A Long Way From Anything

Apparently, now you can get your doctor in trouble for telling you that you're obese when you're obese. Via the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Stolen from Lady Larken:

Pat Robertson recently said a prayer on the 700 Club asking God to "free up" a few more seats on the Supreme Court. I'm sorry, but on a court where you can only leave by death or by retiring, isn't this a little insane? Asking God to kill off some people just so your political views can be enforced seems to kind of contradict the whole "Love and Forgiveness" angle of the New Testament to me...

Or, as they list it on their website, please "Pray that additional vacancies occur within the Supreme Court."

Gives new meaning to "Kill them all and let God sort them out," don't it?

Being as I am a fan of Southpark, I thought it would be interesting to use Gina M. Häussge's Southpark Studio 2 to create some characters:

Me:


My brother, or, as some know him, Stick In Your Eye:


Lastly, my good buddy S from Ma Vie En Prose:


It's interesting that both my brother and myself have facial hair. I remember an interesting time when we were driving cross country and stopped for some chow in a middle-of-nowhere town somewhere in the vast nothingness that is Wyoming. Really, this little place was hours from anything. We're speaking German to eachother as we go in, order, and sit down. The waitress comes to deliver our food and looks at us: both with facial hair, speaking some strange language and asks "Are you guys Russian?" Whoa-boy...

Well, I have to say I'm impressed with my unemployed self! My Mp3 Server has come along better than I expected. I got an email asking me to explain how I did it, so here's a little bit about how it works:

First of all, let me point out that the system I'm using as the server is OLD. it's based on an AMD K6 CPU (about 500Mhz) motherboard that I've shoehorned a little over half a gig of RAM onto. In fact, this system is so old that it still even has ISA slots on it (you can also see my WiFi NIC in the photo)! So, having my ancient system (that just barely runs Win 2K and Winamp), I proceeded to slap in two hard-drives (One 2Gig for the OS and a 40Gig for Mp3s) that provide me with the room for 38 days of music. Currently, only 5.5 Gig is used up (or, five and one quarter days of continual playing).


So, after scraping together all of my parts, I took the case outside and painted it black. Now, it might pass for an audio component in a dark alleyway. Then, I took the Infrared Receiver I had soldered together (thank God for Mr. Iverson's electronics class in Highschool!) and attached it in one of the empty drive bays. Then I simply drilled a hole in a bay cover and glued some exposed color negative film over the hole to block non-IR light (it has to be really exposed - black).




So, now it's time to hook everything up. So I grabbed a Y-adapter (1x3.5mm to 2xRCA) and plug it into my A/V Receiver. Then, I installed a little Winamp plugin called SnowCrash (I had to do a little XML hacking to make it work properly). Once I did that, I got this:


So, if you look closely, you'll see that not only can I view the player from any computer, I can also control all of the functions (play, pause, etc...). I also get detailed song information that updates every 1 or 2 seconds. I can load playlists, control the volume, etc... Pretty much complete functionality.

Pretty neat, huh?

Hopefully this hasn't bored my regular readers too much. ;)

I've been good for the past few years...no new tattoos. Well, for a while now I've been starting to think that maybe getting yet another piece done would be a good idea. So, I've started sketching a few designs (yes, I design all of my own work). So far, I'm thinking of what's called a Saint Matthew's Spiral (see an example in a ring here - the originating website here) as an anklet. As a few of you know, just because I've decided to get something like this doesn't mean it will happen anytime soon. I'm notorious for taking up to a year or more to design a new tattoo. Anyway, for now I'm just thinking about it.

Something that I've been thinking is needed for a long time: When Tush Comes to Dove (Salon.com).

Well, it's now official. I have no job. Yesterday I was laid off from my job shortly after coming in. It's what's called a "no-fault" job-loss (meaning I can apply for unemployment if I want), but that really doesn't make it any better. I've never lost a job before in my life, so it was a bit upsetting.

So, after hearing this, I went home and spent the day laying around, working on my Mp3 server, and playing guitar (things which help me relax). However, I remained angry for most of the day (and most of today as well) being as this is the company that I put in 50+ (sometimes ranging up to 70) hours a week in for the two months I've been employed. So, betrayal is on my mind right now.

The girlfriend took me out to Puleo's try to cheer me up. It didn't help too much, but it did help take my mind off things.

Right now I'm working on my resume and reading up on .NET to prepare for Tech. Interviews. Wheee.... I hope all of you are having better weeks than me!

I would like to first of all point out the following:



In the spirit of that, I'm going to regale all of you with a little project I have been working on. You see, most of my music these days is on MP3. I got a little tired of having to play said music from my crappy computer speakers (can't hear it around the apartment). So I decided to do something about it. I'm building an MP3 server. Since I already run a Wi-Fi network in my house, I'm simply building another box from components I have laying around gathering dust. Once I'm done with that (almost there), I'm hooking up and infrared receiver I built (will be done later on today) that mounts in one of the drive bays of the server (using WinLIRC). Then I'm simply going to paint the thing black and slide it into my entertainment center like it's an audio component.

I'll be able to control the server over the network or via remote control. Neat, huh?

Oh, and another neat thing? The video card I have for it has a TV output, so if I need to work directly on the server, I simply switch video inputs on my TV. Cool, huh?

Let's see, a good compromise between thirty billion and four hundred billion dollars is two hundred and eighty six billion, right? Man, if I balanced my checkbook the way the government does, I'd be in jail or on the street by now.

Oh, and I'm sure that Alaska really needs all that money. And the Ronald Regan Parkway in California really needs millions of dollars for "beautification." Because the money couldn't be better spent improving LA's horrible traffice problems. No, really.

Well, I have lost my job. The company I am working for terminated their development team to "refocus efforts in a more productive and lucrative field." Meaning that the idiot of an owner doesn't know how to use Quicken so the company's about out of money.

The picture looks grim, no? Well, don't be too concerned. For the time being I am still working with same company, just as a technician. So all day long I fix computers (the salary is the same). I'm planning on getting another programming job here in the next month or so.

Potentially disastrous, narrowly averted, and currently disgruntled. Yep, that's me. But it will get better.