A Rare visit from the muse

In the midst of singing along to CAKE and wondering what rejections await me from the fairer gender this year, I was struck by a bolt of inspiration; take the words to Short Skirt/Long Jacket and re-write them to reflect my own opinions. And so with out further delay I present my opus, that is until the RIAA drops the hammer on me.

I want a girl with a kernel like a diamond
I want a girl who knows what's best
I want a girl who ctrl +x's to cut
And eyes that burn like cigarettes

I want a girl with the right memory allocations
Who is funny and witty
And geeky as a white hat
She's playing with her compiler
She's putting up her source
She's touring the lab
And picking up slackware

I want a geek girl with a short skirt and a long jacket

I want a girl who plays games early
I want a girl who stays up late
I want a girl with uninterrupted uptime
Who uses a debugger to hunt down mem leaks
With fingernails that shine like justice And hair that is red like fire

Who is funny and witty
And geeky as a black hat
She's touring the lab
And picking up slackware

I want a geek girl with a short skirt and a long jacket

I want a girl with a smooth leather cuirass
I want a girl with good stat rolls
At a gaming session we will meet accidentally
We'll start to talk when she borrows my dice

She wants a computer that is penguin powered
She wants a computer that will get things done
She's changing her name from Kitty to Karen
She's trading her win box for a white Apple laptop

I want a geek girl with a short skirt and a long jacket



The livejournalness of the above almost makes me ashamed, but I couldn't let a rare creative idea go untapped.

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* Pete Was here *
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And the time is: 12:23 AM have a nice day.
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Pi!Pie!Cake!

Last night Cake played The Crystal Ball Room. The show was... (wait for it) ... AWESOME. The opening band The Punk Group was, interesting in a strage sort of way. They are what I would imagine the bastard child of Devo (yeah the entire band) and Johny Knoxville would look like, the music was 'unique'. But they have no love of country music and made that clear in their lyrical stylings, and sang about being hackers and video games, so it all balances out. Cake opened up with Daria, I didn't even know that was a Cake song. When they played Comfort Eagle the whole crowd just went nuts. And then it began, John McCrea stirred up the crowd with the first of a number question the establishment speeches, it was almost as good as the music. I say almost only because the music was that good. No Phone was simply a kick, the song got stretched out to a good ten minute affair, the bulk of which was the crowd chanting the chorus with John directing the massive choir in two parts (left and right) and another speech on how hectic daily life is and people needing to just relax. Sheep go to Heaven was another awesome sing along, and a speech that poked fun at the, lovely, state of Indiana and how well they upheld the separation of church and state, culminating in "I wanna buy some damn beer in Indiana on a Sunday!". The second encore was kicked off with not a word but just the opening cords of The Distance, the crowd had just calmed after cheering on the second encore which was the biggest energy output of yelling, clapping, cheering, and stomping to date, and then got even more excited. There was a moshpit just to my left that had been about 5 guys for most the show, during The Distance it enveloped about a quarter of the general admission floor. All in all the awesomeness was overwhelming. And best of all I didn't get shot!

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And the time is: 3:26 PM have a nice day.
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I am THE google whore

After an early leak of the server information and subsequent early stress test, which some would call a failed slashdotting, Google talk has gone live, and is damn cool indeed. The official windows client includes builtin voice support: point, click, talk. Given Google's recent push behind gAIM as part of the Summer of Code project, one can only hope to see versions of gAIM in the not to distant future that tie in to the voice segment of the network. For those of you that want to connect with gAIM right now (and I do encourage it), the server information is as follows:
Screen Name: your gmail address without the @gmail.com
Server: gmail.com
Use TLS: True
Port: 5222
Connect Server: talk.google.com

Go forth and chatify. I can be found at FirstName.LastName@GMail.com

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* Pete Was here *
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And the time is: 12:19 AM have a nice day.
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Season 3: Now with 99% less politcal angst!

With a new school year nearly upon us, and some provocation, I figured now would be a good time to make my return. I'm a geek, duh, while I was away from bloggger I established my self else where on the net. I'm going to be working up north in Portland another few weeks and then shipping out for Corvallis on the 14th of September. I start my new job in the inner circle (of hell or geekdom, only time will tell) on the 15th. I'm working, prepare yourselves for this, tech-support/help desk for the incoming freshmen down in OSU, it's going to be be bad but I get to hang out with the Techdesk/Resnet Staff so it's worth it, and I'm getting paid, and no damn it I will not end this sentence!

This should prove to be an interesting year, I'm going to be back on Wilson 4 with the Enginerding crowd**. I'm rooming with Doggy (Mike) and (by proxy, via Doggy) Lorri, a combination which should make for good music and an abundance of fresh brownies.

That said welcome to blog, I may even get around to updating the layout if I'm feeling artistic/bored.

**If there's sufficient interest/boredom I'll give a face book guided tour of the crowd.


And as ever: All you Base Are Belong to US!

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* Pete Was here *
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And the time is: 6:49 PM have a nice day.
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A newer lower pit of OS Hell

For a long time I was convinced that you couldn't possibly do worse than windows when designing an operating system... I was wrong... very wrong. Ubuntu is great for grandma, but horrible for power users. I was damn near stir crazy the second my feet hit the ground.

Remember the Synaptic package manager I thought was so cool, it's great for INSTALLING packages, but if you want to remove them it will kindly tell you that if you want to remove that package it will have to remove: Ubuntu-base, which is the entire operating system. I can understand if you were trying to remove some key library, but I was trying to remove a command line text editor I'd never heard of. I conceded I wasn't going to be able to strip the system down anymore, and then installed thunderbird, and gcc.

I'm a KDE user through and through, I accepted that there would be some differences transitioning to a GNOME desktop and app suite. But come on GNOME's Nautilus file browser is the most horrible piece of crap ever. After realizing I wasn't going to be able to explore my new system I took to the console to continue my browsing. My console adventures were brought to a quick halt by the fact that root was "locked out" (for my convince I'm sure) with a scrambled password. To get around this I ran passwd in sudo to set the root password. So I finally have a shell with root access, I check /mnt to check on my windows partition... /mnt is empty so I created a windows folder, edit fstab to make my mounting life easier. Ok, so now root has read only access to /mnt/windows but that's ok I'm root I can fix that real quick; chmod 700 /mnt/windows ... no dice still read only access oh well another problem for another day. I'll give myself read access while I'm here chown root:peter /mnt/windows chmod 770 /mnt/windows. Yeah neither the chmod, or the chown had any effect what so ever. At which point I said "screw this noise I'm taking my ball and leaving". After I post this I'm going to boot up knoppix and rm -rf that POS back in to the abyss that spawned it.

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* Pete Was here *
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And the time is: 6:48 PM have a nice day.
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The art of sucking an elephant through a drinking straw and other such impossibilities

I've finally gotten around to doing what I should have done ages ago, namely back up my laptop's hard drive. This wasn't really prompted by the fact that it's a good idea to keep an up-to-date backup at all times. I backed up my hard drive because I was going to mess with the my partition table, and really didn't want to foobar my entire system in one fell act of stupidity. I suppose I should mention why I was messing with the partition table in the first place.

Back in January I picked up an external USB-hard drive on account of my laptop's internal drive running pretty full (for most of the year 58 out of 60 gigs). And since I had an extra hard drive I thought why not make it bootable and throw Linux on there. And so I did... but... I ran in to one (small) snag the BIOS on my laptop can't boot from USB devices. So I was SOL. During the second OSU LUG install fest I got my hands on a copy of partition resizing tools namely BootIt NG. Using my new toys I shifted Windows down disk enough to install GRUB. New bootload in hand (or rather on disk) I proceded to install Ubuntu on the external drive. Ubuntu was the flavor of choice for install fest ][, and I must say I'm very impressed. The Ubuntu installer is the easiest install I've ever seen, and Ubuntu's Synaptic package management system is beautiful, for those questioning the technical clout of Synaptic it's apt based. The only problem I've seen with Ubuntu is the stock kernel provided has modular USB support, so it can't be used in a system with root on a USB drive (like I was trying to do). After screwing with Ubuntu on and off for a few weeks now I gave up on getting it to play nice with a USB root partition. So I broke down and decided to do a true dual boot on the internal drive, which is how I ended up having to once again shuffle partitions around on my internal drive to make room for Linux. As it stands I'm probably going to put Gentoo on there on Sunday, but I'm going to throw Ubuntu on there this afternoon just to see how it goes.

And now to further sing the praises of BootIt NG and Linux, between a BootIt NG cd and a Knoppix CD there isn't anything that can't be done to a hard-drive. I've got to say that between those two you've got the ultimate back up suite. BootIt NG for resizing partitions, knoppix for backing data up. Using the Unix dd command included with knoppix you can make a perfect back up of any hard drive partition, it's exactly the same down to the “empty” space. The only limit of dd is the bus speed between the original disk and the backup disk. FYI, at USB speeds that's a fairly hefty limit; 3GB/Hour, 60 gig drive, you do the math.

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* Pete Was here *
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And the time is: 3:05 PM have a nice day.
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Math makes you stupid

What on earth is wrong with Math majors? What sort of person would willingly take all manner of math classes that make no sense what so ever. I've got my second Math 232 (Descrete Math II) mid term looming and I can best sum up the last few sections as: the parts I understand make sense, the parts I don't understand I can apply most of the time, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD CAN SOMEONE TELL ME WHEN TO APPLY WHAT THEOREM TO WHAT QUESTION. I'm hoping to pass this mid term pass the final, have homework pull my grade up to a C, and then never deal with this garbage again. On a lighter note Philosophy is a total mind trip and easily the most fun I've had in a class.

Between philosophy lectures, Tim (the sorcerer hardware hacker), and (Bible) Josh I think I might actually be getting a handle on this whole good and evil thing. Given my cynicism it's easy for me to play my self off as a bastard among a sea of uber bastards, or to let my ego run rampent and get all holier than thou, but all in all I'm not a bad guy (I think). Even if all people are greedy, immoral, etc. by nature I'd like to think I'm making the best of a bad situation. Isn't morality fun kiddies?

You know you'd think after hving been around for nearly 19 years a person would have a good grasp on right and wrong, my internal confilicts alone should be enough to disprove that idea, much less the veritable sampler plate of ethics one finds in one wing of one dorm.

It's 2 am, it's my bed time

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* Pete Was here *
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And the time is: 2:00 AM have a nice day.
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Living up to my end of the bargin

Well I promised Nathan I'd get a post up not later than today, and I am I've still got about 4 hours to spare. College life has been good this last term and a half, I've met new and interesting people of all types.

Today happens to be one of my favorite days of the year and for the 18th year running I am... *drum roll* ... still single. At this point I think it's fair to say it's all on me, I'm a dually confirmed "nice guy", I just lack the courage to talk to women and when I have the courage I lack the more rational mental facualties required for higher discourse. The highlights of the day were dinner with the McNarry horde and free candy distributed bye Lauren and Cambel.

I'm rusty at this bloggin stuff, and life's be mundain lately. I may be back, I make no promises. I'm sure this post is riddled with bad grammar and spelling, still sticking to the same high standards of quality.

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* Pete Was here *
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And the time is: 7:40 PM have a nice day.
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