There and Back Again

Yes it is true, I am not just saying that I have a lizard on my computer to sound cool in an attempt to make friends.  I have been taking care of my sister Laura’s pet lizard since she is still down in Argentina. I guess i should really call it a gecko, since that is what she is.  It is fun to let her wander around and see what up from a gecko point of view.

I am trying to decide what i want to do about getting some shots before my trip at the end of next month.  I guess if i want to get them i need to find out what if anything my health plan would cover, and where i need to be going, etc etc.  which is not what i feel like thinking about. But there is still time to feel like it later next week.

Now i am going to bed, becuase i was tired today and very nearly killed a computer because of it.  No, that isn’t quite the truth, i mean there was some tiredness and there was also some very nearly computer killing, but i can’t correlate the two. Good night crazies!

This is going to be one of those mostly pointless posts, i can tell aready. These past few days have given me some of my most frustrating computer experiences in the past several months, maybe even at least a year.  Yes, even i ( DAH ) sometimes feel the life shattering forces of the event horizon that is the human-computer barrier.  I have been trying to setup some code repository software on my server, namely subversion, and the combination of tired brain and new things is not a good one.  So needless to say sunday night i broke more software on my server than i care to think about, and am just now getting things working the way i had hoped to during my relaxed weekend of ‘computer stuff’.

Their isn’t much else.  I have a feeling i will go to bed soon.  Life is good, good like soft-serve ice cream.

I got my tickets for my flight to Egypt and the Sinai today! it is exciting to be all official now.  I was originally planning to get them a week or two ago, but as most people know i tend to put things off.  Happily enough, my procrastination turned to profit, as today i was able to find my tickets for about 400 dollars less than the last time i looked at the prices.  I am flying out of philly monday August 28th, and will be returning on thursday september 8th.  For those of you who don’t know, i am flying out to cairo and the sinai to join my sister, Kristine, as she ‘joy rides’ around from Istanbul to the Sinai and then to Rome.  Actually she is doing some travels to aid in her research as she gets ready to get her doctorate, but for me it is all glorified vaca.

Regarding the rest of life – i had a wonderful weekend down in lancaster. Did an art walk on friday with mel and the governor of pa, saw pirates II on sat, and thanks to Megans ‘wonderful’ (can you feel the sarcasm?) suggestion stayed past the credits for the rediculously stupid 2 seconds of extra footage. and sunday i did some all purpose relaxing before going to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo in concert at Longs Park. They were really fun, people starting getting up on the stage and joining in on the dancing… it was all cute and entertaining when it was only a few people, and little kids at that, but then everyone started to flock towards the stage and it started to feel really hokey, like the ending of Rat Race.

I used to have a particular mindset when it came to anything related to technology, and computers and programming in general. If I want it, then i will do it myself. My reasoning was that it was a learning experience and more fun that way. Well, spending the past 10 months working with computers and programming as a day job have modified my thinking. For one, I no longer have vast amounts of free time to spend writing code and messing around with ideas. But most importantly I have come to understand that while it is helpful to do things yourself to learn the methods and ideas behind it, nothing beats using a widely accepted peice of opensource code to get things done. The benifit is not only standardization, but there is an active community behind it, and in the end you usually end up with something that looks much nicer, aka my website. i have been replacing, ever so slowly, parts of it with some opensource developed counterparts. I started with my photo gallery, and now i have replaced my blog. I figure not only does this one look nicer and support all the features i was planning to write into my own some day, but it ‘plays nicely’ with other blogging software out there.

So the lesson is, generally it is better to use standards, and if you want to ‘roll your own’, then become involved in an open source project. That is my plan. I hope to either start, or find, a decent project that i am interested in to help develop for others to use. I may wait till my skills have become more masterful to attempt something like that. otherwise I would feel like my contributions wouldn’t be that great.

A quick word about the new site. I forget how i set up the permissions for this thing. I think you can still comment anonymously, but if not then you might have to register, it should be painless. bye for now!

Wow fireworks are fun. I just recently got back from jaunting around the h-burg with mel and peter and lisa and etc… I must give props to the fireworks this year. not only did i get to see longs park fireworks (which i havne’t done in years,,, its in lancaster and i just haven’t been there since like before high school i feel like) but also city island fireworks! first we got to ‘see’ beach boys in concert. by which i mean that of course i couldn’t really see them, but some of them looked old enough and the songs sounded right. then the fireworks. I remember thinking that they were weak in the previous years, but i was actually impressed by them. not as long as longs park’s (pun intended) but they were higher up and bigger and seemed a tad more political… stately rather.

At mike berts suggestion i downloaded and watch all 6 episodes of the first season of a brit show called “The IT Crowd” look here for a synopsis: http://epguides.com/ITCrowd/. Anywho i was glad to have the day off today so that i could stay up relatively late (actually very very late) and watch all of that, which i found extrememly hilarious by the way, as well as do some other lounging type activities. the long and short of it is that i am surviving. went food shopping today for what seemed like the first time in weeks…. honestly. its nice to have food again.

tata!