Category: Life in General

I got asked, via e-mail, today how I went from a retail pharmacy store manager to systems architect and it was such a good brain dumping that I figured I’d blog it too. =:) Here, then, is a brief overview of how I got from .A->.B. met the woman I knew I wanted to marry at Taco Bell. realized I couldn’t support a family on Taco Bell wages, so started looking for work elsewhere as I was still trying to finish college. started working at a tiny little Thrifty Jr. in Rancho Bernardo, California with my amazing friend Brad Prosek, stocking shelves and scooping ice cream. went into shift manager training for Thrifty in Ocean Beach, CA. got promoted to Read more…

I know it’s stealing Firefox3’s thunder, but Opera 9.5 was just released and it is REALLY well done. I have always been amazed at how blazing fast it is and this release continues in that vein. However… Is it just me or does the Gmail “move to trash” / “delete” shortcut (shift+3 or “#”) TOTALLY not stinking work in Opera???? I am just blown away by this. I am trying to not let it irritate me to the point of switching back to Firefox (I mean, there are other things that will probably do it (see below)), but it is increasingly frustrating. When editing a wordpress post, if you hit “Enter” in the Visual editor, it pre-pends a newline?? Um, Read more…

I don’t think I truly know what the words “vacation” or “relax” mean. Seriously. We’re visiting friends right now and I’ve taken the week off, conceivably to “relax”, or have a vacation. But I don’t know if I’d be able to relax if my life depended on it. When I’ve not been running around town with my little brood, or busily doing “fun” stuff, I’ve been trying to get caught up on my work e-mail, personal e-mail, and GSOC project, among other busy-work. Not exactly relaxing fare. I’ve recently realized that this state is not necessarily a good one to exist in, and have become increasingly aware of an absence of rest, peace, and tranquility. So, in an attempt to Read more…

I switched from SUSE 10.3 to Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) just this evening. It’s always good to get a feel for how the various distros are doing. Anyway, it took me a bit of digging to figure out how to get the artwiz fonts (smoothansi, in particular) to work as my konsole font. Thanks to this article for the help! Couple of notes: Ubuntu Hardy doesn’t ship xfonts-artwiz anymore, apparently. Download them from this sourceforge project. The trick is to tell fontconfig to use bitmapped fonts by running sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config.

I had THE most frustrating day yesterday. After a hellish night of not sleeping (darned cold!!), I wake up to find that my internet connection is totally borked. Looked at the router’s status page and it can’t get a DHCP address from my lovely ISP, Charter.net. Spent an hour on the phone with Charter’s completely unhelpful people. The guy actually said “gee, it’s kind of funny that you’re calling in with a Linksys router that isn’t able to get an IP address today–we’ve had a lot of Linksys router users call us today and tell us that.” I asked him if he didn’t think that that might be an indication of a problem in Charter’s setup and that it might Read more…

Oh HECK yes!!! I am SO buying this the split-second it comes out!!! Here’s an awesome review to boot!

I’ve been using Firefox 3, beta5 for a while now and am very much liking it. It’s crashed a fair bit, but that’s understandable being that it’s only a beta5. One thing that has bothered me, though, was that quite a few of my must-have extensions aren’t released for FF3 yet. TinyURL Creator, for one, is notably absent. Well, thanks to this page, I found a really simple workaround to enable (possibly dangerous and a bad idea to do) your old extensions in FF3: All I had to do was to create a “extensions.checkCompatibility” boolean field in the Firefox about:config and set it to false. As you can guess, this disables the compatibility check for the extensions, and all the Read more…

KDE3, KDE4, Plasma, Twinview == Not Good Originally uploaded by vanRijn Dear Lazyweb, This frustrates me and makes me all kinds of sad… For some reason, whenever I start my normal KDE3 session, plasma and KDE4 insists on starting up as well. So I get KDE3’s kicker and KDE4’s plasma stacked, which is less than fun and not quite useful. Also, I can’t get plasma/kwin4/kde4 to play nicely with twinview. I have an external monitor that runs @1280×960 and my laptop screen that runs @1280×800. I think it’s confusing plasma, and it looks like this. =:( Anyone know why or how to make it better?

I’ve never had an eye exam before today, but I am a HUGE fan of Brian Regan and absolutely LOVE his skit about going to the eye doctor. It is totally hilarious! What I was not prepared for, however, was how accurate his observations were! I thought that he must have some nutty eye doctor, but he was right on, which made it even worse for me, as I was sitting in the eye exam chair, trying way too hard not to laugh. If you’ve never seen Brian’s eye doctor skit, you totally owe it to yourself to watch it. NOW! Oh, and as an added bonus to the thoroughly entertaining morning, I found out that I have pretty durned Read more…