.  I realized that I never put up a photo of my laptop. Sorry for the quality; I snapped it really quick with my phone, and it’s a bit dark. :]

out.

.  So, I just recently had surgery on my right ankle. To make a long story short, I was riding cross-country on a motorcycle in ‘08. I thought I should be the only one in my lane at the time, the driver of a car disagreed. The car won the argument, and I rolled down the interstate at about 60mph. The end result is that two years later, I’m on my couch with a wrapped up ankle, vicodin, and a month off work.

.  I was hoping that I’d be able to use all this time to get a lot of cleaning/sorting stuff done, but as it turns out, it’s more difficult to do those things when you can’t put weight on one leg. Instead, I’m stuck working on cleaning up some computer stuff. So I rebuilt my long-neglected blog and set about sorting through photos and media. If you’re reading this directly off of toasterlizard.net (and I’m assuming that you are), then you’ve obviously seen the new design.

.  I’ve been trying to work on trimming a lot of things down, both on the computer and in life in general. If you know me well, I’m sure you’re scoffing a little bit, because I’m quite a bit of a packrat. It’s a really hard habit to break. I’ve started with the blog and social sites, like myspace and facebook. MySpace was the easiest; I just deleted my account. Facebook was a little harder, since I actually use it and communicate with a few people pretty actively. But then I’d read this not too long ago, and realized that I had done a lot of the same stuff unintentionally. So, I purged my friends list, following the criteria of “would it matter to me at all if this person died?” Not too surprisingly, there were a lot of people deleted.

.  I guess I never really got around to writing about my switch to mac, which surprised and confused a lot of people. My line of thought basically goes like this: You get what you pay for. I know, I know, there are very nice high-end PCs out there. There’s nothing quite like the unibody macbook pros, though. Up until not too long ago, most of my computing hardware was trash, in the literal sense; I salvaged most of it from trashcans and dumpsters after other people had discarded it. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, because most of what I run (linux, bsd) doesn’t need the bleeding edge of technology. Plus, a lot of the stuff that gets thrown out has been quite modern compared to what I had been running at the time. Other than discards, the last machine I actually purchased was the Athlon XP 2200-based system I pieced together when I was still in college and needed more recent hardware for a required programming class. It’s still quite functional as the media centre PC, and servers up HD video quite nicely.

.  Anyway, the mac hardware is quite elegant. Also, I’d been meaning to try out OSX for a while now. Something about a commercial OS built on a BSD base is just exciting. I can use my beloved terminal and ports as well as have the perks of the beautiful gui. I still spend a large portion of my time working from the console, whether it’s local on this machine or running stuff (via ssh) on one of the linux or bsd boxen.

.  Back to the minimalism kick, if you’re using a mac, you should definitely check out OmmWriter.  It’s actually replaced WriteRoom as my favorite distractions-free text editor. I’ve always been a fan of simple apps that pick one thing and do it extremely well, and OmmWriter is a perfect example of this.

.  I guess that’s it for now, except that Cat’s been a bit ridiculous about making sure I don’t need anything while I’m stuck here on the couch. She still refuses to admit that she’s too good for me, which is a bit endearing. No offense meant to any of you that are married, but I’ve got the best wife in the world. Fact.

.  I love you, Cat.

out.

This was sometime last week. I swapped 802.11g cards in my little laptop, turned it on and watched smoke /pour/ out the front audio jacks.

The laptop still works, though, so I guess it’s not too bad. no internal wifi card, though. =\

Anyway, I really just wanted to test the new flikr plugin.

out.

.  Worth thinking about: I have a house with a whole bunch of things that I “need”, yet I’m home for about ten hours in a typical week.  Really, I’m living out of my car.  This has a lot of implications more to do with computing than anything else, I suppose.  Mainly, it makes me think about how much “stuff” I really need.  All I really use on a day-to-day basis is my laptop and ipod.  I /like/ to also have my notebook and pens, but don’t neccesarily need them every day.  Of course, knowing all this doesn’t help at all when I try to go through stuff and throw things away.

.  Watching something on the History Channel about Nostradamus.  Nick left it on when he fell asleep.  It’s really fascinating, regardless of what you believe regarding his predictions.  Or maybe I’m just a sucker for mythology/secret societies.  Interesting, in any case.  Apparently, something huge is supposed to happen in 2012.  I guess we’ll see.

.  Here’s xkcd on Obama.. http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/28/obama/ I don’t think I can say it any better than this.

. Evil Brett.. making me do stuff. I’ve been a little busy lately. No, really, I have. Amy let me pick up a 48u rack cabinet from a guy I work with, so I’ve been busy setting that up as well. It currently has power (I gave it it’s own twenty amp line from the power box), and I replaced the batteries in the main ups. It also has the basic network setup, but I have to partially recable the house; the majority of systems are now on the bottom floor.

. Aside from that (and holiday stuff, which I hate), we switched back to twelve-hour shifts for the holidays. I have a soldier of the month board I’ve been studying for. There’s a bit of competition between myself and Fitz, so I’ve been running more. Well, running a lot. Enough that I managed to get hurt. It was just a little run (four miles), but I’ve got stress fractures through my left shin now. I find out tomorrow how bad it is. yay. :]

. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Brett, but you’re hitting the photo-album thingy before I do. That’s why it takes so long to get the thumbnails. You’re seeing photos Amy takes that I haven’t seen yet. That’s why some of them are so horrible.. like the one of me reading a book in sleep pants. dc=

. We’ve been listening to the tallywood string quartet. They’ve done a -lot- of tributes that I’d never heard before. You should all (yes, all two of you) go find their discography somewhere. Legally, of course. Far be it from me to suggest anything illegal. :]

. Did anyone else not know that a new Dune book was out? I’ve read it now, and it’s great. Beyond great, even. Classic. I almost prefer it to some of the original books. That might be because I’m a lot older now then I was when I read the originals, but you never know.

. It’s time to go to PT now, so I suppose I’ll post this. I’ll get back to writing more often, I promise. It’s a little easier now that the network’s back up.. :]

out.