Tempestuous Fury

Time for a blog post! It’s been awhile since one of any substance; I think I’ll just toss one out there just because. That and it’s more fun than being frustrated being unable to play Star Wars Battlefront 2 online.

I have finalized the Gentoo installation, and have pretty much built my way back to the type of system I had before switching OSes. IceWM is in, and everything is almost what it was before. Sure, some things are missing (I’m not sure why Gentoo considers xcalc unstable and therefore worthy of masking, but gnome’s calculator is an okay substitute), but all in all it Just Works (TM). I even have flash now working under the firefox 32 bit binary, an option that the Gentoo people very thoughtfully provided for lamers like me who lack that purist streak for running all 64 bit everything on their AMD64. So now I can get annoying flash commercial content just like any other ordinary Windows user! Yay!

I’ve discovered a few cute oddities as well. For example, did you know that if you compile BZflag with a speed optimization flag of greater than 1 for GCC in your /etc/make.conf, it compiles successfully but you can’t shoot other people, just yourself? That was a good one, connecting to servers and getting pwned nonstop. And the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that my original problem with the Audacity x86_64 version was probably due to the fact that I had the flag set to 3, the highest setting. No one in the Gentoo Handbook said anything bad might happen, so I figured faster was better… But now I know better. And I’ve really learned alot about Linux just setting up Gentoo. Also, this is really the first distribution of Linux I’ve used that makes it easy to compile your own custom kernel. It’s no wonder I’ve always thought it was so difficult and esoteric before–it’s because before, all I used were distros with kernels made by other people with lots of funny patches here and there. Yup, Red Hat 9.0 and it’s offspring mainly, with a year there with Debian. It was all kinds of difficult to roll my own kernel because of all the procedure layered on for these distros before you even got to menuconfig. And then the one time I finally try with CentOS, it blows up and overwrites the original only good kernel with a bad one that didn’t compile right with all proper patches. With Gentoo, it’s very fundamental and basic… You have to do it all yourself, but the upshot is you know where it all is and goes and how it works when you do it yourself. Thank goodness for the documentation of the Gentoo Handbook, which is really quite excellent, otherwise only total nut jobs would use this otherwise excellent distro. Even UT2k4 runs better and more smoothly with the options page working better, just on account of the OS change.

The only bad thing so far is that the alsa sound drivers or something just doesn’t seem as good. My attempts to record music from .nsf files to .mp3, a hobby, are being stymied by quality issues. It seems Audacity isn’t picking up the sound as well as it did once; the quality has suffered for reasons unknown. It is likely a setting issue more than anything, something I’ll figure out, but only after awhile. It isn’t about any of the settings I have written down as part of procedure; something else has changed.

The latest thing I’m working on in general life is health insurance. Rates are ridiculous–what else is new. And, our company can’t get anything decent going; I can get a better rate on my own. It’s very sad when that happens; it makes you wonder what happened at the negotiation table, because companies are supposed to deliver better rates to employees by helping to foot the total bill. If the company is paying out significant money but I can’t get anything better from them than the individual walk-up rate from the Internet, then something is really wrong.
At work, they like me enough that one of my supervisors told me anytime I want overtime, just say so and he can arrange it. Of course, he doesn’t know I’m salaried, hence not eligible.. Heh heh, that’ll be amusing telling him that one. But maybe a special arrangement can be made. Who knows, it’s worth a shot… I’d be willing to hang around an extra hour or two for a little extra pay on a weekday, it’s not anything worse than what I did for school. Besides, I have an unrestricted Internet connection, heh heh.

And so life rolls on.  And I go the office everyday, sit in my own little box with my own comfy chair, and churn out plot plans or formboard or concrete foundation drawings for surveyors.  Sometimes I get cold because there’s so much A/C in there.  I even have a big bag of Milky Way fun size bars there now, just so I can fit in eating candy every once in a while trying to become fat like everyone else (but failing at it).  Occasionally, my life is broken up by fun events, like today when I realized I’d forgetten my lunch on the kitchen counter ten minutes into the commute to work.  Yay for breaks in monotony, eh?  But life is very…  routine now, I suppose.  Just a little too much so.