Adventures in Zephux

Yesterday, Eric (my fellow co-op, the useless mechanical) and I were commissioned by the engineering manager to do some time trials on something called the spoolers. What they do is spool the aluminum foil onto the little cardboard rolls. We were to record the speed every minute on each of the nine spoolers (there are eighteen, Eric took nine and I took nine). That means that every time the second hand on the clock (which we jacked from someone’s office, why do they need a wall clock? We need a stopwatch) reached the top we would walk down the line and record the speeds, this takes about 35 seconds. So, we would walk back and wait for the clock again. The trails last an hour each. We did this twice yesterday. It was painful.

Today, I got here at 5:15am instead of 7:00am. At the end of yesterday, the engineering manager decided that we should have another trial from 5:45-6:45am. Eric and I agreed because that means that we will get to leave early some other day. Unfortunately, that meant I had to manage to get my lazy butt out of bed at 4:30 in the morning; no easy task. Then, do extremely tedious work for an hour before coming upstairs at 7:00 to do my regular job. Want to know the best part? He just called me again, to ask if we could do it all again tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with the extra work, and I will love the time off, or the pay that is coming, but It’s just so early. I am definitely not a morning person =)

I went, earlier this week, to my first guitar lesson. I think I told you earlier that I was trading computer service for lessons from a guy I found on Craigslist.org. He preferred that I brought my acoustic guitar to the lesson, so I hunted it down at my mom’s house (where it hasn’t been touched in year). A couple of the strings were broken, so I bought a new package and set it up, unfortunately, it no longer holds a tune (I think the neck is warped). Well, that’s okay, it was a cheapy anyway. I think we got it ten years ago for around $100. I decided to stop by Strauss Music Co. on Bardstown road (where they have a great selection by the way) just to check out new ones and see what I wanted. I found a real winner (although, due to my current financial situation, I’m going to do some more shopping before I buy it) it is a smaller guitar, it’s full sized, but the actual body of it is not as wide, which seems a lot more comfortable to play. It’s solid wood and still sounds very nice for it’s price and size, and it’s not plywood. There was a problem though… It was $250. Which isn’t bad as far as guitars go, but it’s out of my current price range. I was looking more around $150 or so.  I want to stop by Guitar Center in Florence next weekend when I go home (my mom lives in the Northern Kentucky/Cincy area) just to see if I can get something cheaper, but I really have my heart set on that one. I can’t remember the brand or anything like that, but I sat for about 20 minutes just holding it and strumming randomly, it felt great.

The real point of the story is, I saw an $8500 guitar there. Wow, I played a $2000 one, but the crazy expensive one costs twice what my truck is worth. That is sad. I had trouble debating whether or not I was even worthy to touch the tag and look at the price. For some reason though, the $2000 one that I played was much more attractive.

I’m finally working on getting the house I rented setup. Yesterday, I bought a mop, some cleaning supplies, some glasses and a pitcher, also a screwdriver set, a shower curtain and some rags. I cleaned the kitchen up a bit, installed the shower curtain rod (which was a pain since there weren’t studs next to the shower, now half of it is just in drywall and I’m pretty sure it’s going to rip out lol, but I’ll fix that later), and freshened the upstairs. Now I really need some kind of vacuum and am in dire need of a lawn mower. (my grass is like a foot high) But it’s coming along pretty well. I actually have a bed there now, that is an improvement.

If you read my latest randomness (I like it’s 38) you will get to read my story of the evils that are involved in creating an entirely virtual PC. Well, I decided to do this more at home just to test it out (and see how fast I could get them to run on top of my Vista installation). So far so good, I am using the trial of VMWare Workstation now instead of the Qemu I was using at work. I used VMWare back in my senior year of high school, but it seems to have greatly improved since then, the speed is amazing. I will be doing some tests against Qemu to see which I like better, I will be running an XP environment, Ubuntu, and possibly an Arch Linux. I’ve done Arch once before and enjoyed it, but it’s time consuming. This a work in progress. Maybe I should try running Vista from a virtual machine, lol, although, I don’t see that going well. Also, I think I have a copy of Server 2008 to test now, I will be posting a randomness about Vista and 2008 eventually. That’s pretty much everything that is going on, still no BitDestroyer work being done… because I’m a bum =)

I finally got fed up with the Fedora installation on my home server, so I wiped it and installed Vista Ultimate. I hadn’t done much looking into Vista, but now that SP1 is out I thought it would be a good idea (Service Pack 1 would usually imply that they have made some major fixes). I expected it to be about a year after release until I installed it. So far, I have got to say, it blows away EVERYTHING I am used to, Linux, XP, doesn’t matter. It is pretty nice, although I haven’t tried any gaming on it yet (it’s my home server, hence, no graphics card, only cheap integrated graphics). I now, however, have a new task for it. Since I am finally getting a home (p.s. I start moving stuff in this weekend) I will have a bigger need for this home server. It’s going to be doing some real work for me, here is the general rundown:

TV Station - Hooks to my living room TV and plays all my videos, movies and shows.
Network Files - Just feed my file shares over the network
In house music - Play music through the surround sound
Online Audio Streaming - Me and my bro are gonna do a talk show
Web / cgi proxy - Why not make it a web server too?
Ftp - So I can access all the files on the share from anywhere
Mail - Why not? the servers already there
BitDestroyer - It will be the main server for my BitDestroyer game.. when it works
SQL database - Necessity for web
Jabber - I want a jabber server.. just because
Gizmo available for calls (or skype)… I want people to call me!
CS:S server (or unreal tournament 3) - When I get my gaming rig assembled, Ill be needing a server for one of these.
VNC - … of course. What good is it if I can’t tweak it from afar.

All of this will work in Linux except the TV station. For some reason Linux keeps messing up my video playback, and wont play windows formats.. blah blah blah, you get it. So my switch back to Windows is necessary for this server (I dont want Vista though, I’m trying to get Windows Server 2008). And all of this is easily doable from a Windows Machine (with the exception of the necessary downtimes when I reboot… that is going to suck, but should only be for 5 minutes every three days or something like that). I am excited about getting it set up and working. If it functions as well as I would like it too, I want to register it as Azerious.net or something of the sort (Azerious is one of my names) to run a website on it. And if successful this blog will most likely be moved to there, but maybe not. If it works really well and I get all the dns issues and stuff worked out (I’m thinking zonedit) then I might *MIGHT* migrate KreepyIndividual and KiPCs there to save myself on the hosting fees, I mean I am already going to be running it 24/7 anyway. I’m already paying for the electric, why not host those as well and save myself the monthly fees.

Looking back, this was a better story for a randomness, so I’ll post it there too. Ill also, I’m sure, post an update on how well it’s working when I get the internet connection at my house working. Should be early May or late April here. I can’t wait to get my stuff in there.

I am actually starting to feel better (thank god!), so I have been working a little harder. Still nothing new for the site (but should be real soon), however, in life I made a pretty good deal. On craigslist I found this guy who teaches guitar lessons. He is supposed to be really good, so I thought I would email him and ask him if he would be willing to do an unusual trade. I was willing to trade him my computer services and IT support for his musical training. Sounded fair to me, and he thought so too. So, for only the price of my amazing self-taught skills, I get to learn the guitar, which I’m guessing usually costs at the least $15 a lesson. In return I have to help him get a website up and running and tie it to a merchant account, but that doesn’t sound too difficult, also he has some basic computer repairs to do, but again, trivial for me. I am very excited over this trade. I like this barter system. If there had been computer in medieval times, I could have been a wealthy man.

On another not, I was busy working on my KiPCs site so that I can actually get some more computer business. Only the services tab actually has pages, but there is quite a bit of content up there, and I now have the layout just how I want it. Tomorrow I am going to start the actual PC advertising side of it, where you will be able to configure your new PC with all costs included and it will spit you out a nice quote. This will take some work, but I am talented enough with PHP that it shouldn’t be too bad. I am actually looking forward too it. Should help my business move along a bit. I am also going to start (as soon as I have the website fully functional) handing out those nice little business post-it notes I was talking about. Hopefully, this will bring in a couple more builds for me so I can afford my new baby =) I’ll talk about him on KI eventually. The software setup will be interesting.

     Wow, can’t believe it’s been a week. Well, I haven’t written because 1) I have nothing really exciting to talk about, and 2) I’ve been sick, and I still am. I got pretty sick on Saturday and since Sunday I have been popping Ibuprophen and sucking down cold medicine every 5 hours or so. It has made me feel much better, but I’m still in a drug induced trance for the most part. It has left me very tired and I can’t seem to remember what I did yesterday… That’s not normal. Hopefully, I will start feeling better soon and then I will be normal and functional again.

     Before I got sick, I was working on my KIPCs.com website. The new layout is done (and looks quite a bit *cough* identical *cough* to my Kreepy Individual layout, except with a nice light blue instead) I just have to get some of the content ready. This is what is taking most of the time. I want to build a custom computer configuring program in PHP, shouldn’t be too difficult really. I am not concerned. I just have been too lazy to sit down and do it. I have been advertising a bit on craigslist and such, and when I get the website up I am going to buy some of those annoying post-it notes with my info printed on them to stick on cars and such, randomly. I know, it’s obnoxious, but hey, it gets my name out there, right? and it’s a cheap and convenient form of advertising, so I don’t want to hear it. =) 

      Also, I rented a house last, I guess it was, Thursday. I did give up on that fixer-upper job I was looking at after they pushed my move in date back. I think I mentioned on the first I was going to see one, well that is the one I ended up renting. It is ginormous, has WAY more space than just me and my brother need, but I am comfortable with having too much space. I’m fairly certain we can find a way to use it. I want to put a workshop in the basement, so I will have space to work on computers, and work on that Mame cabinet… that will really happen someday. It was a little expensive, but still less than a mile from school, so I’m stoked to actually move in. I am heading home (Cincinnati) this weekend and I will be bringing my full size bed with me. That means I can finally start moving stuff. I slept there Saturday night with my girlfriend. We just threw a sleeping bag and comforter on the floor of what will be my room, just to break the place in. You always have to sleep somewhere shortly after renting it.  We were going to leave the heat off since it is April, and the electric is still in the rental companies name, so I felt bad. But at about midnight we realized that if we did not do something, we were going to freeze to death. So we finally turned it on. And then had to drag the sleeping bag over to vent. All in All, it was a nice experience. I can’t wait to actually live there. It needs some cleaning though, the fridge stinks, so that will need to be cleaned out; the floors all need to be swept; the bathroom needs a real thorough sweeping and mopping; I’m going to attempt to get the paint off all the windows (when they painted they did the window frame very sloppily and painted half the windows);  I also need to purchase some blinds, maybe some curtains, and definately a rug or two, because the hardwood floors will be killers if I don’t, plus it will stifle the echos. Going to be a big project I fear, but I have time.

     With the exception of the sickness, it has been a good week since I have last posted. I’ll post about how the move in goes, and about what’s going on with the websites when I finally get some stuff done. I need a new project for my randomnesses, I haven’t done anything entertaining in a while. Unfortunately.

Today I was supposed to move into my new house. Unfortunately, they called me and said they hadn’t even started the cleaning yet (remember that I said the whole house was basically in pieces). So, I think I will just say screw the deposit and try to find another one. This company (Winterwood inc) is very unprofessional and can’t seem to get anything done by deadline. I have an appointment at four to see another house about .3 miles from that one. It’s 400 sq feet larger and has a full size, unfinished basement. That way me and my brother can start a fight club not really.

Based on the pictures, I like it better, but unfortunately it is a significant amount more expensive. I think it is worth it though, just to get away from this other company. I’ll know when I see it if it is right for me. It’s still close to school, which is what my initial attraction to the first one was. With either one I am going to have to start a huge project on fixing up the yards. I want so plants, maybe some flowers. Something to pretty it up. Both are very bland right now, some color wouldn’t hurt.

Unfortunately, that is about all that is going on in my life right now. I wish there was something more interesting (besides the fact that I can pick up internet in my office now with that wonderful little external wireless card I bought) going on. My life is getting boring. That means it is time for a new project. When I get into the house and get some tools, I want to start on my Arcade Cabinet. It’s been years in the making.

     Well, another week has passed by and still, no decisions have been made. I do, however, have some good news. It appears that the company I co-op with likes me so much that they want to take me on part-time in my off semesters (at my school you co-op ever other semester for two years, adding up to one whole year of work). This means that instead of working in a grocery store or something, I get to keep my cushy and amazing job throughout the other semesters and get to keep cashing those gloriously high paychecks. I asked about that possibility during the interview and they said it was HIGHLY unlikely, they had only done it once, but apparently I have impressed them, because they are trying to work it out (no guarantees yet).

Also, I’m still excited about this coming Tuesday. That is when I finally get to see what my house looks like after they have gotten it all cleaned up. I get to do another walk through, make sure everything is okay, and then sign my lease. I hope it is at the very least satisfactory, if not spectacular. There wasn’t a lot to work with, but as long as all the doors have knobs and there isn’t six feet of water in the cellar (there was last time I visited) then I will be pretty happy, I think. See, I didn’t have a problem making a decision about the house, so why are other life decisions so difficult? I think it’s because I over think them. Sometimes, thinking is a bad thing. I should just throw myself into things more often with my first instinct and see how they go. If I had done that I think I would be much happier with my situation right now and not feeling so trapped by everything. I’m not in a good place.

I’m keeping my spirits up though. I’m going home to see my family for the weekend. My mom just got two new baby kittens, they are long haired and snow white. I have a real soft spot for kittens (I am very much considering getting two for my house. They need a buddy, so two is the only option). Usually, I’m not much of an animal lover, but I can make an exception if they are cute and promise to be cuddly… and for God’s sake, use the litter box.

I guess I have moved along in some of the decisions now. I think I know what I want to do in the majority of the situations. The most important thing is I would like to just drop out of school, quit work, and just vanish for a while. Hop the next train I see and go where it takes me, bringing only my laptop. E-mail will be my only form of communication, can’t escape with a cell phone. Man, do I hate cell phones. However, since all the gloriouness is not going to work out, I will resort to the other changes. I am still reading that “The Case for Faith” book by Lee Strobel, and it is really having an impact. It counters a lot of the concerns I had about religion. I really think that by the finish I could be seeing things differently. I’m only about halfway through now. I will now thank an individual by name (probably the first time ever on my site, I don’t like to mention people’s names, too personal and it’s not your business), thank you, Hannah, this has been very helpful and I’m not even done yet. Good call, I appreciate it.

Isn’t it horrible when you are in the mood to write, but nothing will come out? That is the state I have been in for three days, notice this post was just me rambling. I don’t have anything interesting to say, nor have I really had an original thought in days. My life is becoming too boring and tedious, and just depressing in general. Something big will change soon though, so watch out for it. I hate redundancy.

     My post yesterday tells of how I am constantly confused and can not ever make up my mind in almost any aspect of my life. I am going to further validate that fact by writing, now, about my religion. Let’s start at the beginning, for a very long time, I was a Christian. Of course, as an unquestioning child, it is easier enough to be whatever you are asked to be. My grandparents were Christian and took me to church on the occasional Sunday, therefore I was Christian. But, as I got older I began to go to church less and less. Then, one day, I just stopped all together, but I still believed.

When my dad died (I was 12), I began to go to church every week again. I rode my bike to the church down the street, I went to youth group, I even was a greeter for a while. Granted, this was in Florida, so there were not a lot of people my age around (the average was 60), but I still enjoyed myself. They were nice people and I liked helping out at the church when I was needed. I did this for a while and even got baptized there when I was 14. Now, I’m really not sure what happened. There is no real explanation for it, except that I would question the existence and possibility of the computer sitting right in front of me, but somewhere along the lines, I stopped believing. Maybe it was the fact that there is an infinite amount of space in the Universe and the odds of us being important, nay, let’s go with the slightest bit significant, to whatever higher power may, or may not, be out there was astronomical. I put the same argument to those beliefs as I do to whether or not aliens exist… Of course aliens exist, how could they not. The odds of no other life ever coming into existence in all of the limitless solar systems out there, in the probably limitless number of undiscovered Universes in the multiverse, is ludicrous. So, why would a higher power care for us at all. Do we care for ants? False, bad example… Do we care for the individual cells that exist in everything that exists? No, we do not. We don’t have feelings for each individual living cell in each and every living thing, So, why would a god possibly care for us?

On some days that is my story, and I would argue it, but only on those days. On other days, I see other stories. I woke up this morning an agnostic, meaning, to me, there could be something out there, but if there is I don’t know if they have any relevance to us. A couple of days ago, I would have claimed atheism, how could there be anything higher than us? And finally, more often than not, I claim Christianity… in a way. On those days I see our God, I talk to him, and, here’s the punch line you were waiting for, I think he’s a total douche bag. HA! These are the few religions I jump back and forth from. Confusing? Agreed. I can’t keep track of what I believe in any better than I can keep track of what I want in my relationship,  or what Operating System I want to use, or what I want to eat. If I could pick one thing, know I want it, know I will always want it, and stick with it, I would be infinitely happier.

What is the point of all this? I want something to believe in. I like the Christian faith, it makes more sense than anything else, again, I don’t much care for religious people, I feel they are very annoying, but still, the faith itself as fine. I think they consciously choose to act like nut cases. I talked to a very good friend of mine, who happens to be the daughter of a preacher I believe. I think what I actually said was something along the lines of I don’t have a set belief, but I’m open to hearing ideas. She had an instant suggestion, she said she had just the book for me. (FYI, it was “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel) After I couple of weeks, which I thought she was using to get home and borrow the book, she brought me a copy and told me to keep it. (p.s. Not going to happen, I will get it back to her somehow, or pay her for it. I was mislead by the illusion that I was borrowing it, I feel bad taking things from people.) This was yesterday.

I have since, meaning this morning, already read 50 pages of the book, and I love it. I’m not too far into it, obviously, and I’m not going to say it’s going to answer every question I’ve ever had (actually I’ve already written on down and stuffed it inbetween the pages), but it is bringing up a lot of the points that I have a problem with in the religion. I won’t go into boring detail, but my point is I’m thinking differently already. Why is this relevant? Well, I’ve decided that I am easily persuaded into different ways of thinking. If I go home and talk to my family (all of them agnostics) I start to feel one way, but I can read something like this and talk to her and feel a completely different way about the existence of everything. It disturbs me a little bit, that my belief system is so weak that I can, with only a couple of words, be persuaded into believing something completely new. I don’t like it.

I want to change that, I still want to know what I want out of life, but I think the first step is knowing what I believe, and then sticking with it. That sounds like a good way to live to me. Now, if I have doubts I can’t do it, so any questions I have I want to get answered, but I really want a set belief system. You can probably tell from my writings that from day to day I believe different things and think completely different. I will go as far as to say In a couple of days, I can manage to change everything about myself without even trying. Example? Back at the end of January I was into freedom of software and developers, I was going to open source all of my applications and reveal everything I know and actually try and get involved in the community. I changed my mind on that one real quickly. By later that week, after writing the randomness that corresponds to that thought process, I decided not to GPL all of my code and to keep all of my stuff mine. At the moment I don’t want others taking my ideas, modifying them, selling them, and making money off my creativity. That just doesn’t seem right, but do you see how much my opinion changed in no time, and computers are my life. If I can changed everything I believe about them and their theory in a day, why can’t I change absolutely everything? I can, and it sickens me.

I guess what I am really trying to say is, after 19 years, I want to know who I am and I would like it to be semi-consistent from day to day. I want to be able to tell someone what I believe, and then still believe it two weeks down the road. I understand that after years I am going to change, but I don’t want it to flip around from one day to another. I want consistency in my brain. Anyone found that Reality Controller yet?

     The device in my head that I have chosen to call my “Reality Controller” is on the fritz. Meaning my reality shifts from one thing to another frequently causing excessive lapses in judgment and a lot of confusion. What am I talking about? I can’t make decisions. I don’t know what I want out of life. One minute I’m sure that I want one thing, then the next minute I’m completely sure that I want something entirely different. It doesn’t make a lot of sense at all. Me and my girlfriend (of only about 6 weeks) have been having a lot of problems. I know, it is way too early in that relationship to be doing that, but none the less, we are. We almost broke up over the weekend, a couple of times actually. However, all of a sudden Sunday, after spending a day talking about what we needed to do, we had one of our best days ever. Which confuses me even more. Now, when I was so sure that we were finished, I kinda want to keep her. It’s a messy situation. It doesn’t stop there though, that’s just my relationship story.

It is appearing in other aspects of my life as well. I find myself unable to make any real life altering decisions. I never know what I really want. I can’t even decide my to use as my primary operating system. I’m currently using Fedora, which is working well, but there are some kinks. I kind of want to switch back to Windows, but only when Fedora does something that pisses me off. Im checking out Ubuntu right now, and I also installed ReactOS (just to see how it was progressing really, don’t intend to use it any time soon). I can’t decide which is for me. It’s still the server I’m messing with, so I really want to go with a Linux kernel, Fedora is my long time favorite, but Ubuntu looks so appealing. And I’m still considering going the Arch route and just setting everything up myself. Ugh, I’ll get there eventually.

All of these decisions, from small to big, effect my life and I can’t decide what I want. Is it normal to not know what you want? I mean, shouldn’t I know what is best, and what I want to do for the rest of my life, and where I want to be? See… my reality controller is definitely busted. So, if you find a replacement lying around. Let me know please. In the mean time, I’m playing with Qemu trying to get some virtual machines up so I can just play with whatever distributions I want. Should be nice. (Also, jumping off the balcony seems good )

I went and looked at that house yesterday… It was practically in pieces. Someone did quite a number on this thing. They promised me that in a week it would look good as new, I’m not holding my breath. I went ahead and put a deposit on it (it was only $200 so no big loss), basically, just to see what it would look like fixed up. It’s so close to campus, and the perfect size, that I couldn’t see passing it up just for a few visual defects. Don’t get me wrong though… It’s a messy house. They need to do some serious cleaning. The yard is my responsibility. I’m going to throw some grass seed down, and put some flower beds up front. Just to make it look nice when you pull up. The rest is up to them. I’ve seen pictures from before it was destroyed, so, if they can get it looking like that again then I will be satisfied. I don’t know if they can do that in the week they promised, but we will see.

It also, for some strange reason, doesn’t come with a fridge or range, so I need to find some. I’m going to hit craigslist first I think, and then the scratch and dent store. This is becoming a much larger task than I had imagined, but I’ll get over it all. I’m sure it will be fine after everything is moved in and ready, but maybe I’m getting screwed. We will see All I know is, it is going to be very boring living there for a month while my brother is still in school. Not sure how I’m going to remedy that. Go out of my mind I guess. It’s only a month. I’ve done worse. The whole situation is frightening. Moving somewhere new, in to a questionable neighborhood, no one you know close by. And you have to sink every bit of savings that you have into the place. I’m ready for this though, what is the worst that can happen? It’s cheap, so at worst I lose a little money, have to back out, and all is lost. Eh… I guess that’s about as bad as it can get. So no worries. Sorry about the rant, have to vent somewhere.