wonkablog

This is the funniest lolcat I’ve seen yet …

If the joke is lost on you, check out this boing boing article.  Great stuff.

There’s nothing I don’t like more on my blog than posting notices that basically say, “I’m busy, and that’s why I haven’t done anything,” but I think this time probably deserves a chance, since I’m not sure when things are going to be back to normal.

I think I mentioned this in passing in other recent posts, but here’s the story.  About three weeks ago now, I woke up early one morning, went out to my living room and noticed my computer was turned off.  It seemed rather odd to me, considering I hardly ever turn it off, though sometimes I do and just forget.  I came back to it later, and realized that my power supply had died.  That in itself is really odd, since I paid a lot for one of those quiet ones, and I’d had it less than a year.

Anyway, instead of rushing out to replace or get it RMA’d, instead I decided to just live without a desktop for a while, and that’s what I’ve been doing.  Cutting myself off from that has been largely a positive experience.  I needed a break from working on Gentoo and computer projects, and it’s helped curb my idling quite a bit, and I’ve been getting a lot done in other areas of life.

As far as Gentoo goes, I don’t have access to anything right now since everything was on my desktop.  My SSH pubkey is on there, so I can’t work on any ebuilds.  I can check my email through webmail, but last time I looked I had over 2500 new messages, and it broke the webpage.  If you really need to contact me, I’m always on jabber during work hours (sdibb at jabber dot org).  I would point to my contact page, but I accidentally zapped that the other day while upgrading my blog.  Whoops.

In case you’re wondering, I am planning on “coming back” sometime, but for now I’m really enjoying the break.  I’m using my laptop at home to get online, but it has a bare minimum of my preferences setup, so I mostly just use it to check my gmail and that’s it.  As soon as I feel like I’m caught up with things again in life, I’ll get my computer fixed.  I’m going to try and take it easier this time though, as I have a tendency to take on too much and get burned out quickly.  I think maybe what I’ll do is instead of broadly approaching so many areas in the tree, I’ll focus on maintaining a few applications.  Who knows.  We’ll see.

In any event, have a great weekend.  I should be back online for good in another week or so.

I have been having a really hard time sleeping lately.  I think it’s been adding up for a couple of reasons.  For one, we don’t have any central air conditioning in my apartment.  The landlord never mentioned that (that I recall) when I signed the lease in November, and it’s been pretty brutal.  Our small building is made of brick, and there are no trees to cover the thing like there is on every other house in the neighborhood.  As such, sitting inside is like hanging out in an oven, since you get cooked to death.  The temperature is always about 5 degrees hotter inside than it is outside.

Last night was really unbearable.  I hadn’t slept the night before very well, and left work early to get some sleep, which in turn made it so I couldn’t fall asleep last night on time either.  The heat wasn’t making things any better, either.  The temperature inside was 83 degrees, and that was with every window open and some fans turned on.  Pretty crazy.  I didn’t fall asleep until 3 a.m. or so, I think, and that was after going to bed about 11:30.  Then I had to rush into work, tired, this morning to finish up a project and the fun cycle starts up all over again.  I’m probably gonna take off just to get a nap so I can catch up, and restart the whole thing.

Last night I thought about taking some sleeping medication to help me fall asleep, but I’ve never taken any, and the whole idea makes me really nervous.  How does something make you fall asleep?  What I’m really worried about is coming to depend on it, since I believe most health problems in life can be solved ourselves by eating right, exercise and of course getting to bed on time.  So I roughed it out and finally fell asleep, but it was brutal.  Today, I’m going to go buy a ceiling fan for my bedroom.  That should help.  Only 3 more months in my lease, and I’m outta there … too bad we’re only at the start of summer.

I was walking around late last night on Temple Square, as I often do when I want to go somewhere and just think of stuff, and there were freaking flowers everywhere.  It was pretty crazy.  Anyway, I was walking by the Church’s main office building, and saw a statue of Joseph and Emma Smith.  I thought I noticed something odd, and sure enough, as I got closer I saw that someone had picked some flowers and put them in Joseph’s hand.  It was really cool, and for some reason kind of inspired me a bit, that I took a little photo on my cell phone.

Well, today’s my birthday. I bought myself something cool just now. I got the score to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I remember XM Radio played a bunch of tracks from all the Star Trek movie scores once on Cinemagic, and that was the first time I’d gotten a good sampling of them. Really good stuff, so I hope I like it. Usually James Horner’s stuff tends to be kind of the same thing across different albums, and in fact I noticed the other day that this one sounds a lot like the score to Krull. Or there are a lot of borrowed parts, that is.

I also just remembered I’m wearing my Starfleet Academy t-shirt today. I’m such a nerd.  Just call me Ensign Steve.

So I showed this image to my friend Scott, and as usual he had a great response.

Steve: what would a unicorn do?
Steve: “pose on a windy cliff”
Scott: Jam his horn into your face.
Scott: The end

Friends are great. Especially at 12:26 in the morning and you’re both tired. I tell you what.

I just submitted my application for the summer semester at the University of Utah, to be admitted into their school of psychology.

I hope I get in.

I went to the library on my lunch break here, and it was pretty interesting.  I haven’t checked out any books from there since high school (which has really been a while), so I had no idea what to expect.  The first thing I noticed is that they had a lot of movies in there, both on VHS and DVD.  Their selection seemed to be pretty big, though I didn’t bother looking at it — I was looking for some Star Trek novels to read.  They also had some CDs there that you can check out.  That’s pretty cool.  I’ll have to go back sometime and see what they have.

It took me a while, but I finally found a few Star Trek novels, next to the Dragonlance ones.  Oddly enough I didn’t see any Forgotten Realms ones.  They didn’t have very many, but I wasn’t expecting much since it’s a small branch just across the street from where I work.  The main library is only a few blocks away, in downtown Salt Lake.  I’d like to go down there too and see what else they have.

I’m not much of a reader, though, that’s for sure.  At least, not these days.  I used to read fantasy novels quite a bit, and I had burned through almost the entire Forgotten Realms library back in the day.  Now, though, I mostly just read old Gold Comics digests for recreation, and that’s about it.  Sometimes though I’ll get the bug to read again, and so that’s why I made my way over there today.

Something else cool I saw is they had some fliers out for a Dungeons & Dragons group that meets every Saturday for the next few months!  I couldn’t believe that.  I absolutely *love* playing AD&D on paper.  And of course that means that it’s something else I also haven’t done for a long time, either.  I’ve been (passively) looking for a group to play with again locally, so I’ll probably stop in tomorrow afternoon and see what their setup is like.  I used to play a half-elven thief called Tich.  He was a lot of fun.  What a great game.

I got a library card too while I was there, so I’m pretty stoked.  I hope I can find some cool stuff to read and watch.

I don’t think I ever wrote about this, but I started a new job about four weeks ago. Actually, I rarely, if ever, write about work. I’ve found it’s best to separate my two lives and not get them too intermingled. I have a lot of opinions on that subject, but I’d probably better not get into them. I tend to not get into too personal things on this blog, either, but I do think that this time I could benefit from some outside advice, if anyone had some.

One thing that’s depressing me a little bit is that looking back at all my computer jobs I’ve ever had since 1999, I’ve never really enjoyed them as much as I had hoped. I’ve been in good company, made some great friends, worked on some really interesting projects that have taught me a lot of stuff, and learned a lot about business, different industries, and computing. In general though, I find it all just a little bit boring. Sometimes I have to wonder if I’m in the completely wrong field.

One issue that I have to deal with in life is that I have a lot of passion for everything I do that I am interested in. This in turn generates a lot of creativity and dedication towards working on goals that fascinate me and drive me to learn more and push my limits of understanding. The flipside of that is I can get extremely bored by stuff that doesn’t interest me at all, and mundane tasks really make my skin crawl. It gets frustrating for me because professionally, I’m always working on someone else’s dream projects.

I can still be passionate or indifferent about my work though. Problems come from both approaches, though. If I really get involved in the process, I tend to take it personally when things don’t work out how I think they should. I know it’s crazy, and I’m working on getting over that, but it’s an issue for me. If I am completely indifferent about the process, it allows me to detach myself emotionally, but then I feel like I’m nothing more than a drone (which is how most corporations probably envision me anyway), and I spend my time being effective, but I feel completely unfulfilled.

What I would really like is a job where I can effectually produce change, and find a business where I agree with their model and their purpose. That’s one reason I get sucked into open source projects so easily and especially spend so much time on Gentoo — it’s because I really believe in the ideals and I’m happy to help push it along. I think that the balance I’m probably looking for would be working for a non-profit organization where I agreed with their mission statement. In that way, I could give more of myself both personally and professionally, and really feel like I was firing all on cylinders.

One of my dream jobs (that I can imagine, I’m sure there’s more possibilities I haven’t thought of, and suggestions are welcome) would be either working for PBS or my Church organization. If either one of those two offered me a job anywhere in the world, I’d almost guarantee that I’d take it in a hearbeat. Practicality and salary have always taken a back seat to personal satisfaction on the job. I’m really indifferent as to how much I get paid (although a nice salaried job is nice, I won’t dispute that), but I can get along being poor and contented.

The thing I enjoy the most is effecuating actual change in people’s lives or the communities. That’s something I’m really looking for. Business has never interested me, nor has the pursuit of money, and so I find it really hard to get involved into anything involving capitalism. You make money? That’s nice. You help someone learn something? That’s freaking awesome.

Another idea I’ve come up with is teaching, and again, another big personal problem raises its head. I suck at school. I really suck. I managed to be good and sit through high school, and that’s where my success ended. I have been in and out of college so many times since I graduated that I’ve lost count. The only effective means of me getting an education is by taking one night class per semester and focusing really hard on that. I realize that education is key to doing pretty much anything these days, and so it gets rather depressing for me when I think I’m pretty much screwed.

I don’t have any degrees, and I’ve actually only taken one class even remotely connected to Computer Science (Introduction to Object Oriented Programming) and I withdrew from that. The only area of study that really fascinates me is psychology. Everything about it just a complete marvel about it, and I could see me using that as a real stepping stone to something else, or help me to understand other things better and work harder at helping others. Great stuff. That’s currently what I’m working on studying in school, too. It’s been the only area of education that throughout the years I’ve held onto as an interest, and I still want to pursue.

So, there’s my personal little story on work. Please don’t fire me. For the record, I love my job that I’m at now, it’s just that I don’t see myself working with computers professionally for the rest of my life. I want to move onto something else within the next few years, but I’m just not sure towards what or how to get there. It would almost be a fun little mystery if it wasn’t so serious.

No, I’m not dead yet, just still kinda busy.  Everything not related to personal life has come to a complete halt recently because I’ve been moving (and still “moving in”, really).  I must say it’s a little weird having a roommate again.  Jared and I are both a couple of lost bachelors that wonder if we’ll ever get married.  Well, at least I think that way, I’m sure he’s a bit more optimistic.  We’ve been friends for a good number of years, in fact we were roommates a long time ago (back in 2001) when I went to BYU.  I think things are going to work out well, it’s just going to take me some time to get used to it again.

I’m still really tired though, which is why I haven’t started picking up on anything again.  I’ve got a lot of stuff to unpack still and setup.  Instead of doing that this weekend, Jared and I played Diablo II for about every waking moment we could find.  We fought our way to Diablo in probable record time, about 14 hours.  Sheesh.  In between breaks, I would play on my new Game Cube.  I really like the Batman Begins game.  It’s pretty cool.

The other good news is that I finally got my mythtv setup again.  Hallelujah.  I’ve missed that a little bit.  I’m hoping to get back into hacking on some Gentoo stuff again pretty soon here, after I’m more fully situated.  It’ll probably be at least another week though.