MessyMissy's Place » Life

I have a new addiction…

Messy — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:56:07 +0000

Not surprising I know, but I do. I’m not great at video games, but I’m not the worst either. I play my Wii and I like puzzle games… what surprises me is my fascination with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I played The Call of Duty series as a first person shooter single player mode for COD 2 and 3. I played the Single player mode for Modern Warfare 1 and got COD 5 for the Pacific Theater, but I just couldn’t get into that one… I guess I was WWII’d out. I went back to the original Modern Warfare and made my first foray into multi-player mode. I got addicted to them and I got pretty good. I even “prestiged” once to see what that was all about. Yeah, that was about losing all my weaponry and having to earn it back, which I do have to admit was kind of fun.

When Modern Warfare 2 came out I made sure I had pre-ordered a copy for the hubby, but I found myself jonesing. I begged and pleaded until I got my own copy. I think so far I’ve only made it through about half the Single Player mode, but I’m already getting close to prestiging in this version. The maps are great and varied, though like in the last game I do have my favorites and I’m still trying to decide on which load-outs I like better. The one thing I wish I could do though, is bring in the maps from the original and play them too.

I’m still getting use to the throwing knife and the “stickies”, but they do add a nice dimension to the play. I’ll just have to keep working on it and get better as time goes on. See you online!

Rawr!

Happy Winter Solstice!

Messy — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:57:09 +0000

Today is the day! Days start getting longer from here! That means spring is on the way! Wooooooooooo! That also means just a few more months until I can ride my motorcycle again too!

Now is the time to start looking at those seed catalogs! Start planning for your spring garden…

New photos

Messy — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:26:20 +0000

added some new pictures to the gallery…

More campus graffiti
Campus in the Spring
Trip to RSA in San Francisco
and something else, but I don’t remember what

soooooo… about that whole suspend thing…

Messy — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:20:44 +0000

I put my NetBook in suspend mode yesterday evening so I could take it home and finish some work on compiling. Yeah now I remember why graphical logins suck fanny.

The graphical login is broken and just keeps reloading and reloading and reloading and reloading… well you get the idea.

Needless to say, I’m reformatting again, because I shouldn’t have to deal with it being broken and I don’t want to spend the time trying to figure out what happened and how to fix it.

Living in a linux desktop

Messy — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:04:01 +0000

So I’m getting along fairly well with my Netbook and while I understand that I’m not going to find ready made binaries and happy little plugins for everything I would like. I’m also remembering what a pain some things can be when installing from source.

My latest adventure has been installing Pidgin’s OTR plugin. I thought this would be an easy thing to ese me back into the the realm. So… yeah, ummmmm… it still isn’t installed and I decided to reformat my netbook. I’m still fairly new to “apt”, which by the way is a really nice package manager, and I installed quite a few things that just, well… I didn’t need them and I hate haveing all these extraneous bits lying around. So since it doesn’t take that long I reformatted the netbook and started over again.

This time instead of using apt-get for some of the stuff I just went to the site and got the source direct. I found that I didn’t have 2 packages I needed when I tried to compile GLib, pkg-config and . I did apt-get them. Then I tried to compile GTK+…. yeah…. now I remember why I don’t like dependencies.

So pixman begat cairo, which begat a whole butt-load of other crap…. I might get the plugin installed by next Tuesday. /me sighs

Linux, my NetBook and me

Messy — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:45:55 +0000

I’m at an impass. I’m pleased with the way my NetBook is working with OpenGEU an yet I’m frustrated at the same time. This is the first time in a VERY VERY long time that I’ve used Linux for a desktop. It’s really come a long way since then and it’s very usable. The problem is quite a few of the programs that I’m used to having available to me on windows and the mac just aren’t here. I don’t think I’ll really miss them since there are alternatives, but it’s the fact that I can’t use their expanded functionality that bugs me. For instance if I wanted to use the video chat in gmail, I can’t. There isn’t code available for that functionality. There isn’t a Y!Chat client at all, you have to go through the web interface which isn’t that bad, but again it doesn’t have all the functionality of the client. I know there is Pidgin for all the chat things and all that and I don’t mind it, in fact I rather like it. It still bothers me that I feel like a second class computer user when it comes to chat. I love that I have the terminal and all the functionality that my servers have on the little guy, but it’s just the little things that bug me. I’ll live with it for at least another month and see what happens. I’m sure it’ll grow on me… if it doesn’t, there is always nLite.

NetBooks and Operating Systems

Messy — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:58:25 +0000

I was a copy-cat a few months ago and bought a NetBook. I got the ASUS EeePC 901. it has a solid state hard drive and it’s about the size of a large paperback. I love it and it worked great for me when I went to a SANS training at the RSA Conference in San Francisco and didn’t want my Mac anywhere near those looney “security” people.

when it first came it had the Xandros OS on it from ASUS. while it was nice and pretty, it just didn’t do it for me. Mainly I think because it didn’t have a terminal. Who has ever heard of a Linux flavor without a terminal! Anyway I reformatted it with Windows XP and put office on it for RSA. Everything worked well and I was pleased. Then I ran out of room trying to update office. I found out when I reformatted the lil’guy that there isn’t one 20GB SSD drive, but 2. One is 4GB and the other is 16GB. The 4GB chip being faster I had decided to install the OS to it and run some tools that modified my profile path and the path to where the OS installs programs by default. Really everything was wonderful, except not being able to update office! Then I tried to get the webcam to work. That was a no-go. I tried everything, well except for the obvious, which didn’t occur to me until after I reformatted with Linux for the fourth or fifth time. Apparently the webcam is disabled in the BIOS by default for some off the wall reason.

I fixed that and then decided I might as well explore the linux variants that exist for the NetBook crowd. There are quite a few. There are 4 that tried out: OpenGEU, Mandriva, EasyPeasy and Moblin. I had problems with all of them to one extent or another.

I settled with Moblin for now, but in this post I just found out that I can’t cut and paste with keyboard shortcuts. While that isn’t a deal breaker for this particular distro, it is going to be rather frustrating ince I use keyboard shortcuts quite a bit. I’ll have to investigate the little section called “Pasteboard” which looks to be the way I have to copy and paste. That is not exciting. (I messed up and touched the trackpad and moved my cursor, and since I still don’t know how to type, was still typing away before I noticed the issue. I tried the pasteboard and it copied the text to it, but then there isn’t a way to get it out of there and where I need it. I’m really going to be annoyed it there isnt something as fundamental as cut, copy and paste in this distro.)

Another negative for Moblin was the install. If you’re going to give me the option to install it the a partition that I want to and put the bootloader where I want. That part better damn well work, which obvously since I’m writing this didn’t. There were partition table errors coming out my ears. No matter how I tried to slice up the partitions between the drives it just wasn’t having any of it. I like the overall theory of Moblin, which to me makes the NetBook a “Social Networking Platform” with a terminal.

Easy Peasy and Mandriva were just meh.

I’ve ended up rith now with OpenGEU which is based off enlightenment. I like it so far… we’ll see how it goes.

well doesn’t that just figure…

Messy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:00:32 +0000

I grabbed my rollerblades out of the closet this morning, so that I could blade the river trail after work today. As I went to toss them onto the truck seat a piece of plastic fell to the ground. I didn’t think much of it, they’re old blades and I figured that I could just stick the piece back on wherever it had come off. Well that was not to be. the entire heel piece was apparently shattered somehow while they were in the closet. No rolling around for me. I guess I have to either go get some new ones or start running around. Now I’m sad.

Have you ever…

Messy — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:02:37 +0000

Really craved something and then when you did get it or something similar and you really weren’t satisfied. Then it goes into the “what the hell” mode where you’re really annoyed cause that thing just didn’t taste, smell, look… whatever.

Yeah, that just happened.

Changing ones overall diet

Messy — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:01:02 +0000

So I decided to change over to a slightly different diet, well ok I guess it was a rather drastic change. I went from eating meat to pretty much not eating meat. I won’t say I’m a vegetarian, because that wouldn’t be true either. I like sushi too much to really want to give it up and Cheese is my number one favorite right along with potatoes. Anyway… I’ve found that my change to a breakfast of rice, roasted seaweed and miso soup makes for an interesting week. My body is still trying to adjust to the change and it isn’t being nice about it. I think perhaps if one is going to change ones diet, a more gradual approach would be best. Ah well, we live and we learn.