Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like Batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

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Category: Life in General

the war on boredom

So, here’s the thing. I get bored VERY easily (like you care…). And, to make matters worse, I have a love/hate relationship with both Mozilla Firefox and Opera. I run Linux, of course, and as such, don’t have the option of using Internet Explorer (Bill of the Gateses hasn’t seen fit to provide a version for Linux yet, and oddly enough, I’d not use it even if he had). So, my options for the browsing of all things webbish are limited to Konqueror, Mozilla and its derivatives (Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, etc.), and Opera. Of all of these, Opera wows me the most. It is the simplest to configure, it does everything I want it to from a user interface perspective Read more…


what on earth am I here for?

“The Purpose Driven Life” is the book that I’m currently reading through. It is REALLY good!! I struggle greatly with reading through books in general. I have no problem starting them, but being consistent and reading them through to end is not my bag, baybee. That is, unless it’s a good action/adventure/spy/geek book. Then that’s a different story. But anyhow, this book is different. It is meant to be read in 40 days, so the author has written the chapters into day-sized segments. Now, what this translates to for me is it takes me roughly 2 days to get through a day-sized chapter. Kind of like the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George realize that, working at full capacity, together Read more…


wordpress oddity

So, this is weird. I thought I was going nuts! I’ve not used any blogging package other than wordpress before, so I don’t know if this is “normal” or not, but it seems a trifle silly. By default (and by “by default” what I really mean is “you can’t change it easily”) wordpress will only show the date/time for a blog entry if it’s the first one for a given day. How annoying is that!?! Is there a reason for this, does anyone know?


Gesundheit

So, I’ve been a sickie for the last couple of days. Stayed home 2 days because of it. Some might call that being a weenie. I prefer to think of it as being smart and healthy. Wow, what a weird thought process this is. You see, before I got the glamorous job that I currently enjoy, I was a retail store manager for a bad long spell. And when you’re employed thusly, you are simply not allowed to call in sick. See–there’s you and maybe another 2 people in your store (who are also employed similarly), so if you call in sick, there’s nobody to replace you who’s not already working 60+ hours a week. So what do you do, Read more…


and now for something completely different

Groovy!! So, like tigert put it, “What happened to the site that never updates!?” =:) I’ve been formatting my site like a blog for the last 4 years+. I’ve had content on individual pages, which I would update every, oh, year or so, and when I had the time to update them, instead of replacing the content on the page, I would prepend it with another entry, with the date listed as to when I posted that content. You know… like a blog. =:D The only problem with this nifty little model is that it was ridiculously hard to update the content. I had to open vmware, open dreamweaver, add content, ftp it up, etc., etc. (okay, well, that doesn’t Read more…


allow myself to introduce… myself… again…

I’ve recently been informed by my lovely bride that I need to put more things on my little site here, showing off my little family. I’ve always been hesitant to do so, but I’ve apparently been overruled in this. =:) So then… the beans…. This would be me (well, this is an older picture–maybe 5 years ago?). I hate cameras almost as much as I hate telephones, and am about as un-photogenic as they come. So, other than the rare picture of me with my family, I’m trying hard to keep myself out of that medium. And yes, there is a striking resemblance to Johnny Bravo, though I had the hair first, I tell you!!! I am married to a Read more…


linux neato-ness

As I said, my first exposure to the linux operating system was in the IRC channels on the undernet network. And it seemed to me that the people who were talking about linux (at this point in time, linux was still early in its 1.2.x kernel phase) were the people who were very knowledgeable about computers in general, and seemed very well-informed about operating systems in particular. I looked up to these people–felt a kinship with them. And more importantly, I felt intrigued enough about this freak of programming, linux, that I just had to look at it some more. Now, having come from the hellish days of DOS 5-6.22/Windows 3.xx, Windows 95 was a very nice improvement. It seemed Read more…


something about computers or something…

So indeed. Who really cares what you run on that computer you paid all that money for, right? I mean, it’s a free country (well, mine is advertised as being free, at any rate). Why not just like what ya bought? Why not just learn to live with it?!? I mean, who do those nutballs think they are, saying that Windows isn’t the fine piece of quality that you thought it was when you put all your hard-earned money into it!?! Really! I mean those linux guys are just freaks, right? They really don’t have anything better than you do with your Windows desktop, right? I mean, come on, every computer system crashes at least once a week, right? Twice Read more…


php oracle database class

PHP stuff!! Check out this php Oracle8 class. It makes connecting to, and using php3/4 with an Oracle8 database just that much easier… including a completely dynamic SQL function call that allows binding of host-variables that are determined at run-time!! Way sweet! To use, just do: include “path/to/dbconn.inc”; The methods are documented at the top of the file. Many thanks to my good buddy Shawn Andrews for his help in developing this little gem. =:)


timing is everything

Finally had a chance to look at things. Well, a little time. But not enough time to actually do anything about it. Which stinks. Thought I’d try to redo the site, using something from oswd, and I pulled down several templates, but again, don’t have enough time to actually do anything about it. Bummy. Maybe next month. =:/