Category: Life in General

I ran across this article that discusses a total Mac newbie’s first impressions with Mac OS X. It’s pretty light and entertaining reading. And what it’s done more than anything has been to whet my appetite for a Mac OS X box myself. Truth be told, I’ve always loved the Mac OS, and Apple machines in general. I’d love to be able to buy a 17″ powerbook. But, I don’t have that kind of money, and I’m pretty sure that if I ever did, there would be something far more important (or meaningful) that would need it to be spent on. For where your treasure is…

As it turns out, after having spent far too much time trying to debug this, I found a bug in Kopete that was causing the problems with using a SOCKS proxy in KDE. Along the way, I learned that a SOCKS proxy feature is built right into SSH!!! ssh -D causes SSH to act as a SOCKS 4/5 proxy!! Now that is sweet!! Anyway, here are all the gory, copius details. Go, bug-fixer guys!! =:)

I’ve been banging my head against the wall for a good couple of hours and had to vent…. I needed to get Kopete (a REALLY good KDE IM client) to use my Squid proxy server. Well, it’s not designed to do that, so that’s one thing, but what it can do is use a SOCKS proxy server. I proceeded to set up the Dante SOCKS proxy server on my aging-but-still-ticking debian box. All that’s left is getting Kopete to use it, right? Nope, not so easy. You can’t have just Kopete use a SOCKS proxy server, like gaim can. You have to have the entire desktop environment (all of KDE) use the SOCKS server. Okay, fair enough and understandable. Ahhh, Read more…

I knew it was coming. The worst part of it is that even if I do find an uber-cool design that I like, I’ll likely soon get bored again. And what, then, shall I do? What then, donut lady? Well, anyway, I’m looking for a good WordPress design. In fact, I wasted a few hours late yesterday night doing so. And an hour or so today. =:/ I’m really liking the Kubrick designs, like the one my friend Mike put on his site, and there are some really nice-looking designs that people have done, based on it. One of the things I like most about it is the ability to have a second tag-line in the header area. The wp-styles Read more…

So, one thing that I’ve found lacking in WordPress is the ability to be notified when somebody has replied to your comments on someone else’s blog. And, not surprising, there is a plugin for it. It looks pretty interesting, and I’m tempted to try it. =:) As an aside, I started looking through Brian Groce’s site, and I am very impressed! It’s a very nicely-done WordPress-based site, for starters, and it’s very refreshing to see another “Bible-based Christian” in the wild. =:) But back to my original point… isn’t this “send an e-mail to the person who posted a comment when their comment is replied to” functionality something that should be in WordPress itself?

So, I stumbled upon this wordpress client and got all excited about it until I realized that it was written specifically for Internet Explorer (which I wouldn’t use if you paid me in Cheese Whiz), specifically for Windows (which I wouldn’t use if you paid me in Cheese Whiz either). Why would anyone write an application for IE nowadays, please tell me? Blargh. Isn’t there a java-based client somewhere??? I’ve been using BloGTK on and off for a while, and it’s semi-decent, but it doesn’t wow me. I have to have it use MovableType, and it doesn’t seem to be able to edit my WordPress blog entries. Hm. I guess that’s it for now.

My friend Mike has brought up the Spongebob issue. Here’s the thing that bothers me about this. Once again, the media has incorrectly reported the real situation. If you’re interested, you can read the cause of all this hullabaloo here. In fact, go do that real quick. Go on, read it. Okay, Mister Stubborn, let me help you out… Question Why is Dr. Dobson objecting to the distribution of a video featuring such popular children’s characters as SpongeBob SquarePants? Answer From the outset, let’s be clear that this issue is not about objections to any specific cartoon characters. Instead, Dr. Dobson is concerned that these popular animated personalities are being exploited by an organization that’s determined to promote the acceptance Read more…

You’ve just had a day off yesterday and you don’t feel at all rested. You wake up an hour and a half late for work the day after your day off. You would rather be shoveling snow than sitting in your cubicle at work. You would rather be cleaning the bathroom than sitting in your cubicle at work. You would rather be doing almost anything else than sitting in your cubicle at work.

you are taking one tomorrow and don’t have a clue as to what you’re going to do with yourself, but you know that it won’t be “to rest”. your to-do list is longer for your day off than it is for a regular day at the office. you are feeling stressed out about the fact that you have 3 movies that need to be watched. you have struggled for the last 4 hours to go through the last 2 weeks’ worth of e-mails. you have 2 hours ahead of you to go through the last 2 weeks’ worth of opened-but-not-looked-through tabs in Opera. It is snowing tonight, ever-so-lightly, so perhaps I’ll have to deal with shoveling tomorrow. I should have Read more…

My name is Jason ‘vanRijn’ Kasper. The Jason part was given to me by my parents, though I have many times wished I had been named Richard the Third, after my Dad and Grandfather. The Kasper part was passed down to me from my Dad, though there are some pretty interesting facts about the family’s lineage. The ‘vanRijn’ part is something that happened on the way between then and now, but you can read more about that later. My titles at work are Master Systems Engineer and Chief Architect. In human-speak, that means that I’m a geek who can and enjoys to: Program computers in more than 10 different languages. Understand complex problems that need to be solved with computer Read more…