I've been thinking a lot lately about what I wanna do with my life, and invariably the answer always quickest to come first to my mind is, "not this!"  I never wanted to go into computers, and I did so, really, as a matter of indifference ... I did it because I could.  I'm finding that attitude to be somewhat negative now.

But, I don't wanna sound like I'm whining.  I got myself into the situation I'm in, and I'm willing to take responsibility for that, and I want to gracefully exit out, but at the same time, find something I would rather do instead.  Interestingly enough, I've had two ideas bouncing around my head lately of something I could do.  It seems incredibly risky, but I have so many ideas and I get so excited about it that I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't at least start to look into it.  I've been thinking about either running my own local movie theater or video rental store.

I've always wanted to run my own movie theater, ever since I was a little kid.  Growing up, going to the movies was a rare treat, and I really enjoyed it every time.  Well, except that one time my mom took me to see Bambi, and I thought the movie was pretty boring.  I must have been five at the time or something.  A critic at such a young age.  I still love going to the movies, for just the thrill of the experience.  One of the reasons that working at a movie theater was so much fun for me too, was that I've never found myself so culturally engrossed around people of my own kind as I was there.  First of all, those of us who were long-term workers were really into movies.  There seems to be more than a few shared qualities from that fascination, since I made a lot of good friends working there.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that I have some really cool ideas for what would make a movie theater fun to visit.  I especially have lots of ideas on some cool promotions to do (which I might go into later ... right now, they're just floating around in my head).

The same is true for a video rental store.  I know it's in the news this week that Hollywood Video is going out of business, and it really comes as no surprise to me.  I've written before how I think the whole business concept is outdated, and some ideas they can use to brighten things up.  I have lots more ideas on top of those I mentioned there, too.  There's so many things you could do more than just making it a trip to pick up a movie or game to rent.  I gotta write em down.

There's only one small problem -- I'm not really the entrepreneurial type.  Personally speaking, I dislike the ideas of capitalism in general, and I completely glaze over anytime the topic of business comes up, so I'm not sure I'd be well suited to take on such an endeavor as I might run it financially into the ground, quickly.  If I was serious about doing it, I'd have to do my due research, that's for sure.  I'd like to think I've worked with the movie theaters for long enough to know what would be the basics (I've filled every role there -- usher, concessionist, box office, projectionist and management), but it seems like running a theater would be a lot riskier than a video store.  Who knows.  If it was small enough, I guess.

Anyhooms, I'm just thinking out loud for now.  I dunno what I think of the idea, but one thing I'm absolutely certain about -- it's one idea that gets me really excited, and just keeps generating more and more energy as I think about it.  Add on top of that it's something I've thought would be cool  to do for years, so ... who knows?

I guess at this point I'm just wondering if I should pursue the idea or not.  I mean, not commit myself to it, and run out and get a loan from the bank or anything, but rather just ask myself if there's really some sustained interest there or if it's just something to consider.  I dunno.

I can really think of some cool ideas, though.   Maybe I should share them.

My dream job, though, is to go back to working at the movie theater.  Of all the jobs I've ever had, none of them have happier memories.

Growing up, though, I remember in high school one thing I had settled my mind on was that I wanted to be a marine biologist.  I sucked at sciences in school, but I really liked biology, and with some real study on my part, I actually understood it.  On top of that, I took classes and was a registered scuba diver at the age or 14.  That was really intense, getting certified.  Diving is fun, too.

I still don't know what I wanna do, though.  My main area of scientific interest now is psychology and sociology.  It's the one subject that I never get tired of.  I don't have any kind of schooling in that area (though I never got a degree in computer science, either), so I can't really make a career change right now.

Ideally, though, my dream job is still just having one where it's low stress, low key, and I enjoy working with people I like.  I'd have to sort out a few things in my life before I can manage to do that again, though.

I got an idea for another new Gentoo website this morning, and instead of summarizing what it is, I think it'd be more fun to kind of show what my thought process is when coming up for the idea.

The catalyst for all of it was that I got to work this morning, and I wanted to find a backup solution for a few case scenarios.  This is basically how it rolled.

• Run eix -S backup on my desktop, pipe it through less, start looking at them
• Open up the website of every single one I find that looks like it might fit my needs
• Realize that there's an app-backup portage category, which I could have browsed on my own website (oops).
• Start realizing that trying to find my own is tedious, how I'd really want is just to see ratings on which ones are best.
• Get ideas for a new Gentoo website.
• I really need to build a new Gentoo packages website, one that track's users ratings on packages, can have comments, reviews, all that crap.
• While I'm at it, I need to do something to get a universal login across all the Gentoo projects (Znurt, Planet, new unnamed package one).
• I should probably get a new domain for it.  Or bump Planet somewhere else.
• I don't wanna bump Planet somewhere else.  What's a good domain name.
• I'm almost out of cookies.
• I've got a good domain name, is it available?
• Crap, the .com is gone, but .org is available, I'll get that.  Click, click, click, spendy, spendy.
• Hmm, I wonder if my brother-in-law can help me design it for me.
• Chat with him on IM for a few minutes, tell him I need it in about 3 to 4 months, he says no problem.  Awesome.
• And it's gotta login through OpenID, because I hate doing user management.
• I'll integrate Planet in there so users can modify their own stuff
• And this'll go great with all the user preference stuff I'm gonna have on Znurt soon, just track it through preferences.
• It'd be cool if the packages one also tracked features, or did comparision, or did recommendations, like Netflix
• Ooh, and you can see what friends are using
• And at the same time, reserve all usernames for current Gentoo devs.  That'd be fun.
• And it needs LOLcats. (I just came up with that one)
• I gotta think of a new design.
• Ooh, look a cool backup program.
• I like the website, what are they using?  Ooh, Redmine.  I remember liking this thing.
• I wanna try setting up Redmine again.
• Ooh, someone put an ebuild in the tree.  I don't have to use my crapalicious one I wrote.
• Sweet, I can use SQLite.  Setting up a database on MySQL / Postgres is a pain if I just wanna test it out.
• The --config isn't working.  Crapsticks.  Well, I'll just re-emerge every Ruby package installed and maybe that'll fix it.
• That didn't fix it.  Maybe I'll see the exact command that it's running and debug it from there.
• The deps are bad, I have to use an earlier version of rake.
• All fixed
• Ooh, I can run it as a standalone app!
• I might need mod_ruby sometime, someday, even though I can't find any mention of it on the website.  I'll just install it anyway.
• Ooh, shiny interface!
• I like.
• I think I can use this to replace trac.
• Ooh, it supports git.
• How the heck do you change the Issue fields?  I don't like the defaults.
• I think I'm going to go buy a subwoofer today.
• I should put my local stuff in a Subversion repo for now.  I gotta learn me some git.
• What's a good subwoofer?
• *ping Jason on IM and ask about subwoofer specs*
• *go buy a subwoofer*
• *watch Harry Potter trailer*
• *eat lunch and head back to work*
• What was I working on?  Oh, yah, backups.
• This one looks cool too.  Ooh, shiny interface.
• Woah, it integrates automatically with cron.  Nice.
• There really should be a website to make finding this stuff easier.  I should write one.
• And it should have screenshots!
• How do you deal with the spam?   Hmm.
• It's been kind of a crazy day today.
• I think I'll blog about it.

And so it goes.

Tonight, I was bored, and was thinking how stretched thin I am right now (I essentially have three jobs at the moment, eek), and I started wondering about my skill set in general, so I wrote it all down.  You can see the lovely unordered list here.

I compiled it out of curiosity more than anything else.  I'm not interested in comparing my skill set to anyone else, or anything like that, and I'm certainly not trying to toot my own horn .. I'm certainly not into that.  But I did find it interesting.  I know I've always been a hybrid between web developer and systems admin, and then throw in some multimedia stuff on the side.  It's really odd.  I realize that.  I like, though, that I pursue everything that interests me, even if it does totally wear me out.  I like knowing what I'm into and what doesn't appeal to me.

So, yah.  That was fun.  It was hard getting them all down, and I'm sure I probably missed a few.  I don't think I could really categorize Gentoo too well, as it's taken up a lot of room in my life over the years, and really helped push me in a lot of directions.  I'm really grateful for that.  I love learning new stuff.

And, for the record, I really did write a CLI frontend to rip TV shows off your Tivo.  I've never released the code into the wild.  That's on another huge list .. of projects to eventually accomplish.

Edit: for the record this is one of those posts I was debating publishing or not.

First of all, I got a job (yay!), so I'm glad for that.  Can check that one off my list.  I was honestly starting to get used to the whole unemployment thing, though -- get to work on my projects, stay home and watch Star Trek all day, and complain about my heater kicking in too much.  Oh well.  Getting laid off in the middle of December was kind of a good thing, in a way, because it gave me a break.  I didn't really think many companies would be in their right mind looking for employees because of the holidays, so I just ignore it and put off job searching until January.  My little vacation was nice, and much needed.  I got to spend Christmas at home all by myself, and did my best to make it a cool little holiday just by myself and my friends around here.  It went well.   It felt a lot like Christmas, in fact.  I haven't enjoyed a holiday that much since I spent it by myself like 15 years ago in college.  That was cool.  Anyway.

I'm really glad I got the packages website launched (znurt).  I worked like a madman all through November and December to get that ready to go, and pushed it live pretty much just a few hours after finishing a few touches.  Unfortunately, I had no idea I'd get such a high amount of traffic and, at first, I hosted it at home on my Comcast connection, and it absolutely crippled my poor network here within like the first 8 hours.  Whoops.  So, I scrambled to get it online somewhere else as fast as I could, only to realize that the server setup I signed up for was not *quite* as fast as I had hoped it'd be -- I don't know what possessed me to do *anything* with the word "Celeron" in it.  Yikes.  But, I pushed myself against a wall, and I haven't had time to look at it since then, so ... it's running slow, bugs and requests are backlogged, and I feel kinda bad about the messy launch.  However, if I hadn't launched it when I did, I probably would be obsessing still over the very tiny details, so it was good if only for my mental health to get it out there.

So, I got that whole thing going on.  I just started my new job last week, and I'm still getting settled in.  I'm not sure what I think of it just yet.  Could go a *lot* of different ways.  Right now, I feel like a fish out of water because for the first time in, well, ever, I'm the only IT guy working there.  Takes some getting used to.

There's a bunch of other stuff going on .. or maybe I just keep telling myself that.  Maybe it's just more like catching up to my previous obligations.  Who knows.  Either way, I feel swamped, but not overwhelmed.  That's good.  And a first.  I promised a friend yesterday that I'd help him build a mini Gentoo multimedia image to run on a VIA C7 system, so I gotta build that for him.  That shouldn't take more than a day or so, though.

Lots of cool, good stuff going on, though.  Most of it is of a more personal nature (not *that* personal, but as a general rule I don't get too detailed on my blog), and that's good.

Right now, though, I'm mainly just trying to adjust to the new job.  Get down the rhythm of everything new and all.  Yah.

That's mah life about now.

Go weenie wooman.

I haven't written one of my posts about recent watching habits in a long time, so I thought it'd be a nice revisit since I've seen a few things again that aren't really deserving of posts in of themselves.  I'll ramble them off in whatever manner I even remember them.

Astro Boy

I ended up seeing Astro Boy, unexpectedly, on opening night even, at the theater ... and I loved it.  The more I think about it, the more I realize how much I liked it.

I was *extremely* skeptical about seeing this one, because of it's manga background ... something that has proven time and time and time again, that I just don't have a passing interest in.  I just don't have the brain for it, I guess, which in some ways is keeping me from becoming a first-class art / entertainment geek.  Ah, well.  My tastes are in a world all their own, that's for sure.

But I remember seeing the trailer, again, about a week or so before the movie came out, and I thought, "Huh, this actually looks pretty good!"  And I liked it.

The story was really simple, and, the best way I can describe it ... almost ... well, simple is the best way to put it.  The story doesn't take any weird, random tangents, instead almost following a direct storyline of the events without any diversion or discussion.  It was actually quite refreshing to see the story neither dumbed down or trussed up.  With one exception, each of the characters was consistent all the way through.  It was just good.  I wanna go see it again.

Oh yah, and every scene with the RRF is just hilarious.

Surrogates

I had been waiting to see this movie for a long time, ever since I saw the trailer for the first time.  I just knew I was gonna enjoy it, regardless of how bad it might turn out to be.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect, since it was a sci-fi action / thriller with Bruce Willis, which could go all kinds of directions.  As far as action movies go, it was rather tame ... hard questions about society aside.  That surprised me.

The story itself was weak, which would probably explain why I haven't heard much about it, good or bad, or in reviews and what-not, but the concept it portrayed -- people living their lives artificially -- struck me on a number of levels.  I kept thinking about the many analogies of how our society does that anyway, through the Internet, through virtual escapes of any kind (video games came to mind).  It was just really, really cool.  It also raised a lot of points of you never know who is behind the artifical mask, either.  For someone who gets really sucked into the virtuality of second lives sometimes, and suffers from the after-shocks of trying to use it as an escape during hard times, the film really hit me, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.  It's definitely not going to be a popular theme with the masses, but I liked it a lot.  I wish the story was better, though.

Calling Philo Vance

Now this is an old movie (1940).  I recorded a bunch of Philo Vance movies on my Tivo when TCM aired them a while ago, and I just now got the urge to watch some old movies this weekend, and I found this one.  It was a little odd.

I had a little hard time following it because, apparently, this is a staple character of movies back in the day, and this was the first film I saw him in after he'd already starred in quite a few films and radio shows.  I imagine it would be like stepping in to watch the 14th of 20 Sherlock Holmes films, never have knowing the man or his methods before, and wondering what the heck is going on and why it's interesting.  That's exactly how it was for me, here.

I'd heard of Philo Vance, only in passing, since I've seen his name before in my attempts to collect old time radio shows.

The movie itself moved at a really clipped pace, and Philo solved the murder almost as quickly as he found the details.  Anyway, it was a bit strange, but I love watching old movies so it was still fun.

Turns out I made a stupid mistake -- I need to send in a medical form signed by my doctor that states I can drive. The reason I need to do that is that I take some prescription meds, and when I got my renewal notice in the mail last year, they ask if you are taking anything regularly, so I answered yes and put my info down. I figured that was the end of that. Except that I got a longer form in the mail asking for more specifics and demanding that the doctor sign it, and I had to send it in before I could get my license. Well, poop, more paperwork. I took care of that, and got my license okay.

What happened, though, and I had no idea, is that you have to send one in every year after that, too. I probably would have known that except that my address on my driver's license was still at my old address -- I had moved a few months after getting it renewed and forgot to update it. The officer kept saying, "they would have sent you something in the mail if it was suspended," and I just replied, "I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have missed something like that."

So, I have two charges against me -- speeding, and driving with a suspended license. Getting my license reinstated was simple. I just had to go to my doctor the next day, have her fill out a new form, and dropped it off at the driver's license division and was cleared to drive again right away. Oh, and I updated my address at the same time.

I have to go to court now, and I have no idea what I'm gonna plead (probably either guilty or no contest), but I hope I at least get a chance to explain myself. I'd never *intentionally* drive without a suspended license (it was revoked back in March), it's just that I had no idea, and I probably would have if I had my address updated. So, I have no idea what to expect, and of course, being the nervous type that I am, all these fear-mongering scenarios race through my head. Not really looking forward to this one.

On the plus side, my driving record is mostly really clean -- I've never been in an accident before and I think this is only the fourth or fifth ticket I've ever gotten for speeding ever since I started driving, so maybe it won't be that bad. I just hope I can explain to the judge that I'm a dumb cluck who forgot to do some paperwork, and it's probably not a good idea to demote me to just skating to work after that.

I signed up for a Linode (and did automatic billing), and I'll be moving the sites there rather soonly.  That'll save us all from other responsibility-addled issues.  Well, financial ones at least.

From Rhymes With Orange.  A great strip.

In some ways, it actually reminds me a lot of where I'm working at right now.  I started here about 9 months ago, and I love this job.  This is the first one since working at the movies (10 years ago) that I want to stick around for years.

When I was interviewing for the job, I met with the CEO and he said something that really stuck with me.  He said that the #1 reason someone will accept a new job is because of the payrate, but the #1 reason they will leave is because of cultural differences.  As a result, he said, they place a very high emphasis on corporate culture.

I was, of course, a little skeptical ... but after seeing how nice the place was, I thought he must be pretty serious.  Well, he was.  This place treats its employees incredibly nice, and in a lot of ways the culture reminds me working at the theaters.  The similiarity is that the environment is especially social (we're mostly a call center, sort of ... kind of a hybrid) so that people who are social and dynamic and easy going and fun to be around stay here and build up others.  When you walk around on the floor you just get a feeling of connectivity for everyone.  It's really cool, and pretty rare.

Anyway, I love my job, and I don't think I've ever said that since I worked at the movie theater so many years ago.

Ah, well, I need a break after all of this. I'm definitely up for a movie tonight, I'll have to see if Lola will come along. Things have been a bit stressful lately .... I can't convince her to give up the baby, and I still have no idea what we're gonna tell her parents. Not that it matters in the long run. Everybody probably thinks I'm gay from my last post about the cats. I think everything will work out once we move to Puerto Vallarta anyway. Let them all try to figure out what happened while I'm laying on a beach.

I'm heading home.

My friends know I've been thinking about getting a pet for a while, mostly a cat. They're fun to have and pretty much take care of themselves, and aside from finding hair in places you didn't think could hold it, a generally positive experience.

So, today, I went back down to the animal shelter and adopted some small little bundles of joy. I got four total so we can have a cool D&D game together.

It was a tough decision, but mostly, it's been an obvious lifestyle change that has been coming. I'm single, in my 30s, and let's face it ... some things just aren't gonna change anytime soon. I'd like to attribute a lot of this to a real role model on TV who has gone through similar times, and I can totally relate to -- Craig Feldspar.

And see, we have another thing in common I just noticed, too -- big screen TVs. It was just made to be. Craig's the one on the left.

So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to my new cats:

French Fry

Marshmallow

Freschetta

Otto

I've had a bit of trouble breaking Otto into using the litterbox, but I'm sure she'll come around in due time. It's great to have some companions around the house. I don't know how I ever did without the wonderful new world of aromas before, and I'm enjoying the surprises in my cereal. Plus, this pretty much guarantees me I don't have to worry about spending money on dates anymore. I can get some great Xbox games with all the savings. Tell you what!

I'm pooped.  And I also bought a Wii today, because I'm totally hooked on Bowling and Baseball.  I think I'm going to crash now.  Tomorrow will be interesting.

I've been wanting to upgrade my whole audio setup for a while now, and this is the first step. I'm going to do it pretty much piecemeal, adding or upgrading one item at a time, and the receiver was the first one to go.

This thing has some really cool features. For one, it supports all the extra HD codecs that Blu-Ray supports, two of which enable up to 7.1 surround sound, and two which are lossless. Right now, I only have one Blu-Ray disc that supports 7.1 channels (Sleeping Beauty), but since I don't have the extra speakers, I won't know for a while how nice it sounds. But, one major point of doing an upgrade is to future-proof the system, so that's what I did.

I also bought some nice stereo speakers to compliment the receiver, since I figured most of the sound goes through there. My good friend Jason, who is far more the audiophile than I'll ever be, tried explaining to me that most of the audio comes through the center speaker, and I'd be better off investing in that. I didn't really understand how it could work that way, so I bought some side speakers anyway. It should be worth mentioning at this point, that my audio experience can be summed up pretty simply -- I just like the aural experience of feeling like I'm surrounded, and as far as my class as an audio expert goes, I couldn't tell the difference between a phone and a tin can on a string.

I was sure, though, that since I wanted it to sound like stuff was coming from all sides, that I needed good speakers for the sides. So I got some good ones. As I was wiring the new receiver, though, I noticed that it had been opened and returned by someone else. The previous owner's hair being all over the place was a good indicator. I think they owned a cat who apparently thought a receiver would make a great tanning bed. I wanted to make sure it would work properly before I set everything up, so I wired my old speakers, and being the lazy bum that I am, only did the side ones, leaving out the center speaker. I popped in a Blu-Ray (Clone Wars) and everything sounded fine. I puttered around for a bit looking at the manual and left the movie playing. After a few minutes I realized that I wasn't hearing any dialogue. That seemed normal enough, since I knew that it comes through the center speaker, but what I didn't realize was that wasn't *all* that comes through there. There was a cool space battle (which is one reason I recommend watching Clone Wars -- some of the coolest Star Wars battles are in there), and all I could hear from the side speakers were these little pings. None of the good stuff was coming through at all. Well, there's nothing like real world experience to school you, so with that, I packed up the very expensive speakers and took them back. I still haven't found a good center speaker I like, but I'm glad I didn't blow a load of cash on an otherwise mostly secondary effect.

I also took my receiver back, in exchange for one uncoated with fur, and setup my old speakers and away I went. The setup came with a little microphone that you can plug in and run an automatic setup to determine the distance of the speakers and how they need to be adjusted. That is really nice. One of my speakers had to have the volume level slightly higher than the other one, so it worked out well to get it all balanced. Despite the 7.2 capability (supports two subwoofers as well), I've only setup a 3.1 system so far -- two bookshelf speakers, one center, one subwoofer. I'm not sure how I want to wire my living room just yet for surround sound, and for some odd reason the idea of running speaker wire across my ceiling or floor seems a little unsightly to me. I guess I'll never be a true A/V geek.

All in all, though, it sounds really nice. For some odd reason, my old receiver had a perceived A/V sync issue on Blu-Ray discs played from my PS3. It's gone with this one, I'm glad to report, though I'm still not sure if I was just imagining it or not. Another great feature I found out about is that the receiver will upscale and export any input video through the outgoing HDMI port. That means I can plug in pretty much anything from Composite to Component and have it all go out through one display port. Not a bad feature, but my TV already comes with something like 7 input sources anyway, so I probably won't ever need it. It also has a Monitor Out feature, where it will give you an OSD for the setup. That is a really nice touch.

Just as cool as a new receiver, I got a new book in the mail from my parents -- Batman Animated.

I'm not much of one for coffee table books, but with Batman, anything goes.

I probably wasn't supposed to open it already, but if I get unwrapped presents in the mail, you can bet your bippy I'm opening it up.

It's a great book. I absolutely love the new animation style that started with Batman: The Animated Series that Warner has been using since. I'm a real freak for certain styles of art. The whole book is all sketches, drawings, commentary and the like. Awesome stuff.

I wonder what else I'm gonna get .... er, that is, from myself for me. I asked my little sister the other day, "Why is everything I want to get so expensive?" She said, "Because you've already bought everything affordable." How true it is. Happy burfday to me

All within the past little while, I've finished up three big projects, or at least come really close to where the status quo is gonna work out great. I got my new Mini ITX media frontend setup, and minus a few tweaks on the remote and configs, it's good to go. I've been hacking on drip and dvd2mkv, my scripts to automate ripping and encoding both TV shows (drip) and movies (dvd2mkv). Oh, and I keep meaning to make mention of this, but I've given up trying to dream about getting those things in a "release" state. It'll never happen. But if anyone is looking for a class to access a DVD through PHP, well, it's all in SVN. And the third thing, crazy as it is, is that I've pretty much bought up all the DVDs (movies) that I've had on my wishlist for years. Again, there's a few exceptions (like two) that can either wait or they are out of print so I'm waiting for the price to come down, but mostly ... I'm done!

It's been nice to go home and watch Buck Rogers in peace, and knowing everything just works, but now I'm wondering what I'm gonna work on next. And when I say next, I mean, which project am I going to finish that I've been putting off for so long.

The first one on my list is also the one that I've been putting off the longest by far: getting the last release of this scriptures database complete. I sat down this morning for a quick second and documented all the stuff I have left to do, and there's really not much. Part of is verifying that the schema is correct on all the exports, and the rest is mostly just getting the documentation and changelogs written up. I don't know why this release has been taking me so long. Some of it just seems a bit overwhelming. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to get this thing done right, because I really want it to look good and work without problems.

That shouldn't take long though. Really, if I sat down, it'd take just a couple of hours to hammer out and get out the door. I still don't know what's next though. There's a lot of Gentoo stuff I want to work on, but I've kind of been hovering for the past little while, not really committing to any one area. I've been trying to decide where I wanna focus my time on that, as well. There's pretty much just two areas that I've kind of settled myself into: ebuilds and projects. Documentation used to be a third one, as I used to write a lot of stuff on the wiki, but now that it's kind of gotten hit pretty hard, I lost interest in going back to it. I am, however, working on one official Gentoo doc right now, though I don't want to promise anything since even that is going pretty slowly.

As far as the portage tree goes, I need to figure out what areas I wanna work on. I'm thinking about dropping out of the media-tv herd completely since I don't even *record* TV anymore. It's all about ripped DVDs these days. There's still a lot of stuff I'd like to cleanup before I go though, and if I do stay on, it'd mostly be because I don't wanna see stuff rot and be forgotten.

The projects, on the other hand, have always been something I'm interested in developing further. I'm talking about stuff like the packages website, GPNL, and the stats tracker. The packages frontend is about the only one I'm really satisfied with the way it is. All of them could use a lot of work though. GPNL hasn't even come close to my original vision of what I'd like it to be. Part of the reason is because it's just so hard to get metadata into the database, and it's so time consuming to do trial runs and things that I've spent way more time writing scripts to collect data than analyze it. People keep asking me about the stats program, which I want to work on as well. The one that is currently online was really nothing more than a proof of concept to see if I could collect data remotely using shell tools, and how complex it would be. It turns out it was much simpler than I expected, so it's given me a lot of ideas of where we could go with that. I think, though, that I probably won't work on it until I get the other two finished up or at least advanced a bunch more though.

Also, a side note that just occurred to me. I don't know about anyone else, but one thing that helps for me to get these things moving is knowing what kind of features people are interested in. I usually write these things so that I can fill a void -- mine, to start with, but I'm always open to slapping on some useful features that I may not have thought of. Besides, it's usually not hard once you have the base framework either. So, I need some ideas.

One last thing that's been bugging me -- I need to find a new domain name for this stuff. larrythecow.org is too long to type. I can't think of anything I like, either. Something short would be nice.

Ah, my, lots to do, and not sure of what to work on next.

Comparably, I can't stand Best Buy. Sure it may be cleaner / nicer in some ways, but they also have really annoying pestering sales people who pressure you to buy magazines at checkout. It's gotten to the point where I pay cash just so I know I won't get signed up for an MSN subscription or something. The worst problem I ever had with Circuit City was that I couldn't figure out where the cashiers were hiding.

One thing I really liked about Circuit City was that it was always a nice place to quietly just browse and look around without being bothered. That might contribute to their poor sales (no sales people bothering me, no customers making noise), but I'm still going to miss the ability to go through the aisles at my own pace and just look at stuff without being interrupted. At Best Buy, they always have *loud* music on overhead, and the displays for most stuff is badly lit. I guess I'm just old school.

There's a *lot* of stuff I've bought at Circuit City. In fact, every major piece of entertainment hardware I've bought there at one time: game console, TV, HDTV, receiver, speakers, CDs, DVDs, remote, car stereo, etc. I even bought my netbook from there just last month (it's a Lenovo IdeaPad, I still need to write a post about it).

I'm bummed.

Edit: I keep thinking about this -- not Circuit City specifically, but shopping in general -- and I figured I'd comment a bit more on things.

Brick and mortar stores have, for me, become nothing more than a convenience factor.  I buy just about everything except food, office supplies and clothes online, and it's been that way for years.  One other exception is big-ticket items, like a game console or an HDTV, because that's something I'd really like to see and inspect in person before I buy something like that.  But, for the most part, stores have just become the go-to place for when I don't want to wait.

I'm sure that Internet sales played some part in how badly business has gone.  It's obviously much simpler for Amazon to update a column in their database to say that a DVD is on sale, versus Circuit City who has to plan the thing ahead weeks ahead of time, prepare circulation and ads and still time it with the website as well.  There's just so fewer steps for online stores, and it's been my experience (as a shopper) that traditional stores are just pretending to ignore that the Internet exists completely, and not trying to compete at all.

There is one kind of a store that I would like to see, and that's ones that have hard-to-find items to start with.  For instance, there's nowhere in Utah that I could go to buy a Mini-ITX board today (well, not without a huge markup of 50% or more) or find a video store that has pretty much every title available.  Part of that problem, of course, is that I live in Utah.  I realize that, as far as populous states go, I'm in the boonies.  But I also realize that because of the economics, it's not gonna happen ... a long tail store just isn't gonna spring up.  It makes more business sense to sell just the hits.  Of course, a part of me thinks there could be a compromise -- just have a simple store frontend with one cashier at your warehouse.  I don't wanna browse, I know what I want, and I could just go in and pick it up that day for the online price.  No glitter, no fuss, very little overhead, and I can still get what I want.

Anyway.  I'm not an economics major, and I'm not really interested in why some things work out or don't all that much, but I'm pretty certain that the business model of ignoring the Internet as competition is what is really hurting these traditional chains.  I've summed up a lot of my thoughts in a previous post of how a video store chain could catch up and compete in this one: video stores are deprecated.  That pretty much says it all, I think.

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, since I'm big on making resolutions all the time. But, when I'm gone for a long time (Christmas vacation) and come home, I tend to have a new perspective on things.

When I got home from vacation, I had a fresh approach on how things were setup in my apartment. I could look at it more objectively since I hadn't been living there day to day for a week. In my living room, I have a card table where I throw all my incoming mail and just general stuff. I hate organizing and filing paperwork, whether its bills, receipts, things to do or archive or whatever. What happens is I just lump them on my desk and tell myself that I'll get to them later. Later usually meaning anywhere from next week to next year.

I took one look at my desk and thought, "this system isn't working. I'm going to completely scrap it." So, I did.

I realized that the stuff I had sitting around falls in one of very few categories:

• Bills I need to pay
• Papers that I think may be important so I want to hang onto them (warranty information, updated insurance stuff, whatever)
• Receipts
• Mementos (movie stub tickets, cards, drawings, stuff I wanna keep)

Aside from stacks of ads and newspapers and junk mail that was lying around, that was it. So, I decided that instead of trying to save it all and eventually get around to it, I'd try a new system where I just have a place to put all of it, or get rid of it. Essentially it comes down to four options: deal with it, file it, shred it (or throw it away) or recycle it.

As far as stuff to deal with, that's just bills. I looked at the ones I hadn't paid yet so I checked out if I could do online billing so I wouldn't have to worry about them anymore. That's already helping. The rest, I just write checks for and send em off. One thing I always do, as well, is I keep my old bills for everything I get sent (credit cards, insurance payments, phone bills, whatever) and archive them in a file folder. I decided I'm not doing that any more. I always hang on them because of this vague sense that someday I might need them or something's going to happen where I'll have to look something up. Screw that. That *never* happens. If something does come up, just get on the phone and call them up. I figure I'll let the corporations do the record keeping, I'm tired of cluttering up my desk and my life dealing with paperwork of stuff that's routine and isn't gonna change anyway. I do keep the important ones, like my credit card bill and my credit union statement, but everything else is easy to access and I'll never need them again. Into the shredder they go.

The recycling stuff is easy, too. I get some junk mail, not a lot, but most of it's already targeted for me so a lot of times I'll hang onto it thinking I'll look at it later. What happens though is I never get around to it, and instead if I need to find something I just use the Internet anyway. So, I just have a small box that sits next to my front door where I immediately throw any junk in there so it gets recycled. That's done with, too.

There's also my little mementos. I already have a small tin jar where I keep memorable stuff and keepsakes, but it was getting full, so I found a shoebox and just started using that. It's big enough to hold everything, and it works great.

Finally for the stuff that's "important" but doesn't really fit in a file folder all its own, I just decided to get a set of folders and label them monthly only. That way, if I ever do need them, I can just look back to the month when I think it came up, and I've already got it. And I don't get nervous knowing I threw something away just because I didn't wanna find a place to file it.

So far, my new system is working great. The biggest problem I had, I realize, is that I completely overestimated the value of some paperwork. Realizing that I hadn't ever gone back to look up stuff at all, ever (minus financial stuff) really helped put that in perspective. I really hate the feeling of having too much paperwork in my life. I cleaned off, threw away or filed all the clutter on my desk and I can soon get rid of it completely and just have a few boxes on my floor where I deal with all the incoming mail from the moment I get it. Minus the bills, of course. I'm still working on a system for that one.

Best of all, that's one idea that's been coming up lately that has been really helpful. Too many times when I have a system that isn't working, my initial reaction is, "well, you just need more self-control." That's just a recipe for disaster because you're constantly coming up short. It takes some thinking outside the box and using your imagination to scrap the system and start over, but almost everytime I do it, it just works out much better and far more efficient than I could have supposed. It really takes some perspective to see that the entire thing isn't working, though, and then have the strength of character to start over. It's worth it, though.

• I'll finally cancel Comcast and switch over to watching Netflix movies (in the mail and on demand on my Tivo) and everything from my massive library
• I'll eventually buy that Mini-ITX motherboard I've been wanting for so long, only to find out something really simple (like sound) isn't supported in Linux.
• I'll think about getting surround sound again, but will shrug it off because of the high costs of speakers
• I'll find even more PS2 games that I'll fall in love with (I'm already blown away by how many I've found, I figured I'd be lucky with 2, but its more like 12 so far)
• I'll finally go to Disney World for a vacation
• I'll think about driving down to DisneyLand but shrug it off
• I'll spend an entire day setting up an extra box to run Windows so I can play with and test streaming to and converiting for Tivo, PS3, PSP etc. and then never use it 5 minutes after setting it up.
• I'll get tired of LOLcats.  Maybe.
• I'll think about retiring from Gentoo again, but instead just disappear for a month or two and take a hiatus.
• I'll break something major in the tree post-hiatus.
• I'll finally find a decent place to host my webpages for cheap (need postgres 8.3, php5, mysql5 and cron)
• I'll merge GPNL and Packages websites into one, and have it use AJAX everywhere and break permanent URLs
• I'll finally finish GPNL backend to read ebuilds directly (almost done, actually)
• I'll think some more about learning C++ so I can rewrite bend / drip to access discs directly.
• I'll buy Mr. Belvedere on DVD the second it comes out and have a marathon watching at least 4 hours of it in a row (hey, it happened with Silver Spoons .. and Super Friends).
• I'll finally buy the last 3 seasons of Voyager (my favorite Star Trek series, ironically ... and I have all 7 seasons of TNG and DS9).
• I still won't upgrade my ancient version of MythTV
• I still won't switch to Blu-Ray, but I'll buy a few discs just because they look awesome in HD (Batman Begins, Kung Fu Panda).
• I'll finally finish writing my MPlayer Gentoo documentation (halfway done)
• I'll finally write my howto on creating an embedded Gentoo MythTV frontend under 220 MB (works great, SSD ftw!)
• I'll really love it when skating weather comes around and I'll get into it much more this year.  I'll start to learn how to balance properly and get a decent kicturn in.  It'll be a great summer, and I'll spend every night going out.

I'm pretty predictable, so I think most or all of those will come true.  Lots of stuff I wanna get accomplished, that's for sure.  I left out the more personal stuff since I don't really touch on that here anyway.