the sonorous swell

Here’s a big surprise :I’ve neglected this blog again! Anyhow here is a quick update of new things since the previous post. I’ve been to and come back from Maui. I was there for a week with my girlfriend Jamie. It was great and I’m wanting to go back for some more snorkeling and paradise. We bought a dog the first week of November, his name is Atlas and he’s a minature Daschund. He’s pretty much the man (and perfect for keeping me warm at night). I’m trying to convince Jamie we need to get him a bulldog friend. We’ll see about that though. Aside from that, Christmas was good for me I got the following games: Fallout 3, Bioshock, LittleBigPlanet, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Wipeout: Pulse, Patapon and Sonic Rivals. I guess I’ll have to start making time for all those games. I wouldn’t normally call myself a big gamer, but some of these games could change all that for me. Other than that nothing new to report. My goals post from last year is still on the front page, it’s a little dissapointing since I didn’t meet most of them (though I did significantly cut back on fast food intake). Ah well motivation to be better this coming year! We’ll see if I can post here again next week – no promises though.

So, I’m looking at that nice list of goals I made in my last post and feeling a little bit disappointed with myself. I’m behind on all goals, except fast food. Though I haven’t been perfect at avoiding fast food I’ve definitely cut way back on eating out. And to be fair things haven’t been as simple as they should be. Right after I wrote my post I got sick and then a few weeks later I moved my girlfriend from San Diego to Kansas in 3 days. So there has been a lot of things going on. However it has all settled down, and now the weather is getting nice out. Yet, I’m here no where ready to run. So that means it is time to kick some lazy butt and get into gear.

Programming/Game development wise I have been somewhat sidetracked, but I do have everything setup on my linux install now so it is ready to go. Python plus pygame: check, subversion: check, music and rhythmbox: check. I must say that I am more and more amazed with Ubuntu everything “just works.” I plug in my camera, and boom it asks me if I want to import all my pictures. I put in a blank cd and bam! Do I want to make and audio cd or a data cd, and once I’ve made my choice I’m presented with a very simple interface to do whatever I chose. I have to say Serpentine is easily the best music cd creator I’ve ever used. There is absolutely no fuss or anything involved. I even was able to get my gamepad working in mame simply by plugging it in. Of course getting mame set up was a huge chore, but I don’t blame ubuntu, I blame the mismash of information and partial tutorials and the fact that I run amd64 on making nothing easy. However I’m happy to say that I did prevail and am now considering writing up a post about the steps I followed to get everything in proper order.

I have nothing more substantive to post. There are a lot of software releases coming out soon that I am excited about. The major one is Firefox 3. Somehow throughout Firefox 2′s life span I’ve solely used the windows version, though apparently the linux version of FF is terrible and an afterthought (no offense to the wonderful people who made it, I’m just repeating what I’ve read and have experienced recently). FF3 plans on fixing most of that. Also the next version Ubuntu (due in April!) looks to be completely awesome. Ars Technica did a review about all the new features. I’m mostly interested in the sound features and getting caught up on other developments that have not been backported to Gutsy yet (*couhg* new pidgin releases *cough*) Anyway, I need to catch up on some sleep if I am to get any of these goals started soon.

So its a new year. I’m still not sure how to use my web space but I went ahead and finally started paying for it. Before I had a free promotional thing from 1 and 1, while I never had any problems with their service, Dreamhost simply has more features I’m interested in. So friends who’s sites I’ve obliterated, it wasn’t on purpose. It was time for a move, so here we are. I’m not sure what I’ll do with all the old posts and sections I had before. I’m not sure how to get them on this site anyways. But here we go. Here’s to a new year and promises of change.