Okay so this week I turned 27. Wonderful age 27, you can year your thirties screaming at you from around the bend.

So as a reward for my ascendance up the age chain I was hit with a horrendous little badass of a beastie (no I will not use 'virus', that's far too tame of a term). So far I've been out of the action completely for 5 days and I'm just now starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. Luckily after seeing a doctor at the local clinic today it sounds like I won't be hosed for much longer. According to him it's a very common bug going around and you're usually out of it by day 10. Hmm... I hope so. This thinger has killed all my sick time :(.

Anyway, beyond that not much else is new (for obvious reasons). I got a Car Toys gift card from my parents for my b-day which allowed me to replace the failing radio in my Cavalier. The commute to work is much nicer now (well it was... the one day I went!).

Well this is all I really had energy for, catch y'all on the flip side.

So I'm home sick today and figured it'd be a good time to update y'all on what's going on with me.

As the title says I have not only purchased a new car, I've also acquired a new apartment (finally!).

Okay so let's handle the car first. It's a 1991 Chevy Cavalier with 94K miles on it. The car has a few quirks (like a radio that works when it _wants_ to) but all good Cavaliers have personalities, my family and I have owned enough to know. The engine runs fine after I gave it a quick tune up and the body is in reasonable shape (rear tail light has a hole in it and there's a dent in the driver's side of the car). Over all I'm incredibly happy with my purchase. I paid cash for the car so I owe _nothing_ on it, a concept I thoroughly relish.

Now on to the apartment. I just heard today that I got the apartment I'd been waiting for. YES! This apartment is special due to the fact that it is a two bedroom in Monroe that's in line of sight to my friend Devin's place, which means that he and I can keep our network setup going. The apartment also has washer/dryer hookups which was one of the requirements for me getting into a place (No more coinop for me, no sir).
With the two bedrooms I can FINALLY have a place for me to sleep and not have servers screaming in my ears. I also get to have an actual living room (whoah), something I've never had before.

I've also acquired four new servers, all rackmount. So now I think I can finally go get a nice rollable rack and mount all my servers in an enclosure, which will help TONS with cooling and space conservation (those of you who saw the server setup I had in Bellingham will understand my desire for space).

Now onto the groove. I've been listening to some newer stuff, now that I'm finally back in range of Seattle and some acceptable radio stations.

My current song I'm obsessing over is U and UR Hand by P!nk. Now the original song is good but this remix is just fantastic. Don't ask me why I like it, I'm not entirely sure but man it's got a good groove.

Well that's it for now. Be well people.

So today I worked some OT and pushed all but one minor change out to the new website. Those of you who wish to see it before Monday can view it here:

http://www-test.danube.com/

If you saw the original site, you know this is a considerable improvement in the look :). The functionality of the site is also greatly increased (I wrote something like 6 new drupal modules to round out the site and make it more useable behind the scenes).

But the best part is? I'm pretty much done, the stress is over. There's some finishing of things behind the scenes that will be done after the launch but all the critical stuff is out of my hair.

YAY!

Just a quick update as I sit here and watch Devin play NFS Most Wanted.

For starters I lost my NFS save game last night (I was in the process of challenging #4, grrr). Man I was pissed, but I've started over and I'm #11 after about 4 hours of play. I'm absolutely determined that, for once in my life, I will complete a bloody game.

Work has been crazy, about every day the boss has been handing me something with the 'panic' label on and and somehow, I miraculously pull the magic out again and fix the newest problem. The only problem is it's taking a bit out of me and I'm starting to get sick (I was a complete loon at work today).

However the end of the darkness is in sight. We launch our new product Monday the 15th and just today the Java dev team finished putting the final touches on it while I finished the last 'panic' module for the website.

The fun stuff now commenses. I have the next two days to do a full merge between the dev website and the live website both of which have been actively added to over the last month (ugh). Most of the merge is complete after some hectic hours today but the remaining stuff is just tedious as heck. Lots of editing and bug fixing to get pages to match up right (which in a CMS is NOT fun).

Anyway I'll probably go ape crazy on the site tomorrow and bang everything out, but for now I relax and dream of Tuesday when life will finally settle down a bit :).

So as some of you know, I've switched my primary window manager over to KDE. Now I know some of you are looking at me like I've lost my mind but I feel that with some of the new improvements that KDE's done it's actually a better WM for my needs than GNOME. Here's a screenshot of my new sexy. The look needs a bit of tweaking to be as polished as my laptop but it's coming right along.

EDIT: Yes I know, the full-size image breaks the theme, I haven't had a chance to dig into the CSS yet and fix that. :)

So I've been wanting a script of sorts to change my background image while I'm at work and change it back to the original when I'm at home. The reason for this is I have a nice sexy girl as my background (nothing bad, she's clothed, just hot) and I don't want anyone getting pissed at me if they happen to walk by and see her and think it's inappropriate for the work environment.

So I whipped up the following shell script to change the background in KDE upon login based on whether I'm on my home network or roaming.

#!/bin/bash
#
# A shell script to switch the KDE desktop based on networks
#

IMG_HOME="/usr/kde/3.5/share/wallpapers/suseA.jpg";
IMG_SAFE="/usr/kde/3.5/share/wallpapers/triplegears.jpg";

IP_HOME="192.168.42.100";
INT_HOME="ath0";

IP_CURRENT_HOME="";
IP_CURRENT_HOME=`/sbin/ifconfig $INT_HOME | grep 'inet addr:' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'`

if [ -z "$IP_CURRENT_HOME" ]; then
echo "Not at Home -- Enabling Safe Background"
`dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface setWallpaper $IMG_SAFE 6`
elif [ $IP_HOME = $IP_CURRENT_HOME ]; then
echo "Located Home Network -- Enabling New Background"
`dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface setWallpaper $IMG_HOME 6`
fi

That's it. Change the image locations and pop that in your ~/.kde/Autostart and it will change your background images based on network. Granted this isn't elegant, but it works. Quick hack and all that :).

Thanks to Devin for pointing out that adding an if [-z] to fix an error I was having (The script worked but the error was driving me nuts).

So Ryan just dropped this link on me about an hour ago and I simply must share it with you:

Watch It Here!

Prior warning, it's 41 minutes long, so watch it when you have some spare time. But i'll tell you this, it's worth the time.

Where you're just not quite sure what's going on and wondering what that blur is that's moving by around you?

It's been one of those months :).

I hope you all enjoyed your holiday.

Christmas was good. I spent some time with Devin and Steph in the morning (they ARE my roommates after all) and then proceeded to head over and hang out with my parents for a bit. After that I pretty much came home and crashed (Life casts Introversion. Life crits nickw for 5344. Nickw passes out).

Tuesday was a paid day off (I will wax poetic about my job in a second) so I stayed home, tortured the kids and finished tweaking Gentoo on the laptop. Everything finally works! I also started working on some game concepts using AJAX, PHP and MySQL. Nothing special just a tile-based adventure RPG, something to help me get my head back in the game. College kinda destroyed my desire to be creative and I think it's about dang time I got back into my groove.

Wednesday and today I had to work, which surprisingly enough I didn't dread... for the first time in many a year. Yes that's right people I actually like my job. The people I work with are cool (what little I see of them, I'm a team to myself) and my boss knows how to sit back and let me perform the magic I've been hired to do. Oh... and I get paid holidays. See now this is new to me. I've worked for startups and micro-businesses for so long I didn't actually remember what it was like to get paid for holidays. Or to be able to go home at the end of the day and not worry about my job being there the next day (or how I was going to appease a crazy boss).

Anyway, I'm thrilled with the job, life is better now.

Now I must figure out what I'm going to do with this here four day weekend... I managed to catch the elusive elite 'Spare Time' and it's trying to hurt me.

Saving Rolls Now!

PS: To Levi and Kristine: I'm sorry I missed y'all's wedding but I'm sure it was beautiful. I wish you nothing but years of crazy happiness together. God Bless.

Yet again here I am with the late update! :) I've been quite busy with my new job working for Danube Technologies as a contractor.

Basically what I've been doing is completely revamping their Drupal 4.6 website into something a little more modern. This ended up being perfect for me as I have quite of experience with Drupal and they're not trying to do anything bizzare on their website (asside from a few custom support solutions for their clients).

Well about a week ago I got offered a full time job working for them as programmer/admin/tech at a decent pay grade. Well I looked over what they had to offer and ended up taking the job yesterday, among the perks, they pay for my bus pass to Bellevue and I get a laptop as well as the whole benefits package. Hooray laptop! (Yes, notice the priority in this geek's head)

Since I already work for them as a contractor, I just get transitioned in as an employee, sounds like a relatively painless process.

The neat thing is, I drive to Woodinville (15 minute drive across 522) and then there's a direct bus to the Bellevue Transit Center about 2 blocks from Danube's office complex.

Anyway that's really all that's going on here. Hope everyone is well and happy :).

Nough said!

Go hither for thy update grashopper: Flash Player 9 Beta