Chris Lee

my new apartment

Sun, 30 May 2004 23:57 -1000

Moved into my new apartment on the 25th and I've been chilling with Tony down in Boston for the past few days. Life is good! I have no furniture, but I have a TV, my computer, and cable internet.

I also have no food. Nor do I have any cooking tools, like pots or pans or knives, to cook food, if I did have some. My fridge looks pretty typical of what I'd guess most bachelors' fridges look like; there's donuts and some leftover pizza (if you can call Pizza Hut pizza, anyway).

Steph was supposed to fly up this weekend, but her boss was evil and told her she wouldn't have a job to come back to if she did. Which sucks. And my aunt was supposed to come up to visit, but she had to put out some fires with one of her tenants, so that hasn't happened yet. So they've both ditched me but it's ok; everything is going to work out just fine. Steph is on another "I think I want to move up there" kick. Hopefully this one will actually result in her moving up here. I've got my fingers crossed, but I'm not holding my breath.

Other than that... the tattoo looks awesome, still, and damn, but I need a desk and a chair for this computer. Hrm.

excitement in the air

Mon, 24 May 2004 04:01 -1000

Finally feels like things are going places. I just got back from a great week and a half in Arizona on Wednesday night; for whatever reason, I came down with a fever almost immediately after I got back, which included a really nasty throat condition where it hurt to swallow. Fever broke a day or two ago, but the throat still hurts. Nasty.

For the first time since I can remember, Arizona was actually fun to be in. I had a BLAST. Kyle came down from Colorado; I got to see pretty much every single one of my friends; I got a tattoo; and I did some other things which I'm quite proud of, but which aren't fit to print, especially not on a public blog like this. I even got to say "goodbye" to a few of my old teachers from high school, which was awesome.

And, to top it all off, I move into my new apartment on Tuesday (yeah, I got approved!) and two weeks from that, I start at redhat. Even cooler is that daniels is coming up on July 11th, and we're gonna go crash OLS and kick some ass in Canada.

Oh, and apparently (according to Steph) I've become some sort of a pimp. Can't argue with that. :)

asteroid release

Thu, 06 May 2004 12:30 -1000

Published Asteroid on looky today. Should be interesting to see what kinds of responses I get to it. I'm sure that nobody will ilsten to my "If you don't like it don't use it and don't bitch" disclaimer, but oh well. Such is life.

In other news, I should be able to hack on my dotNET config page Sometime Soon (TM) so hopefully I can finally get that uploaded into CVS. I know I've promised it before, but honest - it's coming!

And other stuff is on the horizon. I love KDE development. Also, the guys from Sun's Project Looking Glass team kick ass. (I met them at the xdevconf last week.)

new toy

Wed, 05 May 2004 03:18 -1000

Picked up a new toy yesterday, a Logitech USB 200 headset. Hooray for USB audio! I'm amazed at how nice it is. I'm not an audiophile by any means, but this headset is a lot better than I was expecting. And it works great under Linux, as well as OS X. I hear it even works nicely under Windows...

I love this stuff. Had fun trying to get everything to play to the headphones, but it wasn't too difficult. Highly recommended.

looking at laptops

Tue, 04 May 2004 03:06 -1000

I've been looking at a few laptops lately. Apparently the model I've been ogling - the hp nx7010 - is very much similar to the Compaq X1000 (which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone). I have decided that the specs that I want are:

Centrino. Pentium M or bust, I say. (It's the only way I'm likely to get any decent battery life out of a laptop these days.
Wide-screen 8:5 aspect ratio. I suspect that 1280x800 may be too small; 1440x900 seems about right, but I will probably love 1680x1050 as well, but the important thing is that it's wide-screen.
I would really prefer it without an OS but the other two specs have so far made this look extremely unlikely, as the only manufacturers I've seen happen to be stuck with nasty evil agreements with Microsoft. (see previous rant.)
Oh, also. I need at least half a gig of RAM, a 40 gig hard drive, a mobility Radeon would be nice (since it seems like the mobile GeForce chips aren't that prevalent in the Centrino machines...), a DVD/CDRW combo drive, Firewire, and gigabit ethernet.

Yeah, it sounds like what I want is basically a Powerbook, I know. Except that since I'm going to be working at redhat, I get the feeling that an Apple laptop would be sort of ... bad karma.

We'll see what happens.

my own personal reason to hate Microsoft

Mon, 03 May 2004 16:28 -1000

How's this for a reason?

I called up HP/Compaq, Dell, and IBM today. I can't get a notebook/laptop computer from any one of these manufacturers without paying for a Windows license.

That's right. I can't even get any of these systems blank, sans operating system. I explained to the guys over the phone - and especially the HP rep seemed sympathetic - but the problem is that Microsoft has strongarmed these manufacturers such that they can't ship any laptops without a Microsoft OS.

This is complete and utter bullshit. I'm just going to wipe the hard drive and put Linux on it anyway; I'd rather that the hard drive just came blank, as I don't expect any of the hardware guys to install Linux on it for me.

Ugh. I was hoping that one of these guys might be able to set themselves apart from the rest by satisfying this one wish. Looks like I was wrong.

asteroid surprise

Mon, 03 May 2004 16:02 -1000

I wrote a new style from scratch a long time ago called Asteroid. It was done half as a gag, and half because I was bored. I also decided to implement it from scratch (instead of following my usual method of hacking on the dotNET code) so that I could provide a better platform for others to build their styles on. (As an aside, I also took out all of the Asteroid-specific code and put it into a Skeleton style, which is BSD-licensed and available on my site).

However, being that I'm lazy and Asteroid got Good Enough TM for me to use without being too annoyed with it, Asteroid was put on hold at version 0.2. Until today, that is. I got an email from David Chester, with the Munjoy Linux distribution, and he has implemented much more of the widget style code, and submitted his changes back to me. (As an aside, Munjoy looks quite nifty, and I'm going to have to try it out. KDE + Debian = Righteous.)

So, yeah. I started something neat, and somebody else picked it up and ran with it. Open Source code rocks.