-- Pics from my sis visiting!

My eldest brother, Ed, with his daughters, Lauren and Heather.

My younger sister, Sara, with Heather and Lauren.

Lauren's closeup.

Young Heather took these pictures of Sara and Lauren. ( I think she's better then I am at this. :)

Sara DOES in fact have a husband, but I failed to take any good pictures of him. :/

-- And
These are the computers that we entertained ourselves with at Joe's house last week at that LAN party.

-- *Grumble* One of my favorite Rush lines doesn't really exist. :(

I've always heard:

Leave out the fiction,
"The fact is" is richer,
Love may be won by persistence.

And apparently it's really this:

Leave out the fiction,
The fact is, this friction
Will only be won by persistence.

The line following it only helped my version. "Couragous convictions, Will drag the dream to existence."

---

Vital Signs
-Rush

Unstable condition,
A symptom of life,
Of mental and environmental change.
Atmosphereic disturbance,
The feverish flux
Of human interface and interchange.
The impulse is pure;
Sometimes our circuits get shorted
By external interference.
Signals get crossed
And the balance distorted
By internal incoherence.

A tired mind become a shape shifter,
Everybody need a mood lifter,
Everybody need reverse polarity.
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form.
Everybody got to elevate from the norm.

An ounce of perception,
A pound of obscure.
Process information at half speed.
Pause, rewind, replay,
Warm memory chip,
Random sample, hold the one you need.

Leave out the fiction,
The fact is, this friction
Will only be won by persistence.
Leave out conditions,
Courageous convictions
Will drag the dream into existence.

A tired mind become a shape shifter,
Everybody need a soft filter,
Everybody need reverse polarity.
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form.
Everybody got to elevate from the norm...

-- DaVinci Times.org is a job posting site for upstate New York.

-- I counted yesterday and I made or helped make 40 pieces of software at my last job. Out of 91 pieces in the log, 30 were just me and half of those were major products. :)

-- For purposes of rumor control and to limit the "telephone effect" Jenny made a website about our pending wedding. So far it just says that we have no definite plans yet.

-- And of course, I'm still unemployed as you may have noticed from the lack of all caps and lots of smilies.

-- Re-iterating, I like LindowsOS (with the yearly subscription to their software download and installation system.) and normal Linux installation is BAD!!!

Not just kinda bad, but REALLY, REALLY BAD.

I'm still trying to contribute to the GAIM project and I'm still wrestling with getting the prerequisites running. *sigh*

-- My little sister is coming to the area for a super fast visit mostly revolving around a funeral. Still I'll be happy to say hi and give her and her husband a hug. I'll see if I can get some pictures for you far away folk. :)

-- For my LAN gaming friends, I have a Games page with some tips, fixes and instructions.

-- Yesterday I got to play Natural Selection on a german serer. It's hugely more challenging to play when all the communications you need are in a language that you kind of know. It was lot of fun though.

-- I've been trying patiently to get some help with making GTK which I'm guessing is a "Graphics Tool Kit" for linux. I've posted on the gtk website and on a linux development newsgroup and had no response at all from either of them. *grumble*

A "make" is one of the steps to installing things in Linux/Unix. You type "make" into the command prompt (from the right directory) and a program called make looks in a file called Makefile and does the work listed there. And you can mostly ignore the reams output as long as you don't get error messages.

I'm trying to install GTK as a step in doing a make on GAIM the AOL Instant Messenger type program for Linux. After I can get that to compile, then I can attempt to change the source code around and contribute to that project. (I'd like GAIM to behave appropriately in the middle of the night. ie, don't beep unless it's important.)

-- Joe is hosting a lan party today. He managed to get a setup that allows us all on the net at the same time! Schweet!

-- Does anyone else think that "incumbent" is the wrong title for this job posting? I always thought that an incumbent was the person who already had the job.

-- I updated my Links page. New menu bar and anchors to let you jump to whatever section you want (comics). Also added the job search websites that I know about.

A demonstration for Auto/Mate a company in the area which makes computer systems for use by car dealerships.

Automate Systems Overview

Computer Hardware

Computer Software

Dealers Using Auto/Mate

Download Overview Manual

Contact Us

Just a different way to draw the menu bar that they use.

-- AHHH state taxes! Must finish taxes today!

-- It's been a wonderful day in Albany.

-- Apparently Monster.com charges $305 to post a job on their site for 60 days.

-- New job sites of the day:
CapitalRegionHelpWanted.com and HudsonHalleyHelpWanted.com

-- The Hacker's Diet basically says that fat is added when Incoming Calories > Burned Calories. Oh and BTW, water obfuscates everything when you step on the scale. (If you're trying to lose 2 pounds of weight in a week and you consume 11 pounds of water a day, any gain or lose that happens is easily hidden by having a different amount of water in your system.)

-- Take a look at this Glider Simulation game. The graphics are really simple, but you control a glider over a 100km course. You have to find the updrafts and spiral up them to gain altitude. It's really addicting and fun for all ages.

Read some of the instructions. You need to know where to look for thermals. They may not be there, but under the clouds is a great place to look. Oh yeah, follow the squiggly "road" line. It's a pain when the cloud you need is just a little too far off the map. I managed 76 km.

-- I've apparently completely lost my tolerence for caffiene. Had 4 cups of soda with dinner and was up till 6am.

-- Whitespace has been the part of the program that the computer should ignore. Normally,

do this

and

      do
      this

Mean the same thing in a program. Some sick puppy has now invented that language "Whitespace", where the ONLY thing the computer looks at are the tabs, spaces and "newlines" (enter key presses). Here's an example of the code. You may find it slightly easier to read if you highlight the whole page with your mouse.

-- While Jenny wasn't smiling like a maniac, she installed a new power supply in her computer. I think her's leaked some magic smoke during that last ice storm. NewEgg.com hooked us up for pretty cheap and they covered shipping. Weeee.

-- Jennifer Beard has agreed to become my wife!

Currently we plan on waiting until I am gainfully employed again. The ring will have to unfortunately wait until then as well.

-- My car is still in the shop and apparently will stay there until tommorrow or Friday.

Or, they can call up and tell me it's ready today. (Which they did.) Two thousand dollars later I've got new head gaskets (Subaru has two heads I think, it's a boxer style engine), thermostat, water pump and any other gasket they could lay hands on.

-- I found AutomationTechies.com yesterday. Looks like they specialize in my type of work in their job postings.

-- From my mom:
GotLaughs.com has "Got Big Bombs" a funny Sadam animation.
FoxNews.com has a photo essay on that statue that US troops helped some Iraqis pull down.

-- For all you folks who no longer live in New York, here's what we got yesterday and today.

This second picture is of the cleanup of the large branch that fell where Jenny's car had been parked. Hooray for being out running errands!

-- If I got depressed like any rational person does, I would be now.

My car is getting $1000 to $2000 worth of work done

I'm not employed

Jenny's brother is shipping out to Kuwait early

My little sister had to visit the hospital. She's home again aparently.

-- How birds mate you know you're curious too

-- We watched "Life Is Beautiful" last night. I really enjoy that movie and Jenny liked it as well. In case you don't know, it's a story of a charming, Italian man before, during and after he goes to a concentration camp with his family.

The DVD has an English track, but I really love the sound of Italian, so I recommend that. The word for princess is just great.

-- Someone on Ebay is selling a Star Trek apartment. Not worth 2 million, but the pics are neat.

-- Gnome Darts
It's not in English, but : D
So, you pick up a gnome, drag it to the dart board. Then you have to actually throw the gnome at the dart board with an upward mouse movement. Rope and booze are available for those gnomes that are less then willing.

-- Al Jazeera is an Arabic news source. Mysteriously, the English version of their website has been hacked down. You can still click through the story links and look at the pictures.

I also can't seem to find a free translator from Arabic to English anymore. :(

-- UseIt.com is a straightforward website about usability, mostly for computers and the web.

-- Happy April