Category: Life in General

… or at the very least, my internet connection (now) is WORLDS better than my internet connection (last week). I’ve made the jump back from Verizon DSL to Comcast Cable modem (which, I must say, feels kind of dirty). $19.99 for 3 months, and then $58/month after that. Not great, but not horrible. And the speed alone makes it worthwhile, at least until I start getting the $58/month bill. I tested my connection with Verizon DSL before I got cable and it reported 700k down and 124k up. Suck! I just got the cable-modem installed yesterday, tested again, and got back speeds of 3.5M down and 364k up. ROCK! =:) Anywho, the whole reason behind this was the fact that Read more…

I am, dangit. I waited 2+ weeks to get my Dreambox converter from Hong Kong so I could use my PSX-based custom-built arcade controllers with Street Fighter Anniversary Collection. They arrived today. I was SO excited, as was my son. We plugged them in, anticipating great times. We watched the joystick working correctly. Excitement mounted. I pressed the “start” button on my controller. The game started. And then it asked me to press “A”. And that’s when I discovered that my controllers don’t work with the converters with the Xbox for SFAC. Crap. Another $50 down the drain.

What in the world??? Also, as noted previously, I’ve broken down and bought an Xbox for the fam (well, okay, and largely for me too =:) ). I also have purchased the VERY cool Street Fighter Anniversary Collection, and with it Xbox Live for a year. I have discovered several new and exciting things since then: It is un-healthy for several key areas of your body to play for 5 hours, hunched over, trying to keep your head perfectly still so as not to move your Xbox Live headset. One or more of the following is sucking badly and causes terrible lag: the Street Fighter game itself, the server it’s connecting to, Xbox Live server, my Linksys WRT54GS router, Verizon Read more…

I am so proud. =:) My first KDE CVS commit!

Honestly, they really are. I LOVE them. My lovely bride thinks I’m nuts, and I irritate her to no ends when, on rare occasion, we sit down to watch TV together. Rather than skipping through all the commercials like my bride does, I will very often insist on watching some of them *gasp*. Anyway, some of the most creative and enjoyable things you’ll see on TV are commercials. One of my favorites is the Office Max Rubberband Man commercials. During Christmas holiday, I went into Office Max and they had a DVD playing on one of their portable DVD players that had all of their Rubberband Man commercials (and the making of videos). It was hilarious! I watched them with Read more…

So, they snuck this one in on me. =:) I didn’t realize that 1.5 was released yet, but apparently, it was. I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded to a completely stock 1.5 installation, as well as cleaning up the directory structures a bit so that future upgrades are easier. This means that there will be tons of 404’s in my error_log, I’m sure, but so be it. Like a friend said, this is just a hobby.

Like many other things, sound in Linux is not nearly as easy as it should be. Briefly, the problem is that many/most sound cards in computers these days do not do hardware sound mixing. This means that they are physically unable to handle 2 or more programs trying to ask it to play sound at the same time. Windows gets around this by having software mixing built into its sound card drivers (or kernel–who knows where it actually is). I imagine that Mac OS X does this too. And of course, for these 2 commercial (read: expensive) operating systems, this all Just Works without the user having to get involved. In fact, most Windows users no doubt have absolutely no Read more…

Wow, I really need a vacation. And, curiously enough, I am now on one, thank God. Just in the nick of time, I think. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were not at all restful, for a variety of reasons. Not at all. Sunday was starting to look restful, and I had a nice little meander through the Camp Hill mall with my lovely brood and friends. Stopped by the E.B. therein and found what I thought was a pretty good deal on a really cool Lord of the Rings, Return of the King game. $9.99 for a DVD version of this game seemed like a right nice price to pay. So, thrilled at the thought of abandoning all cares of work, Read more…

Doldrums. I’ve got them. I get them more often than I’d like. Now what to do with them….