The first thing to know is that the size of the pot matters a lot. I got the most basic pot which happened to be five quarts. That’s actually a really big pot. You can put a whole chicken in that thing. Obviously that’s a good thing if you want to make a big meal. The problem is that you have to make a big meal. If you try to cook a smaller recipe in a big pot, it will just come out dry and burnt. Make sure you get recipes that specify the size of the pot to use. If your pot isn’t mostly or completely full of ingredients before you turn it on, don’t expect the recipe to turn out well. If you plan to cook for both small and large groups of people, you really need two different sized pots.

Also, not all pots are created equal. I got the most basic pot just to start out with. The only settings it has are low, high, and warm. Other pots have fancy features such as timers which will automatically turn the pot on and off even while unattended. Some pots also have multiple compartments, so you can cook multiple dishes simultaneously. I like to start with basics, and only go get the fancy features when I am more confident in my abilities. You may not feel the same way, so research the features carefully.

Pots don’t just differ in features, though. Some pots use much cheaper heating elements and mecahnisms than others. Some only heat from the bottom, while others also heat from the sides. Some pots are very good about heating at different temperatures, where on others (like mine) the different between low and high is neglibible. You would be surprised at the number of pots that ruin perfectly good recipes simly because the low setting is too hot. Avoid those pots at all costs.

Another thing with crock pots is you have to carefully consider the cooking times. A recipe might call for 4-5 hours on low 2-3 or hours on high. If you plan to cook on low, that means you have to turn the pot on 4-5 hours before you plan to eat. If you aren’t home 4-5 hours before dinner time, that recipe isn’t going to work out. Also, if your dinner times vary based on what happens during your day, then you might not get home in time for the meal. Even worse, you might get home too early, and suffer in hunger until the food is ready.

Along those same lines, most recipes require additional work beyond just tossing raw ingredients in the pot and turning it on. Many of them require browning of meats or cooking of vegetables before putting them in the pot. Other recipes may require adding additional ingredients a few hours into the cooking process. If you don’t have a lot of time in the morning, or if you plan to be gone all day, these recipes aren’t going to cut it. You will often have to spend time preparing ingredients the night before, thus not really saving the dinner cooking time.

One last thing to note is that the crock pot can be a little messy. While it cooks, it will give off heat, so don’t put it near anything that shouldn’t be warmed up. With almost any recipe you will probably have water spitting out from under the lid during cooking. This is supposed to happen, but you don’t want it making a mess. Lastly, many recipes will leave burnt residue on the inside of your pot. I suggest cleaning it out quickly. If you let it hang around, it will be much more difficult to remove. A Brillo pad is an excellent way to clean the crock pot.

I’ve only been using a crock pot for a few months, so I’m sure I’ve still got a long way to go before becoming a crock master. I just want to share what I have learned, so maybe someone else won’t have to repeat my mistakes.

Regardless, I upgraded WordPress, and changed the theme. I also switched it over to Google Analytics, as I am doing with all my sites. Being unemployed for the moment, I have time to do maintenance tasks like this. WordPress had failed me for purposes of podcasting, which is why frontrowcrew.com is a custom site built on Django. But the newest version of WordPress very much impressed me as a publishing platform. I was inspired to use it again.

But before I started writing more blog posts, I decided to take a trip back and re-categorize and tag all the existing blog posts. This resulted in the blog being nice and clean, but it also gave me a new perspective. By looking through all of my old posts, I learned a great deal about blogs and myself.

The first thing I noticed is how out of place so many of the posts are. Some of the posts that were new seemed as if they were old, and some old ones seemed as if they were new. I got MechWarrior 2 to work in Linux in 2004. That was five years ago. I wrote an article about figuring out Twitter almost a year ago. Has it really been that long? My perception of time and events doesn’t really match reality, and looking back on a blog has helped reset my outlook.

Also, I’m really shocked at how ahead of the curve I am. I always sort of felt that I’m one step behind the game. I thought of the idea to have Slashdot with voting, but Digg made it first. I posted an “audio blog” in 2004, but podcasting beat me by a hair. What I completely forgot about, before reading the blog, was a small project I made once called “glues”. It parsed instant message log files for URLs, and created an RSS feed out of them, or posted them to del.icio.us automatically. That’s entering Twitter territory a little bit there.

Another thing that amazed me was what topics I discussed the most. I was very surprised by how many meta-posts I made, that is to say blog posts about the blog itself. There’s really no point in having them at all unless readership is very large. Also amazing was how many posts I made about Linux, distros, etc. and how many of the things discussed are now non-issues. Yet, many things like audio support in Linux are still just as much a problem now as they were then. 

Even if you already express yourself in other ways, I recommend having a blog. Even with the very small number of posts I have made, looking back at it has been extremely valuable. I have added a “blog this” button to my browser, and I hope to use this space more often to express any ideas I have which are bigger than 140 characters. Even if nobody is reading, bein able to have this experience again five years from now is valuable enough to be worth the investment.

My plan was to post here using the Digg blog feature instead of posting comments on Digg. Guess what? There hasn’t been a single story on Digg that has solicited more than a few sentences of response from me. Not one story on Digg all week has provoked anything more than a very short response from me.

My plan is still the same. I’m still going to blog anything if I see it. There just hasn’t been anything worthwhile to write about.

So I figure there is one thing I can do to pass a lot of time on the computer at work. That thing, if you haven’t guessed, is to start blogging again. The intarwebs favorite pastime. I just have to be careful to avoid being redundant with GeekNights. I slowed blogging down to nothing because I felt it was draining my mental energies from the show. I have to do this in such a way that blogging and podcasting do not take away from each other, but add.

To get some traffic, and some stuff to blog about initially, I’m going to use the Digg blogging feature. All this week, I’m going to try it. Whenever I would normally post a comment on Digg, I will instead click the blog button. Let’s see how this goes.

I have no problem if someone asks me for a professional opinion of what type of hardware I would purchase under specific circumstances. I am fine with someone asking me if I think it is worth their time to watch every episode of an anime, or if they should just watch the compilation movies. Those are the types of questions that I am more than happy to answer. If someone asks about the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R, that’s not cool. I have a big problem if someone asks me what Linux is. Asking what video games are coming out soon for the Nintendo DS is not cool. These are the types of questions that make me sad, but why do I get upset at the latter and not at the former?

The first type of question is something that requires analysis of multiple factors. Few people have the problem solving or risk analysis skills to make an informed decision. When a problem requires a complete understanding of a larger body of knowledge, then I have no problem giving my knowledgeable bodies a workout. In fact, I am eager to provide those services because I believe that it helps me in some small way when other humans make better decisions.

The second type of question is simply a request for data. That data is not secret, and it is not hard to come by. I may or may not have that data stored in my fleshy memory banks, but hether I do or not does not matter. The fact is that the information is publicly available and distributed widely. If some guy shouts into a megaphone that the show starts at five o’clock, ask me a minute later what time the show starts, and I will hit you upside the head.

The Internet is a worldwide megaphone. Millions of people are constantly shouting into it while simultaneously listening to everything that comes out of it. If you want to know who directed a movie, IMDB has the answer. If you want to know the capital of a country in Africa, Wikipedia has the answer. Want to know how many episodes there are of that anime you just saw? Anime News Network Encyclopedia has the answer. And of course, no matter what your problem, Google has the answer 99% of the time. If you ask me a question that is easily answered by any of these sources, it makes me want to hit you upside the head.

I am about to let you all in on a secret. I actually don’t know much. I’m a smart guy, at least I think I am, and I know that I am more knowledgeable about certain things than most other people on the planet. However, most of the time people ask me questions on the web, I just look the answers up. I appear to be much more well-informed on the web than I really am because I have the instinct to look up the answers to any question I encounter. The fact is that I don’t have more information in my brain than idiot savants do. I mostly know just one thing. That one thing is how to use a search engine efficiently. If you need help learning to use a search engine, I will be happy to oblige. If you want me to do the searching for you, suck it.

I like to help people a lot. It is very fun and rewarding for me, and I hope it is equally rewarding for the people I help. When someone asks me for help I want to be nice to them. If someone asks me for something, they obviously think highly of me, and I am not interested in changing that. However, sometimes I just have to give you the big ol’ RTFM. I have so little free time and so many things on my plate, there is just no room for doing simple research for other people. Sorry, but you’re going to have to do something for yourself. No, don’t give me that business about being too lazy. Writing me an e-mail requires a lot less effort than using a search engine. From now on whenever someone asks me this type of question, I’m not going to send them the answer. I’m going to send them the search results.

I am in the business of teaching people to fish. If you depend on me to do the fishing for you, you’re probably going to starve. The next time you want to know something, have the common courtesy to at least ask Google before you ask me. Most of the time that’s all I would have done for you anyway.

When I was a kid, I could never get enough entertainment. I had lots of free time, I had very little money and the Internet was not what it is today. All my video games were beaten promptly. Any time I got a book, toy, movie or game I would immediately start consuming it. I remember putting together small LEGO sets in the car on the way home from Toys ‘R’ Us. I was not a spoiled or rich child who could go buy new toys every week, so the entertainment media I already possessed was consumed multiple times. Those were good days.

So how did I get from there to here? Well, having a full-time job certainly decreased the amount of free time I have available. I used to be able to watch an anime episode or two between classes, not now. Having the money from a full-time job has increased the amount of money I have with which to acquire entertainment. I went from buying a few meager comics once in awhile to getting a box full of trade paperbacks monthly. I also stopped watching TV when I started college, and that freed up a lot of time for other pursuits. However, now we’ve got digital anime fansubs, bittorrent, Netflix, YouTube and Google Video more than making up for the lack of content from ignoring television. Oh yeah, podcasts got thrown in the mix as well.

So, what is so bad about this situation? I should be happy that I will never want for entertainment media. Let me tell you that I am, and I do not take my situation for granted. Although, it is not all sunshine and roses. The major issue is that the mere existence of the entertainment glut has an opportunity cost beyond merely the time it takes to consume it. Due to the increased risk of consuming bad media, I have to spend lots of time selecting media to consume. If I select poorly, not only have I lost the time consuming media that was not worthwhile, but I lost the time I spent selecting it.

The next problem follows directly from this. As much as I dislike it, I am forced to judge books by the cover. I am forced to judge new anime series with a quick skimming of the first episode. I am forced to judge comics by the first few pages. Spending more time testing something to see if I might grow to like it is too risky an endeavor. I have to use a very selective filter on the enormous amount of content coming in. I’m certain that I am missing out on some great stuff, but that is preferable to risking wasting my time with something terrible.

Another consequence of having all this media is that I consume it much more rapidly. I used to read books slowly, watch movies carefully and play video games methodically. So now when I read books quickly I miss out on some things and do not get the full experience. I play video games without exploring every possible area. Also, many works simply fall outside of what I have time to do. Japanese style RPGs are simply out of the question because of the amount of time they require to play. MMORPGs are laughable.

Not only do I consume media quickly rather than absorbing every detail in its fullness, but I hardly ever revisit anything. As I said, I get boxes of comics in the mail every month. These comics are read once and put on the shelf. It’s cool because friends borrow it, but I have no chance to reread any of it. I can’t go back and play a beaten video game because a new video game always comes along and pushes it out of the way. With Netflix I just feel like its a waste getting a movie I’ve already seen. Music is just about the only thing I have time to repeat, but that is because I can listen to a song while doing something else like writing a blog post.

Oh yeah, blogging and podcasting. With all these new technologies making distribution and acquisition of content easier we also have a situation in which making content is easier. Making entertainment content is in itself a form of entertainment, perhaps it is the best kind of entertainment. But even with these new technologies, content creation takes an enormous amount of time and takes away from content consumption time.

The long tail is an idea that with democratization of media creation and distribution we will be able to get away from our homogeneous pop culture. Sure, the most popular music might have a million CDs sold, but the sales of all the less popular genres combined will be greater than the sales of the most popular music. This is really a poor and oversimplified summary, you should really read up on it.

Anyway, what does the long tail have to do with me having no free time? It means increased competition within the tail. In the days when the best sellers were the only option, I didn’t invest lots of time trying things out or hunting things down. I bought the one hit and consumed it again and again. Now because I am so much more discerning of what media I ingest, only the best of the best makes it through. Good art just doesn’t cut it anymore, it’s either a masterpiece or crap. So while a much broader range of genres and styles of content is reaching its audience, only the best in each category will make the cut.

You can see this happening already. There isn’t room for both Digg and Slashdot. There isn’t room for more than a few podcasts in each category. In times past the head of the snake was the only part that mattered. In the new wave, each segment of the snake’s tail will have its importance, but each segment will be dominated by a few players. It’s the old model within the new model. People with a broad range of interests skim off the top of everything leaving the soft underbelly still unexposed.

Are there solutions to this problem? Maybe, but nothing complete. We can definitely use technology and manpower help each other out. Meta conversations about media can serve as entertainment themselves while lubricating the decision making process. Changing jobs and lifestyles can free up some time to make a significant difference, but not enough to clear the problem entirely.

The only solution I can see is to narrow my horizon. If I were to concentrate just on video games or just on books and stop caring about other mediums, like I did with television, I would have an achievable goal. If I narrowed my horizon by genre, only caring bout science fiction or only about fantasy across all mediums, that would do the trick as well. Though, there is no way I will do this. There are many ways to narrow the scope of my interests to create a situation in which there is less of a mountain for me to ascend, but all of them are even far more prejudiced than judging books by the covers.

So what’s the conclusion of all this? As far as entertainment media are concerned, we are living in what appears to be a Utopia. Supply far exceeds demand. The rate of production is greater than the rate of consumption. It’s an infinite harvest of the highest quality. I personally perceive this bounty to be a dystopia in disguise. We will delight in eating the greatest new varieties of fruit from the greatest trees. Meanwhile, I fear that many more perfectly good, but less perfect, fruits will rot on the vine.

I first attempted to find a free program I could download to run this on my own web server. That doesn’t seem to exist in any good and usable form. So I tried to write my own. This proved to be more difficult than I first realized. Since nobody seemed to format their feeds in a standard way, it was turning out to be a daunting adventure in XML parsing.

So in the end I combined two different services to perform the task. The first service is FeedJumbler which does a serviceable job of combining feeds. My only complaint is that it destroys a great deal of the extra data in the feed items. The other service is, of course, FeedBurner. It does a good job of taking the jumbled feed and making it a feed that is useable. It also adds in my del.icio.us feed and my flickr feed without killing the extra data.

I hope one day soon I will be able to use FeedBurner for this entire operation. So many people want to combine many RSS feeds into one, but most services that perform this function are meant for people who read rss rather than those who publish it. Not only that, but so few of them actually parse all of the XML properly causing the inevitable loss of useful tags.

I know from coding a solution why this is. RSS sucks. From the user perspective it’s great because programs that automatically create RSS, like WordPress, and programs that read RSS, like Firefox, already exist and work great. From a developer’s perspective it is a nightmare. I was not able to find a single RSS library in existence that actually handles anything that might be in a feed. No matter what tags from whatever XML namespaces appear in a feed, it should not be ignored or removed. People obviously are pretty good at coding software that writes RSS which is chock-full of semantic web happiness, but nobody has written anything that can make use of all of it let alone just hold onto it. Every library took the RSS data and destroyed at least some of it to make it easier for developers to handle it programatically. Then they made it incredibly difficult to re-write a new RSS feed.

I’m obviously a big fan of the uses of RSS, but not until we have intelligent RSS handling libraries which can actually make use of the full potential of RSS will we see more new and exciting things like podcasting.

So when you put your contact information in a public directory and invite total strangers to call and/or message you, interesting things can result. To my dismay, I haven’t been contacted by any interesting people. It’s rather sad. You would think that with the ability to talk to anyone anywhere in the world that interesting people would form conference rooms and have interesting discussions. Nope, that’s not the case. All the random people who have contacted me seem to fall into two categories.

Category one is obvious. Spammers. I haven’t actually talked to any of these spammers, but I’m 100% sure that’s what they are. There simply cannot be that many girls on Skype named angelica#####. It is painfully obvious that these are sex bots selling porn or some other service. I don’t know why eBay/Skype doesn’t clean this up. AIM seems to have done a decent job of cleaning up SPIM. Are we now entering an era of SPOIP?

The second category is pretty strange. They are all young international people looking for something like a pen pal. The problem is that, unlike a pen pal, they are very difficult to talk to. They speak English less understandably than they write it. They insist on speaking English, even if I might know a little bit of their language (I took Spanish in high school). All in all, they are just impossible to communicate with.

Where are the nerds, geeks and hipsters having awesome phone conferences discussing the awesome things of the day? Why has Skype not become the IRC of voice? Maybe we need some sort of public list of Skype channels which people can create, browse, join and leave. That would be pretty badass, especially if you had all the IRC features of banning, kicking, etc. to keep out the SPOIP.

All in all, it’s fun to keep Skype in “Skype Me” mode, just to see what shows up. At a minimum it makes work slightly more intersting. At a maximum, it might just cause a great conversatio at some point. Obviously, my Skype name is Apreche. Call me if you’re bored.

The striped towel on top is a representative of the bath towels I had throughout all of high school. I got them to take to summer camp the year between middle school and high school. Their last real use was on my trip to Israel between high school and college. Nowadays we use those towels on the floor of the bathroom and not to dry our bodies. The two blue towels on the left are what I have used since freshman year of college. The three towels on the right are the brand new towels which arrived today.

Now, the first thing you need to know is that every solid colored towel pictured here is technically not a bath towel. They are technically classified as bath sheets. You might go into your local towel shoppe and see really ultra-big bath towels on sale for a decent price. And no doubt, they will be bigger than the default bath towels. But none of them come close to the size of the bath sheet. Bath sheet is the secret codeword for “towel that is actually large enough to dry an adult human being”. Here is a picture so you can see what I mean.

The striped one is a standard sized bath towel. It is what most people dry themselves with after a shower or bath. I’m no fatty, in fact I’m anti-obesity, but that towel is too fucking small for an adult human. I need at least two of them to dry myself adequately.

So? Buy awesome bath sheets, problem solved. Not so. The average price for a bath sheet ranges from $20 to $40 depending on quality, color and actual size. Many bath sheets are plenty long, but lack width. Make sure you’re getting something at least 34″ wide. The two blue ones were found by my mother. She got them at BJ’s on sale for a crazy low price. She was never able to find them at BJ’s again, and she regrets not buying more of them. Most stores don’t carry bath sheets at all. When you are lucky enough find them in a store the color selection is limited and the price is high.

Now you’re wondering where I got my new three awesome towels, aren’t you? You know I’m not the kind of person stupid enough to pay $120 for three towels. Three towels are not worth the same as four Nintendo DS games by any stretch of the imagination. Well, if you were paying attention to my del.icio.us links you would have noticed my link to domestications. My mom actually clued me into this site. They have bath sheets in a wide variety of colors for $8.88 each! Unbelievable. I immediately ordered three and my roommate ordered two.

If you are frustrated with the size and quality of your current bath towels I suggest you upgrade to some bath sheets. That way you can fully dry your body with just one large piece of cloth. If you are at least an averaged size adult human being I don’t see how you can not have towels of proper size. Have fun drying yourself everybody.

So even more surprising than his move to Microsoft was his recent departure. But he wasn’t even fired, he quit! When this story first broke there was lots of confusion and speculation as to the reason for his resignation. Many people including myself were waiting to hear a story about the bad things going on in Microsoft’s Linux laboratory.

But this was not the case. Daniel came out and said that the reason he left (and I paraphrase) was that he was not able to fully utilize all of his skills at his position at Microsoft. That’s a fairly boring and generic reason to quit for most people to hear. Whether it is true or not I do not know. But what I can tell you is that I feel the exact same way.

I don’t know if you’ve read my about page on this site, but I have an entire lifetime of technological skills at my disposal. I learned Logo in Kindergarten for crying out loud. Yet at my job right now I only use a very small subset of those skills. Not only that, but I’m not really learning anything new. I think this has been a large part of the reason why I am not 100% satisfied with my current employment situation.

Every day I go into work and I don’t really do much. I have a project to work on, but I’m waiting for the full specifications. I’ve got a few features to add or bugs to fix to existing projects, but if I really wanted I could do all of that in one day. I refrain from doing so simply to maintain something to do if I really wanted to. If I did them all I would literally have no work to do and no reason to leave my house.

Some days the only reason I get out of bed is because I might do this little bit of inane work I have yet to do. Daniel Robbins, I understand why you quit Microsoft. Hopefully by the time I finish the project I’m working on I will be able to find some more exciting work. More than money, more than fame I just want to do something fulfilling and challenging every day of my life. Maybe I should get off my ass and start a company despite my large debt.

Take note that this is the first car I have ever owned in my name. It is also the first brand new car I’ve ever had. It’s also the most awesome car I’ve ever had.

And what’s with people telling me that the car is nice and thinking it’s a complement? That’s a compliment to the Japanese designers and manufacturers, not to me. If you want to complement me say something like “You’re smart for making such a good purchasing decision.” Actually don’t say that because I don’t care.

Of course being the smart guy that I am, I won handily with a Nintendo entry.

Thanks to Doug for being cool and business innovation 2005 for having a cool contest. Can’t wait to read the book. I reccomend you all buy it.

I used to think that my cellphone camera was all I needed. I wasn’t a professional photographer, and image quality wasn’t my biggest concern. It wasn’t until I actually got a phone with a camera in it that I realized just how inadequate that camera was. I am very impressed and very pleased with just how great this camera is, I don’t know how I went without it. I’m learning stuff about digital cameras and photography I didn’t know before. And the best part is that the camera works well with Linux.

One thing I do need help with is info about SD flash cards. I can’t seem to find decent information about them anywhere. What is the biggest flash card my camera will accept? Are there different cards with different speeds? If there are different types, which one is the best to use with my camera? Obviously the canon brand would work well, but it’s obvious that it is overpriced. What type and brand of card should I buy at what price? According to my math a 512MB card should be sufficient. The camera only came with a 16MB card. Also, what should I do to protect the LCD on the camera? I might get a little rough with it and I don’t want it to be scratched. Should I worry enough to get some sort of case, or is it ok to throw this thing in my backback and other stuff?

As a special treat to show off my new camera I took pictures of some of the rooms in my house and posted them on FlickR. Many of my friends have already been to my house, but some have not. So now you will get a very good look at our living room, kitchen and my bedroom. Yes, the kitchen and my bedroom are huge messes. Perhaps I will re-take the pictures this weekend after I have a chance to clean up.

I got into podcasting recently when I purchased the iPod nano. Come to think of it, I should probably keep an OPML online of all the podcasts I listen to. I’ll do that sometime this week. Anyway, this sudden realization that podcasts are actually awesome and people listen got me to rethink about my audioblog idea. Before you knew it, my roommate and I had started a podcast.

You see, when I get home from work, we talk about all kinds of things. And our friends often remark about how entertaining our conversations are. I don’t understand what they’re talking about, but apparently standard conversational fare for us has been called “pure sex” by others. Who are we to deny the world its need for pure sex?

The problem we had with the podcast was coming up with a name. We came up with some good names like “renaissance geeks” and such, but that didn’t pan out. Rym thought “teh show” was a good name, but I felt it implied some sort of connection to l33t kiddies. But then, I rememberd a previous Idea of mine. You know those late night TV shows hosted by guys who have last names beginning with the letter “L”? I always felt there should be a show like that just for geeks. So we settled on “GeekNights with Rym + Scott”.

The website for the podcast is www.frontrowcrew.com. In college our group of friends was known as the front row crew because we sat in the front row of anime club ever week. That site is shaping up to be sort of a community blog that ties us all together on the Internet. The podcast is just the first, and primary, thing that will be hosted there. However, because of iTunes and such, we had to seperate and reformat our podcast feed using feedburner. So the GeekNights podcast feed is at a different URL.

I hope you enjoy the podcast, but if you don’t I wont force you to listen to it. And I doubt that the podcast will diminish the content posted to this blog. If anything it will be quite the opposite.

Otakon ruled. We did an axe gang cos-play for the first half of Friday before the concerts. Entertainment System rocked out. I bought cool stuff in the dealers room. There is a movie called “SARS Wars”, see it. Do not see “2009: Lost Memories” or “Evil Dead Trap 2″.

Wildwood, NJ was awesome as usual. Arcade owners need to maintain their games better. We went to the only EB within range of Wildwood and bought 6 copies of Advance Wars: DS. I’m still getting enjoyment out of it. Definitely the best DS game out so far and the best Advance Wars game yet.

I finally used my points from my Sony credit card to buy a television. It was on sale for $300 at Circuit City and my 20,000 points got me $200 off. Considering the same TV could be gotten for free from the rewards catalog for 40,000+ points it was a steal. Flat glass, 27″ CRT. Pretty much the best non-HD TV they had. Much better than our 70′s piece of crap with broken magnets. Now I can play video games and watch DVDs with a clear picture and correct colors. No, I still don’t watch TV.

I was demonstrating the durability of my iPod mini by stepping on it and accidentally broke the LCD. Now it’s just a 4 gig USB hard drive that can play music if you use magic to navigate invisible menus. See my roommate’s post on Slashdot.

I bout the iPod nano, which I would have bought whether or not my mini broke. It’s fucking awesome. My only complaints are that it gets lots of fingerprints and small scratches on it very easily. Also it’s hard to take out the USB cable if the headphones are plugged in. gtkpod didn’t seem to work with it correctly, I’ll have to try again.

I discovered finally what the real deal with podcasting is. I tried using iTunes again and I hate it less than I did before. At least I can get podcasts reliably and manage my iPod without the tinkering I do in Linux. Of course it only runs on my work PC and not my home Linux box.

I’m spending my free time coding new blog software and finally playing Zelda64 Master Quest on the new TV. I played Zelda64 over five years ago. If I recall correctly,in the original you had to carry Ruto all around Jabu-Jabu’s belly. In the master quest you just carry her around a single room in the dungeon. If that memory is true, then the master quest is awesome. Definitely a good game to replay after all these years.

If you ride your mountain bike, don’t leave the front tire outside the car and run over it when you are driving home. Do take the tire to the bike shop to have it repaired, good as new, for thirteen dollars.

If you get Optimum Online from Cablevision without getting Optimum TV they will think you are stealing cable. Someone showed up at our door asking how we liked our satellite television. Actually this story is secondhand from my roommate, I was at the bike shop. Quote: “No television? Just read books?” “Yeah.”

I say much about New Orleans since every other website in the universe has done it for me. Let it just be said that every crazy conspiracy theorist can shut the hell up. For most crazy government conspiracy theories to be true that means that the government must be extremely crafty. This episode shows that our government is a giant, incompetent, bureaucratic mess. It is definitely incapable of devising the types of conspiracies that people claim they do.

After the Otakon we are going on our second or third annual Week of Awesomeâ„¢ trip. 7 days in fabulous Wildwood, NJ. Relax on the public beach. Have fun on the shlocky boardwalk. Drink Polish Water Ice. Hang out with friends in the beach house. Eat greasy fried foods. Play arcade games. Constantly seek out water or air conditioning. You might even ride overpriced amusement rides. All this and more can be yours if you are a friend of my friend whose dad owns a beach house there. It can also be yours if you pay lots of money to stay in a Hotel there. Oh, did I mention we sit around with all our goodies from Otakon and have fun with them?

So, if you don’t see anything from me for a week, that’s why. However, you might get lucky. I’ve got my laptop from work with wireless, so I’ll be attempting to blog and upload pictures of Otakon to Flickr or such. Look for tags like Otakon or Otakon 2005. Since there will only be 2100 at-door registrations there is pretty much guaranteed to be a mob of stupid otaku and fan-folk, some in costume, standing outside around 11am Friday with no badge and a long walk home. It will be entertaining for me at least. There will be pictures of other things too, though. Maybe if me or one of my friends buys or brings a digital camera the pictures won’t be crummy 640×480 from my phone.

Oh, did I forget to mention the most important part of this vacation? On August 22, the day after Otakon, Nintendogs will be released. That’s a big deal for some people, not me especially. But the game has the potential to skyrocket the DS to new heights. Also, there is a $20 price drop on the DS the day before. Whether the numbers jump as expected or remain stagnant will determine the future of handheld gaming. But more importantly, Advance Wars: Dual-Strike is being released on that day. Pwn3d! If you see a bunch of nerds on the beach with wirelessly conneccted DSes yelling at each other, you know who it is. I plan to write a nice review of the game, but I can guarantee you it will be ridiculously positive. Advance Wars is currently the turn based strategy champion.

I will return from vacation and go back to work on August 29th. Of course I will be sleeping all day. Have fun working in August suckers.

I also rebuilt my Gentoo. That Gentoo had been installed since a very early 2.6 kernel. Now you’re saying, “I thought Linux got better over time!” Well, it did. “Then why did you re-install?” Well, I’ll tell you.

That install of Gentoo was the best. It was perfectly customized for my needs and was becoming more customized every day. However, it had fallen victim to a Gentoo specific problem. Other Linux distributions just update packages to newer versions. e.g: Ubuntu will update package 1.0 to package 1.1. Gentoo doesn’t force you, but encourages you to update to the newer technology. So you switch from devfs to udev, or from supermount to submount to dbus, hal and ivman. Theoretically all these things can go smoothly. But, as they are newer technologies you are just learning, they get messed up. You have the choice not to update if you don’t mind missing out on the new functionality. But if you don’t update you’re not getting a better Linux, are you?

Technically I could have made the system perfect without formatting and re-installing. However, when that system was first built most of my hardware was very new. I needed the latest and greatest ~x86 software just to make it work. Nowadays I only need stable packages to make it work. Also in those days it was more difficult to customize different options for different packages in Gentoo. Your only choice was the dreaded ACCEPT_KEYWORDS. Nowadays /etc/portage exists, works and is well documented. Since it is not possible to go from unstable Gentoo to stable I rebuilt the whole thing. I imagine I wont do this ever again unless I get a new computer because all these technologies look like they are here to stay. /me crosses fingers.

The last reason I did a system overhaul was to try out my strategy for the greatest USE flags. It’s an obvious way to do things if you know anything about Gentoo. But back in the day it wasn’t easy to do. The -N flag to the emerge command looks for packages with USE flags that have changed and marks them to be rebuilt. Before that argument existed changing USE flags was a nightmare. You would have to manually search for which packages you had installed that used that flag and rebuild them. So what I would do in those days was read the list of USE flags and set as many as I could at install time. If there was even a thought I would need a flag I would set it. However, I often got caught on undocumented package-specific flags. It also sucked when I had a flag I wanted to remove.

So for this new install I had a new strategy. Every time I emerge a new package I do emerge -pv to see which USE flags will effect the build. I go through the list figuring out what each and every flag means. I set all the ones I want then run the command again to see if any new dependencies have appeared that might have their own new flags. This way my system has all the flags I want, and I am guaranteed not to fill make.conf with flags that don’t effect my installation. If I forget a flag it’s no big deal. I add it and use the -N.

I would also like to note one more thing. This latest installation took less time than any other Gentoo install I have ever done. It might be because I have a lot of experience. It might be because the handbook is improved a lot. But a significant factor was simply that installing Gentoo is more streamlined and a little bit easier than it used to be. It is still not for newbies, but it is less troubling. It took me only 24 hours this time, instead of the usual 48+. Way to go Gentoo guys.

There is also a new graphical installer for Gentoo now that is in Alpha. In its current format I wouldn’t use it for any production system. But it’s still pretty slick. It’s basically a Gentoo LiveCD with X, like a Knoppix or Ubuntu CD. In true Gentoo fashion it wows you with beautiful purple graphics, and then it starts Gnome. It’s a standard Gnome, but on the desktop is a link to run the install program. It’s a very nice GUI program that takes you step by step through the Gentoo install process. It reminds me a lot of the old Mandrake installer with the steps listed in a column on the left. Maybe that’s the idea since a lot of Gentoo users, including myself, switched from Mandrake.

So it seems that the computing situation in my house is just about in order. After I get back from vacation I’ll take a little nap and then enter high-productivity mode. Expect awesome.

My issue is that I’ve pretty much locked my blog into an essay blog. I make big infrequent posts. A lot of times I write posts and never put them up because they are large and hard to edit. Mostly that’s my fault for being heavily redundant. I keep saying the same thing in many different ways to be sure I get my point across. Like right now. And while this format allows me to express myself in a way I like, it is really something I need to limit.

I had a SlashJournal and it had limits. I worked within those limits for a time. But eventually I found them too constricting, so I switched to this format which has no limits. Now that I’ve experimented with no limits for a time I find that I still can’t do everything I want. So I’m going to write myself a new blog software. One that imposes heavy limits to allow me to do more. Not making sense? Let me explain.

Presently all I can do to post on my blog is make a bunch of HTML and stick it in a box. But with so much freedom to move around I really lack direction. So I always end up blabbing away about something crazy. I never post a cool link I’ve found. I never post a short little blurb about a book or a game. I always wait for something really good and then write a huge thing about it.

So here’s my idea for a new blog software that encompasses all types of blogging. The multi-blog if you will. Instead of just one type of post there will be many. There will be simple “link” posts where I just put up a URL. That will most likely mirror to my del.icio.us. There will be blurb posts where I limit myself to 50 words or such. These will be used for anything which doesn’t require much explanation. Things like “I went to the beach today, yay!” or “I got this thing, you totally should buy it.” I’ll still keep the essay posts, but from then on I will be sure to limit myself to 1000 words or so. Maybe even less. That will force me to edit more heavily and only post an essay when I really write it well. I’ll probably make additional types of posts for photos (Flickr mirror), video and audio.

I think with all these different types of posts I will be more inclined to put up more content. And that content will be more useful to myself and others. Especially since I will also do the following. First, implement track-backs which I have never had working. Next mirror on sites like del.icio.us and Flickr for awesome and for bandwidth relief. RSS everything. Feeds of different types of posts, feeds of different combinations of types of posts, feeds of date. And of course, absolutely everything will be categorized by tag, not hierarchy. Oh yeah, feeds for flags too. Feeds for combinations of flags. The whole shebang.

What I’m going to basically do is create a single information collation point which will allow me to store, get and share all the digital information in my life. I’ve wanted such a thing for quite awhile, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized the web was the place for it to be. But don’t expect it anytime soon. I’m going to be working on using the Puzzle Pirates engine to make some multiplayer games first.

Keep in mind I made this for me and only me. There are a
few problems with it, which I know, and the theme is currently very ugly. I am
also completely aware that the only way to add new feeds is manual and direct
database access. I also realize that the color field is completely unused as
of right now. And don’t even start to complain that using a MySQL database is
overkill, or that I am not supporting other SQL databases. I wrote this for me
and me. If you don’t like it, just remember it’s not for
you.

Oh, yeah, if you want to actually get my program just click to
download ARSS. You’ll need Apache, MySQL, PHP4+ and magpierss at the minimum.