Entries from January 2008 ↓

Another blast from the past…

A friend of a friend (well, he’s not really a friend, but that’s beside the point) had to have their dog put to sleep recently… and he wrote a blurb about it. Reading it reminded me of my own experience in putting a pet to sleep.

Rebel was a pure bred dalmatian, liver spotted, with one blue eye and one brown eye. I know everyone says this, but Rebel was one of the friendliest dogs ever… unless he had to play the protector, then you had to watch out.

We first got Rebel, actually, the man who would be my step-dad first got Rebel when I was about 7… he and my mom got together shortly there-after, so I pretty much grew up with him, and he was pretty much my best friend. Through grade school, middle school, and high school he was there when I came home, waiting by the door with that whip of a tail flying back and forth. (we had to make sure the breakable ornaments were above tail height when it came time to decorate the Christmas tree.)

Continue reading →

I originally wrote and posted the following on my website over 10 years ago…

Ok… I admit it. I’m a bachelor.

This was confirmed tonight when I went to clean out my fridge. (This was part of a grander cleaning of the kitchen that I do every few weeks whether it needs it or not.) Now, I didn’t go to my fridge expecting to have it confirmed that I am a bachelor, but when I was talking later to a couple friends, and mentioned a couple of things I found there, they both made it a point of telling me that I am.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the things I found. First, something I’m sure not just bachelors will relate with here, this is something anyone who’s had their fridge too packed for awhile to notice that little container in that bottom corner. And by the time you find it you have no idea what it was It’s now a dark greenish-grey color, but what color it was originally?

Continue reading →

Ok, the housing market around here is… well… not good. At least not for those trying to sell. And even worse for those trying to build homes to sell. Which is what I have been doing for almost three years now.

But that seems about to change. Right now I am facing the very real possibility of a lay-off. It is a short-term issue, but this is a presidential election year. I am not going to hold my breath on things turning around all that quickly.

I started out in commercial construction a bit over seven years ago on a fluke. I was doing computer work for a start-up company, data-base building, web site work, etc. They like working with me and wanted to hire me full time, but said I would have to learn construction since there wasn’t enough computer related things to keep me busy full time. So I cut my teeth on a tenant build-outs are the MSP airport, a couple of small strip-centers, and a few other things here and there. And I liked it.

Continue reading →

Most guys my age remember Zork, one of the original computer adventure games. It was all text based, you actually had to visualize what was going on… you used a little thing called your imagination.

Then came Pong…and video games were born. Soon that little dot you were smacking back and forth across the screen was replaced with bigger and better games. But what to do with all those left over Pong dots? Well, feed them to Pac-Man of course, taking another major step in the evolution of video games. (Ok, I am taking a a bit of creative license here.)

But haven’t we all wondered what would have happened if there was no Pong? What if we got stuck in the realm of text based gaming? Have you ever imagined what Pac-Man would have been like in such an alternate reality?

Well wonder no more.

Pac-Txt is the game that Pac-Man would have been, if it had been done in the age of the Great Underground Empire. It starts out;

You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

From there you basically just move around the maze, eating the dots and avoiding the ghosts…

What, you thought there was more to it than that? It’s still just Pac-Man ya know.

I’m a bit slow sometimes.

I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting the best resolution and such with my Samsung monitor on the new computer… then I stumbled upon the fact that I had to install the restricted stuff to get the right driver for my ATI video card. Have the booming 16801050 now… and on top of that, the visual effects is working.

So now my windows wiggle and jiggle when I move them around, I can switch to a different workspace using the scrollwheel (maybe that was something that could be done before and I just never noticed?), and I see previews of windows when using ALT-TAB to switch windows…. but I want more!

First, I had to install the advanced control panel options.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Now when I go to System | Preferences, there’s the Advanced Desktop Effects Settings option that opens the CompizConfig Settings window.

It is going to take awhile to go through all the goodies here and figure out what stuff is worthwhile, what’s just eye candy and which of each I want to keep.