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Well.. I guess things are kind of looking up.. mostly. My wife is bored to shit at home without a good major gaming system. My friend was looking to sell his PlayStation 2. He sold it for only $40CDN, which... well.. is just insane. Anyways, it all works and it's all packed up over here and ready to be shipped, in my old WebTV box, no less. My sister's PS2 is chipped and I've been waiting for the next version of Firepro Wrestling to come out. I know most of you don't care for that sort of thing. I don't know why but Japanese wrestling simulations with hundreds of wrestlers and thousands of moves really get my blood going. I had the same friend that sold the PS2 copy Firepro to a DVD and.. it works! Well, not exactly. I can do absolutely everything in the game, from editing wrestlers to creating my own belts and choosing match setups, everything... except actually start the match. The game just goes into a neverending Now Loading display. How depressing. I'm pretty sure that the issue is with her PS2, as she's been playing Final Fantasy 8 and it always freezes at the same FMV and there's nothing she seems to be able to do about it, even with originals. My job search continues with some nice prospects. A place downtown is looking for a system and network administrator for Debian GNU/Linux which is something I can definitely wrangle. The only problem I can see is that they require experience with qmail, a mail transfer agent like sendmail. It's a beast that many a sysadmin have fallen to so I'm a little.. worried. I've got some resources to help out with that though, so.. I shouldn't be too worried. I've also found a place looking for game testers. The only problem is that they are testing cell phone games and I really hate cell phones. I don't know how cell phone gaming can ever take off when they are hampered by that small, vertically oriented screen. (Sorry Neill, but it's true.) I'm going to have to write up a CV and cover letter, which I'm a little worried about as I've never needed to use them to get a job before. So anyways, I'm going to be struggling with that sometime tonight and sending them in before the sun comes up. I'll also be sending them in to Ubisoft because, well.. you never know, right? Wish me luck. Tags: jobs, linux, memories, montreal, videogames, wife
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So, what's new? My wife doesn't want to talk to me anymore. She's angry and upset about our situation and I can't say I blame her. She's pissed off that things have been the way they have been. She says the last six years has been a waste. She doesn't know that I care about her and so on. I'm trying to work on things from my end, but it's difficult to satisfy her since she can't see my efforts firsthand. It may not sound fair of her to feel the way she does, but if you have been through our relationship, you'd probably understand and side with her on things. Again, I can't blame any one else but myself. Being so far away from her just makes the strain and stress on her so much more difficult to bare. Being back at home has somewhat revitalized me. I find myself feeling a lot more pro-active about things, including what I need to do. My mother and friends are all somewhat surprised at the difference. Where there was sloth is now determination. Where there was self-pity is now confidence. Things will be getting better in my life, not because of the ebb and flow of what's around me, but because I will make it so. I will lose my family if I don't and so I won't let it happen. My mother's friend has been confirmed dead. I never got a chance to meet the guy who had befriended my mother for the last three years, but I hear he was a really nice guy, if a little too much of a drunk. No new information has come up about it. My mother's been handling it a little well, but I'm sure it simply hasn't hit her yet. She said she's felt the same strange nervousness she felt when her father had passed away before it had hit her. She's been understandably having difficulty breathing. My breathing's actually gotten quite a bit better since getting home. I began to snore years ago, probably as I've gotten heavier. I remember many times how I would wake up in the morning with a completely dry mouth. I used to think it was a sign that I was diabetic, but now I know it's simply because I've been snoring so much and so deeply. Since coming home, my mouth doesn't feel anywhere near as dry as it used to, so I can only assume that means that I'm not snoring as much or as loudly. No one's said anything about my snoring in my family so.. I don't know. My sister had her first soccer game back from her first somewhat major injury, a severely twisted and sprained ankle she suffered over a month ago. She's been using crutches up until I arrived and she's since gone back to work and has started school again. She wouldn't have come back for soccer at all this year but her team was in the city-wide semi-finals and she felt like she needed to at least attempt to play. They ended up winning the game after two overtime periods and a shootout. She played well over half the entire game, much more than she expected or that I would have liked her to have played. They were losing 4-1 with 10 minutes left when her team scored a quick flurry of 3 goals, including two that she potted herself. Great job. I've been spending my day attempting to call the Canadian Immigration office, but I keep getting disconnected after being told that they are handling too many calls at the moment. It's not fun, but I'm hopeful to get someone.. eventually. Between calls, I've been surfing through Craig's List, looking for jobs within the computer field that aren't asking for 50 different certifications or similar. I found something that sounded somewhat interesting and rifled off a quick e-mail. An hour later and I was on the phone with a man named Joe who was explaining to me what they were looking to do. They're looking to start a web hosting business with something of an environmentally friendly twist. The guy already has a business selling recycled paper and recycled paper products (notebooks and the like). Anyways, he explained to me that he has a friend that has no training that's just been screwing around with Linux, trying to get everything like Apache and PHP working and that they eventually want to be able to sell webspace and have the ability to offer content creation systems.. sort of like PHPNuke. There's going to be a lot of MySQL and mail server stuff involved as well as mailing lists, which I haven't touched yet. It doesn't sound like anything that's really out of my league by any stretch of the imagination. Nothing I hadn't already experimented with over the last few years. The talk lasted for about an hour, during which Joe and I both got to know each other better and I started fleshing out what will actually be going on. This is basically a new project on his plate and I know the guy doesn't really have much in the way of money, but even if it doesn't turn out, at least I tried and I'll have something to put on my applications from then on. Anyways, he liked me and said that he wants us to sit down together at a cafe or something with his friend sometime on the weekend. (His friend is apparently a new father and doesn't really have much time on his hands to meet with me or work on the project himself.) I feel good about this, but I'm somewhat weary about being paid, especially since the project hasn't yet gotten off the ground. Money is important at this point. I can't afford to spend all my time working on something just to get screwed over. It's something we'll have to talk about at our eventual meeting. It's not like I couldn't get a second job or something like that anyways, right? In the meantime, I'll keep looking. I'll keep working on bettering myself.  neillparatzo's recent post was somewhat inspiring. (Hey Neill, know if they're looking for anybody in Quebec City?) (How cruel is it that one of my mother's best friends was named Iris, just for her to go blind a few months after her birth?) Tags: death, health, jobs, linux, memories, montreal, sister, wife
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So I'm sitting on the couch watching TV with my son. The station's on Nickelodeon and we're checking out this show called Lazytown. I've seen it a few times. It's got kind of a strange vibe to it. The show's mainly about getting kids to be active and stuff like that. The whole show kind of makes me think of some wacked out Italian eurodance video stretched to 30 minutes in a sense. The main character, Sporticus, is a superhero all about getting kids active. He's got an Italian accent from what I can tell and he bounces, jumps and tumbles constantly during the show. 
Sporticus posing with a young fan - yes, even his weird mustache is blue.The show's cast is rounded out by Stephane and two other CGI characters. The show's all done as a mix of live-action and CGI, but its style is really something quite original and doesn't feel.. well.. dumb. Anyways, there's a song or two an episode and they all sound like they could be hits on the dance music circuit.. lyrics making about as much sense as anything Aqua's put out. Anyways, so the kid and I are watching today and this 9 year old CGI character named Pixel has his computer start to smoke and Sporticus runs into the house to unplug it.. and has to pull something like ten different electrical plugs out because the kid has something like 5 monitors hooked up to his computer. (Remind you of anyone?) So somehow after doing this, Sporticus loses his memory, just as Pixel complains that his computer appears to have lost its memory as well. (I think he might even had said something about bad RAM chips.) So after a while of fooling around with the memoryless Sporticus, things return to normal and Pixel boots his computer back up for the first time. I happened to notice something when he did. Now, he's completely CGI as well as all his computers and so on... but for a second, I thought I saw something familar. On Pixel's screen was a blue background with white text on top. I didn't get a chance to see it right away, but I sure did the second time around. The screen was covered in text readouts of RAM installed and stuff like that, sort of like what you would see on a BIOS screen and at the top left corner of the screen was... Linux kernel version 2.6.8 (..... I seriously want to find a screenshot of it. Even though it wasn't like.. an actual screen.. I'm just kind of shocked to see something like that in a kid's show. I'm guessing there's quite a few Linux users in the show's crew. C'mon guys, if a fucking fake CGI 9 year old could run Linux, why can't you?!? Just kidding. Tags: billy, kentucky, linux, memories, tv
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Well, it looks like KDE and Wikipedia will be closely cooperating which will bring more integration of Wikipedia's information to KDE's programs. Despite my previous bemoanings of the entire concept of wikis, this could lead to some very interesting possibilities. I know KStars, a sort of interactive star and planetary map, is one of the first projects to talk about the integration, such as being able to right click on any star in the sky and go to a wikipedia entry on it. Amarok, my prefered music player, already has wikipedia integration, allowing you to read about the music you are listening to with a single click. You know, it's kind of funny.. everytime I somewhat exhaust my ideas of what I would like to have in a desktop environment, KDE just ends up bringing something completely new that I hadn't thought of to the table. So if you were to have some new features added to your current desktop (ie - no third party external apps), what would you like to see? EDIT: My mistake, it's not Wikipedia that KDE is working with, it's Wikimedia, which includes Wikipedia, Wiktionary and their other projects as well as developing an API to aid KDE developers in the integration. 
Amarok showing off its current Wikipedia integration feature.Tags: kde, linux, software, wikipedia
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