could. I could really go for a taco right now. I hope I remember to do that lab report and that other dumb report… Eh, I’ll remember, but will I do them? Yes, that is the question, but ta ta for now.

Finally back in the Google Index… The only problem is, they have the old URL, although, it does forward here…

Come they told us… pa rum pa rum… *cough*. I went christmas caroling at Nursing homes with my troop tonight. What fun and excitement. We had cards to hand out to people. One of the cards I made had a floor plan in it, with and escape route plotted in bright red. After handing it to an old lady with a walkier, I walked swifty in the other direction. Thinking I was safe, I reduced my pace to a slow walk and continuted on my way, only to reach the end of the hallway and spot old lady tailing us at a pretty good clip. Upon reaching the rear of our disgrunteled line, she showed the card to a nurse who looked uttered a slight giggle. It was then that she did what we least expected… She began to dance as we gave an atrocious rendition of Frosty the Snowman. Never before have I seen an o ldy lady with a walker dance with such vigor. A good time was had by all. Cookies and other assorted mumbo jumbo in the hall afterwards. ( yeah, you got me… thats how they got me to go. ) Hee-Haw!

Ahh!! Von-Villas and her stupid Essays. Yeah’m she gots me, ah can’t right an’ I need to write a tree two fibe page esay to probe that I can… Oh, and then reprint that math report. If I ever teach anyone anything, it will be to proofread BEFORE printing— It saves time, and trees.

Ever used one of those cheap online ASCII->Binary converters? I’m sure we all have… Sure, they work, but they just aren’t cool. ASCII is a 7-bit code, which means that 7 bits at most are needed per character. Most of the online translators pad every 7-bit chunk with an extra bit to make it an 8-bit byte. I just can’t stand that… Just one of those things. Another thing… Ever seen an ASCII text to ASCII base 13 converter? Well, I just wrote nice little program to convert into any number system. ( 2 through 36 ). And alas, no more zeroes than needed. The progam calculates the string length of 127 in the desitred base and pads every “character” so it has exactly that many digits. whoopeee. In my eyes, the only down side is the cheap interface. IT

On friday, I had a quiz in one of my math classes. For the sake of annoying the teacher, I used an alternate form of the quadratic formula, given by: x=(2*c)/(-b +- sqrt{b^2 - 4*a*c}). Apparently, the teacher did not know that form ( she does now! ). She never even bothered to look through the work and see that it gave the correct answer… She gave me half credit on 3 questions and accused me of using the sovlve function on my calculator… I didn’t expect to fail the quiz due to my little scheme… but I did. Needless to say, that is being sorted out as she toils through the process of proving that the form of the quadratic formula I used is inded valid. According to mathworld, this form is better than the normal form because in certain cases where b^2 >> 4ac, the standard form can yield an incorrect result for one of the roots.

My troop’s annual trip to the Rhode Island Rock Gym was last night. I didn’t really get any climbing in… I had to repell. I couldn’t make it up either of the walls that my instructor made me climb, so I had to climb the first one halfway twice. I climbed all the way up the second one on my second try, but that was mainly due to Jon’s auto belay device. As soon as I moved, he would have the rope tightened. The repelling was pretty fun, but now my arms are killing me.

Work on the PUD site finally went somewhere. We accomplished a great deal during Thurday’s TSA meeting. A large portion of the template is finished. ( Damn, I meant to work on that this weekend ).

In finally downloaded and installed limewire. ( shh. ). It’s a nice program, and there are plenty of users on the Gnutella Network.

After being chased by a bunch of blood-thirsty forty-year-olds on four wheelers, I am pretty much exhausted. Before I collapse and druel all over my keyboard, I must tell the anecdote of the three corner tear in my pants.

Ok, so like I said I was being chased by a bunch of drunk lunatics on mud flinging ATV’s. It was then that I leaped over some barbed wire, I made the leap, but my pants clearly did not. I return unscratched, while my pants have a three-corner ( triangle ) tear down the left knee. These five basket cases who were chasing me did have a reason though, which is why I ran. This was their second day loitering on the town property in which I walk and think about POWs. Many a POW has been thought over ( though not really solved ) in those woods. Yesterday, I came across their “hideout”, complete with cheap beer, a shabby fire, and an obnoxiously large boulder. I watched in hiding as the riders returned and seemed quite angered at their fire being knocked down and scattered. This was the work of a clever fellow, aged about 17 who hid out in the woods looking on. After leaving the scene, I promptly headed home, giggling. The next day, ( today ) My sister, complete with boyfriend ( clearly insane… ) and hardwood beating stick departed for a walk in the woods. They, as did I, came across the hangout of these loitering nuisances. Angered at the litter, they slit holes down the beer cans, and left a note reading “Clean Up”. Later that day, during half time, my brother and mother left home for a stroll in the woods, and stumbled upon the camp of the drunks. They did nothing, and just continued to walk. It was then, however, that the beasts returned to their lair to find dripping cans of beer, with large knife slits down the sides. After looking around, they saw two walkers, whom they immediately chased, to no avail. Later that day, I decided to take a walk, before doing homework then retiring for the night. I encircled a large open area unseen, until I became too lazy lurk in the shadows, as I am so talented at doing. The men were sitting on parked quads some distance away, but when I heard one yell “oh oh!”, followed by the starting of engines, knowing that my cover had been blown, I promptly ran. Luckily, they were too dumb to realize that a person being chased would just bushwack to get away… It makes for an interesting story anyway, though it would have been much more interesting had I been beaten, or at least comfronted.