Felocity

Based on my music tastes, a restrictive firewall at work, and limitations of our evironment, I have found the need for music to be very important. LaunchCast (by yahoo) has stepped up nicely except for its dependance on Internet Explorer to run. As it listens to me rate and give opinions, it feeds me more music that it thinks I would like. As a result, I have heard almmost nonstop all day songs that I have enjoyed. Here was a sample from Yahoo of the most recent streamed songs it served up:

Paul Oakenfold - El Nino (Matt Darey 12" Mix) Smashing Pumpkins - 1979 Judas Priest - Tyrant Fleetwood Mac - You Make Loving Fun The Animals - House Of The Rising Sun Thievery Corporation - Liberation Front Depeche Mode - Strangelove George Acosta - The Sound Of Goodbye (Above&Beyond Remix) - Perpetuous Dreamer Aphex Twin - Windowsill The Cure - A Chain Of Flowers Ratt - Round And Round LeAnn Rimes - We Can The White Stripes - Fell In Love With A Girl Van Halen - Panama Fatboy Slim - Gangster Tripping Matchbox Twenty - Leave Tori Amos - Cornflake Girl The Pixies - Where Is My Mind? Zero 7 - Destiny Morrissey - Suedehead…

I say it with an E, not an A. Deal.

There may not have been many who saw the grey version of felocity.org since I cache just about everything related to the site for the sake of speed. However, I don't think I will cache my CSS anymore. I got my Cease and Desist letter like everyone else (and I wasn't even listed!), and to my amusement, Mozilla Thunderbird marked it as Spam and tossed it into the trash can for me. I swear, between Thunderbird and Firefox, I may damn well never have to actively do anything on the Internet; the browser and email will do it for me. Felocity was grey because of Grey Tuesday. If you haven't heard the story, a very talented DJ made a remix masterpiece of Jay-Z's Black Album and samples from the Beatles' White Album. The result was nothing other than a Grey Album, which is groundbreaking and delicious, even if you don't normally care for rap and hip-hop. Of course, as opposed to making ass-loads [Ed- ass-loads is the literal term for quantities greater than shit-loads] of money, EMI has instead opted to swing their proverbial "legal dick" around, hitting everyone who even speaks up against them. Through the forums I participate in, I have been mentioning the site and my turning of felocity.org grey for the day. I got a C&D letter myself. I have included it below for your enjoyment. I also included my abbreviated reply which pointed out I was changing my colors, not hosting any files, and encouraged further correspondence on the issue. The day I get sued because I changed my website colors is the day I close Felocity and move to Greenland.…

And so comes the birth of a new category, and a minor rearrangement of the existing ones. My 9-5 job I am sure will have some interesting stories to go along with the pay, and while routine, it is hardly [The Usual Bit". Things are a bit hectic, mostly because of an administrative decree. This Thursday is supposed to be an open house at the Knox Library (place of employment). The administration also decided that they wanted our current site functional and working by this time. The request was simple enough except that this coming Thursday happens to be almost two full weeks before the site was supposed to enter the initial "soft launch" testing phase. Most of the morning was spent plugging in data and manipulating database tables. The way everything is linked together here is still odd, and still makes absolutely no sense to me. As a result, these past two weeks have been horrible for getting work done. Most of my time has been spent manipulating servers, remembering passwords, and getting my access card. I didn't think anything could be slower than when I was issued my school identification. At CSUMB, it was two hours and that included waiting in line. Not to be outdone by a state institution, my ID card has been in the "being processed" phase for approximately two weeks. On top of that, I hiked over a good quarter of the Naval Postgraduate School tracking down people and getting forms signed. Almost an hour later and having walked between the library and the ID card place more than a half dozen times, I finally got my shiny card. The hopeful result of this is I won't have to wait for the access list checks again. We will see come morning when I get to the front gate.

I have been experimenting with a few PERL scripts, many of which were never designed for persistent connections, especially when it comes to things like IRC connections. However, I have found a beautiful client called CGI::IRC which does everything I could ever want a web-based IRC client to do, including be fast. I'm not entirely sure how they made a PERL script have almost no lag and have decent processing speed, but it does, and it works wonderfully. This is especially helpful given the over-secure nature of the postgraduate school which limited the number of resources I had access to. IRC, AIM, and E-Mail tend to be my typical forums for asking questions, especially when it comes to technology and troubleshooting.…

Kazaa is crawling the Internet (or more specifically Kazaa Lite) for songs, attempting to fulfill a request for a friend who needs to build a memorial presentation for her uncle. Normally, I have objections to the outright taking of music, but I feel this falls on my small list of exceptions, along with cool remixes of popular songs and music artists encourage to be shared. I spent most of today in Pittsburg working on stuff for RECCACon, most of the day before in San Jose, and most of the day before that also in San Jose. I've been doing a lot of driving lately, and I think I could do most of Highway 101 in my sleep. Come sun-up, I am driving back up to San Jose one last time to drop a friend off at the airport. I do then get to spend time with H, something I haven't done in an alcohol free environment for quite some time. I will probably also leech heaps and scads of anime from her since I haven't downloaded anything of my own for as long as I can remember.

An interesting meme (one of the very few I ever do) came from Matt which I thought I would relay here.

If you wanted to reveal yourself completely to someone who has no knowledge of you at all, and all you could do was communicate two books, which ones would you pick?

There is no doubt in my mind that probably one of the best books to explain who I am, why I am, and how I am would be the Exiles series by Melanie Rawn, more the first book than anything (The Ruins of Ambrai). And the second book would be none other than the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglass Adams. Amusingly enough, that book would likely end up on some of my friends' lists as well.…

The dust has cleared, and now that the 14th has passed, I can actually discuss things with people outside of my "inner circle". This inner circle consisted of the two people who knew most of what was going on, fully supported my insane idea, and then provided the means to make it happen. Steph, Amanda, I dunno if you read these silly ramblings, but thank you.

The Vagina Monologues were amazing as always, and I really liked the two new pieces they put in. I actually knew several people in the play, though I didn't know they were in it until I got the program. This is also largely due to the fact I know 90% of these people just in person, and I don't think I know their last names (nor them mine) despite the fact we always see each other around campus.…

I thought that when I graduated, one of the first things I would get would be a decent job at a reasonable pay, and start down the path of careers, work, and assorted insanity. Little did I know that the resume I turned in a few weeks ago would yield an actual job. Thank you shitty retail, screw you Electronics Boutique, and I laugh at you Target, because in the middle of a minor recession for the technology sector, I have found a job. Not only that, but the job is in a technical field, doing technical things, but I am also getting a decent pay compared to what I was making at ASAP. That doesn't mean I dropped ASAP though, I don't want to burn that bridge because there are some good references there.

I have been there for two days now, the first being more of a welcome and a small meeting with the project manager, today being actual work and learning about what is done / in progress. I put in a couple hours setting up sendmail for drupal (the blog they use), and then also worked on the scheduling / calendar problem that seems to be the bane of my existence. I am thinking that the solution will be more of a hack than an actual solution, but that is because the software was meant for blogging, not for scheduling. However, since I am not currently being paid (in class instead) I am trying not to think about it. This mentality is going to take a bit more work. It's not that I shouldn't think about problems outside of the workplace, but unlike my previous job, I actually have hours allocated for the purpose of solving these sorts of problems. It's odd. I used to spend so much time outside of ASAP planning and drawing up ideas and diagrams; I never billed it because I was a tutor first and formost.…

The weekend came, and the weekend went. I think I gave it one of those "sup" half-nods as it went by too. The original plan was to slave away all weekend on my Senior project. While I did get most of the display functions done, I didn't start on the editing and creation functions. As a note more to myself than anything else, I think for the creation function, it will create an empty project and then dump the user into the editing mode. The very positive side of this is that the create project function can be with the editing functions too.

For those I have kept in the loop, I won't be doing my yearly burning hearts party. Although, if I am, I think I will schedule it for Friday night. No sense in crippling tradition on account of me getting to dote on someone. Anti-Valentines Day cards will be on tap because I like supporting the bitterness that many have during this day. Hell, I've been there before, and I understand the suck associated with the day. However, in addition to the burning hearts party, I have also opted to celebrate this year. The gift may not be fully appreciated, it might shock the person, but I am doing it anyway. I am hoping it makes her happy.…

My mother told me a few days ago she wanted to send me a care package of stuff, and in my half-functioning state I sort of forgot about the package. That was, until today when the said package arrived. If was half-asleep on my bed when the mailman came, and my housemate Matt grabbed the package. He tried to set it down quietly, but didn't quite succeed due to the weight and size of the box. I poked my head out and just about squealed with joy. After everything was put into cupboards and stored, I realized I had enough pastas, rice, and go-withs that I was pretty well set until March when normal paychecks resume. My mom is easily the winner of the "Jakob's bestest mommy award" for 21 years straight. And yeah, I know it's a subjective award, but that's okay.

I seem to be ahead of the game by about a week for my Senior Project. Although, having no project management experience for something like this, I am not sure my timeframe was as accurate as it should be. I haven't started putting the module through bug testing yet though and I am sure there are errors galore. Fixing code is usually 90% of your project anyway. I also need to decide how I am going to to the Gannt Chart view. One thing I am really considering is a program called JpGrpah as a set of addins for the program. I need to play with it a bit, but I am very impressed so far with its feature set. If I can integrate it into my module, I would be very excited. But, that's an extra little thing for my project. Speaking of the project, I have left viewproject.php viewtask.php editproject.php edittask.php and then debug the entire thing. I decided to make the create and delete functions part of the edit for the sake of simplicty.…

This morning I sat there holding my precious, not wanting to let her run off and be free. I didn't want to entrust her to another, even though I knew the person who's care I would leave her in would be as warm and as tender as my own. No matter how much you trust them, you still find it hard to let your little ones go. But then they attend the Spandex Boy shooting, take really nice pictures, and will make it home safe and sound. I lent my brand new digital camera to Tessa so she could take photos with it, and while I trust her absolutely, it was so hard to hand it over in the morning after my 597 meeting. From what I have seen of Matt's and Bryce's photos, it is looking awesome, and I think Shannon has made it into everything she wanted it to be. I know a few of you wanted my comments, so I will constrain it to three things, some of which you may or may not get.

• Huge silver codpieces ROCK. Every comic supervillan needs one.…