Intellidick.com - Pure Insanity

Another day goes by, more patches submitted to my favorite open source projects… It seems like I now spend most of my time just waiting for my patches to appear in the ChangeLog for the project so that I can code another patch on the one that I just submitted.

Is this wrong? Is it strange? Do I really want to help out with what I believe is a great project, or am I just waiting for my 10 seconds of fame before another devs bumps me off of my beloved ChangeLog?

I suspect that i’m not the only one that loves the satisfying feeling of submitting a patch and having it accepted into what you consider to be an excellent piece of software.

Back to cvs.sf.net to watch for more ChangeLogs… I just submitted a handfull of patches.

So there I am, trying to get some sleep. But no, it’s 2:30AM and I can’t sleep at all. I skipped dinner and now i’m paying for it. There will be no sleep for me until I get some food.

I throw on some form of clothing, hop into the Evo and head out. Stop in at the bank for some funds and i’m ready to dine. But what am I going to eat? Is there even anything open out here? How far am I going to have to drive to get something?

And then I saw it… WHITE CASTLE! Oh yeah, open 24 hours a day and just waiting for me to get there. I see the glowing sign amongst the hoardes of closed restaurants, I know this is my only choice. Oh well, here goes.

A 10 pack? Nope, too much. A 4 pack? Still too much. Ah ha! The #2 combo… 2 double cheeseburgers, fries, and a coke. That’ll do it. I pull up to the speaker only to be greeted by the friendliest attendant ever. It must be really boring at White Castle at night. There’s a girl inside just staring at me, like she’s never seen another human being. Wow. I have hit rock bottom.

Now i’m at the window, no stopping now. I’m absolutely STARVING at this point, i’d eat the scrapings from the bottom of the fryer at this point. The friendly attendant greets me, takes my money and returns my change. He then goes away and comes back with a coke. Mmmmm… not that I need caffeine at 2:30AM but I know it’s for washing down those delicious sliders that are coming my way. After a few minutes, the attendant returns with my food and thanks me for “stopping by”. (Like I had a choice at this hour!)

Wow. This smells fantastic! My whole car smells of the legendary White Castle burger. I’m driving like a madman to get home so I can tear these things apart. I’m actually excited about eating this stuff!

Ahhhhh… back at home. Finally! I rush in the door, flop down on the couch and tear into the bag. Okay, let’s be logical here… fries first… I immediately start shovelling fries into my mouth like someone who hasn’t eaten in weeks. 5-6 at a time. I can’t even taste them. I don’t even notice they’re barely warm and extremely doughy. Who cares? I’m so hungry and this is food. The whole box of fries is gone in about 45 seconds. I didn’t eat those, I inhaled those.

Now it’s time for the sliders. That smell is really getting to me now. These have GOT to be better than the fries? I mean, who goes to WC for fries? No no no, it’s the burgers, that’s why I went there. And man do they smell good. First bite… ARF! I almost gagged. Wow, it’s been a long time since i’ve eaten one of these. I forgot what a strange taste these things are. They really caught me off guard. But again, who cares? I’m so hungry i’d eat the maggots off of a dead animal. (And i’m not entirely sure that these burgers weren’t made of that)

So anyway, long story short. Just say no. STOCK FOOD IN YOUR HOME. 2:30AM dinner runs are BAD.

I think i’m going to go vomit.

Hot Dog math occurs when you buy a pack of Hot Dogs and a pack of Buns. One comes with 10, one comes with 12. Therefore, you never have enough buns to match the number of hot dogs and you end up in a never ending cycle of having to buy one or the other.

A body shop is a term I heard used in reference to a consulting firm. I just find it funny that it was called that. I guess it was in reference to the fact that these places usually just hire warm bodies and act like their people are better than your existing staff. I’ve seen both sides of this coin, so I think I can get away with saying this.

Open-Source, what a great idea! It’s a shamed we get to watch it fall apart at the hands of millions of talented programmers. What? Dare I taunt the mighty Open-Source movement that has given the world so much wonderful software? Yes, I dare. Get it together people! Let’s stop all of the fighting between Open-Source groups. (GNOME vs KDE, classic example) Instead of everyone trying to beat each other, why don’t we work together and kick some a$$! Let’s all work towards the same goals and make something that’s unstoppable! I notice that not a whole lot of people have tried to re-write Linus’ Kernel. Doesn’t make much since, does it? Why re-write, when we can contribute and make one awesome product. If everyone is truly dedicated to taking back their Operating System, then let’s all work together and build something fantastic. Here’s another example, instead of lots of different Open-Source HTML editors, how about one that’s written by all the developers? Wouldn’t that be an awesome editor? And don’t leave anyone out either! Get the XML programmers, get the JavaScript programmers, get the PHP programmers, get all of the web programmers! Let’s build a web design tool that makes the people at Macromedia FREAK OUT! Wouldn’t that be impressive? Now, take that concept and apply it to EVERYTHING in the Open-Source movement.

Just IMHO, I could be wrong.

Why do we have the W3C if no one follows their standards? As a web developer and coder, I often run into issues where I use what I think is a standard technology for web development and end up with something that only works in very specific browsers. CSS is a perfect example, every browser seems to handle CSS a bit differently. I mean, Firefox and Opera are good at it, but we won’t even go to the IE place. It’s sad to say, but if you want to do anything nice with your web page anymore, you almost have to code for a particular browser. Our web standards are ass, especially when a browser SAYS it supports one of them but doesn’t render it correctly.

The best window manager for X on the planet. Packed with graphical wonders and lots of speed. e16 is the current stable release and is recommended for most people. e17 is currently in CVS but has lots of next generation features. (If you have a development machine, load up e17 and try it, you won’t be disappointed)

So there I was, wandering aimlessly around the CompUSA… I roamed over to the Mac section and saw the Dual G5 with the widescreen LCD monitor and I just had to go play. And then the Apple representative walks over there to talk to me about why I need a Macintosh…

After he spends 10 minutes incorrectly explaining the benefits of SMP on the Mac platform, he then proceeds to compare Intel Hyper-Threading Technology to Mac’s Dual Channel feature… I then politely informed him that Dual Channel is a memory access feature, while Hyper-Threading is processor feature. He smiles and informs me that i’m not correct. “Dual Channel is for Mac’s with 2 CPU’s”, he says.

So, I let the cat out of the bag and explain to him that I WORK FOR A MAJOR TECHNOLOGY COMPANY AND HE’S COMPLETELY WRONG! Then I popped open the web browser on his Mac, navigated to Google and loaded up the tech specs on Dual Channel memory access… then, just to be an ass, I whipped over to Intel’s site and loaded up the specs on Hyper-Threading and the new Dual Core chips that are out. Last but not least, I asked him what the biggest problem with the Dual G5’s is… “Heat”, he says. So I navigated over to the section on thermal footprints and showed him how the Dual-Core chips operate within the same thermal footprint as the existing single-core chips.

I love CompUSA. I especially love the fact that this guy WORKS FOR APPLE! Not for CompUSA! What kind of crap is that? I mean, if it was just some kid selling Mac’s at CompUSA i’d have just let him talk, but after he touted that fact that he worked for Apple, I had to shut him down.

Sorry folks, Mac’s are cool, OSX is cool, but Apple is ass. Sometimes just being personable is not enough to convince an avid PC user to switch over. (A Rule from an old friend of mine : NEVER speak at the TOP of your knowledge, if you don’t know, just shut up and admit it, you might learn something.)

A specific flavor of RAID, named after an individual who is famous for his “backup strategy”.

non-Redundant Array of Independant Directories (on different machines where he can’t find them)

So, this blog started as a MoveableType blog on someone elses server… mistake #1… Of course, I never bothered to make a personal backup… mistake #2.

So here I am, just waiting for that person to FIND MY BLOG! I had lots of good stuff in there that I want to transfer here.

Maybe i’ll get lucky and he’ll find it. *cough cough*