Computerjargon.com

One more minute. One more click. One more kill.

Just one more minute. That’s all. Then I’m done. Then I can sleep.

I can’t sleep, I’ll play for one more minute, one more click, one more kill.

I picked up World of Warcraft about three weeks ago. It’s a massive multi-player online role playing game. I like to think of myself as being on the edge of nerdism. I have the capability, and choose to be, to interact with actual people outside of the computer. I try to stay away from video games like this because, well, they start to consume my life. Addiction to a game like World of Warcraft is too easy. But, after both Frank and Kyle started playing, I didn’t want to be left out.

So now I’m in, addicted, just like everyone else.

Courtney has been kind about it. I try to limit my online time to an hour or two and when we have schedule conflicts. I’m waiting for the time she has to pull me away after a 10 hour stint that included 18 Mountain Dews. I’m hoping I give up before then.

To make matters worse, Chad and I started using Skype to communicate while playing. Courtney drew the line with me when I started insisting that we only communicate with Chad through the computer. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the VOIP service. Last time I attempted to call someone over the internet was circa 1998, when my brother was living in the dorms at Madison and I had a one way cable modem. The service was subpar. Any internet surfing done during our conversation caused the voice communication to breakdown. Chad and I are able to chat away with very little, if any, interruptions. Still, Court will not have anything to do with it.

I started reading A Million Little Pieces to keep me away from the computer as much as possible. It’s a first-hand account of a drug addict’s recovery at Hazelden. I picked it up after 3 separate people all suggested it to me within one week. The only catch, it had just been added to Oprah’s book club. I was assured that I would still enjoy it, even if Oprah enjoyed it too. I’m half way through it, at my typical breaking point. I have a horrible tendency to leave a book half way in if it doesn’t keep my attention. I’m having to fight my way through the rest of this one. The first 100 pages were stunning, almost breathtaking. Frey recounts every minor detail of every situation which allows the reader to become emotionally involved. He shares his addiction with you. His writing style is more of a stream-of-conciousness. He uses no quotation marks and repeats himself, repeatedly. To me it feels like how my brain processes things over and over and over again.

So why am I stuck? I’ve hit a dry spot. Eventually he is bound to turn the corner right? Rehab sucks, treatment sucks, everyone sucks, right? That’s the gist of the book. It’s a 400+ page novel. Around page 140 he flips. Life is no longer hard. Sure, he’s getting rehabilitated which is making his life that much easier. But it also makes it monotonous. That’s part of rehab though. Give people a pattern, a rut they can follow. Give them a path to walk down so they don’t have to think about it. It just makes for some repetitive reading at some point.

Now I’m assured that it picks up again soon. So I’m fighting through the dryspell. I’ll let you know what I think when I finally finish it. Hopefully soon.

I’ll admit I’ve been a little slow lately grabbing on to new technology. If I can’t find an immediate benefit to it then I complete forget about it. In the last few days I’ve run across two things that I can’t believe I’ve lived this long without:

Podcasting - Holy cow, it’s talk radio whenever I want it! I can listen to people debate the merits of browser versions all day long. The only downside I discovered was that any tom, dick, or harry can have a podcast. I found very few quality podcasts that I actually would want to hear on a regular basis. The few that I liked:

MPR: Musicheads - The elitist music nuts from The Current give their opinion even when off the air. It’s typically only 10 minutes long and airs once a week.

This Week in Tech - Highly nerdy nerds talk and debate. Their arguments typically end up dwindling down to “Yeah, well, shut up.” At least they talk about technology.

NPR Story of the Day - People always talk about having “driveway” moments when listening to NPR. You get so engrossed in a story that you can’t leave your car until it’s complete. Now I can listen to it later.

I tried to listen to Adam Curry, the self-proclaimed father of podcasting, but I couldn’t tolerate his ego. Maybe he’s a little jaded because he doesn’t feel he got the mad props he should have for being an innovator in the podcasting world. I listened to one show and decided it wasn’t entertaining. A side note - his podcast is called “The Daily Source Code.” Does Curry know how to actually right any code?

Del.icio.us - It’s online bookmarking. That’s it. Plain and simple. Kyle had shown me Del.icio.us a while go but I just couldn’t find a real use for it. Then I was shown how it can be used to categorize and store useful links. w00t! It allows me to label any URL which helps organize and store all the random corners of the web I visit.

Call me slow, call me a technophobe, but I’ve finally found a use for these two things. I’m off to play a bit.

Ah, the flame war once again rages here at the office. Will robots be able to one day automously determine whether to conquer man or will man have to program them to do so? So many questions to answer….

Grub boot error 17

I stared at that phrase for two days. I worked some computer magic, tinking with in inner depths of my computer. After all my hard work it now said:

Grub boot error 21

I decided to take a sledge hammer to the computer, metaphorically, of course. I ended up hitting it too hard losing all my data, along with all my family’s websites. Pissed would be an understatement of my feelings.

So I started to rebuild. I focused my attention away from the server and back to my desktop PC. I needed to do a little research. My desktop hard drive spun for a few minutes, lights started blinking, then pow, nothing.

My desktop PC failed 4 days after the server crash. 3 brand new hard drives later I’m slowly rebuilding everything back. The server is mainly back online. All data, including archived email, web pages, and pictures are gone, never to be seen again. So I present to you the Computerjargon.com 2005 edition, REBOOTED.

The following post will be filled with geek-speak and a little bit of mumbo-jumbo. Proceed at your own risk.

I’m making my inaugural post using the new .Net application I’ve been writing for the past, oh, 2 years. Part of the reason I’ve kept CJ in PHP was 2-fold: I have some great software that I like to use in PHP (the gallery and RSS feed stuff) and secondly, there was no .Net support on Linux. You can trust the MS OS for playing video games, but not for hosting web sites in my book. So I put off a revamp for quite some time. I believe the last time I updated the CJ code was sometime in 2000.

Well, Linux got Mono a few months ago which is a Linux implementation of the .Net language. I’ve been messing around with it and it seems stable enough to serve a web site from. I guess we’ll find out.

A one thing to note: Commenting is disabled until I want you jokers to post crap to my site. And this time, you’ll have to fill in a name or you can’t post. The username Ass-Clown is already reserved for a friend. You’ll have to come up with something better than that.

Image My latest creation messing around in Photoshop.

Google released a desktop search tool earlier this week. The tool searches files, emails, and instant messaging logs to create your own personal Google cache of your hard drive. I installed it at work and have been randomly looking up some words. Here are some of my results:
Butt : - 9 emails, 10 files
Ass : - 33 emails, 1 file
Dork : - 2 emails

Nerd : - 7 emails
Shit : - 13 emails
Dammit : - 9 emails, 1 file
Jason : - 9,349 emails, 21 files, 3 web history
Motylinski : - 8,711 emails, 15 files

Jason Sucks - 21 emails

I’ll have to run the suite of searches on my home computer too.
Edit:
Per suggestion:
Poop : - 4 emails

Green Day gets the whole online music thing. They are selling pre-labeled CD-Rs with their album art so fans can download the songs from iTunes and burn to a disc, much like buying it in the stores .

Mozilla’s latest version of Firefox takes the cake when it comes to features. I converted over to Firefox about four months ago. I was impressed with it’s speed and reliablity. Not to mention the growing number of virii targeting Internet Explorer had me hiding behind the couch with tin foil over my head.

The PR1.0 version of Firefox implements a new feature called Live Bookmarks. If a site has an RSS feed Firefox notes it at the bottom right corner of the browser window. The RSS feed can be bookmarked and the headlines from the site will show in the browser bookmark list. A very handy little feature for those of us that browse the Internet at break-neck speeds. RSS is a very handy little standard which cuts through all the glitter of the Internet to deliver information quickly and precisely.

Instructions for installing Linux on a dead badger.

This may come in handy some day.