:w

Yes, that’s a VIM :w (not some new fangled creation), as in, I’m actually writing something here!

I haven’t written in three months, and haven’t committed any code in four…as I’ve been a bit distracted by a few things, notably:

  • That whole job thing. Turns out when you write code 8 – 10 hours a day it drains the coding life out of you. Am still working on overcoming my hate for coding past 8PM. I’m convinced that gedit/vim silently rearrange my code after 8PM so that it has more compilation errors, driving me to stop coding.
    • Perhaps it’s the immense rage caused by running Lotus Notes 5 (under Wine, no doubt!)
    • Perhaps it’s the fact that PHP likes to silently fail or cause strange errors?
  • Cycling season is finally here. Finally. Gotta love that good ‘ol mid-western weather for keeping me indoors for so long! Started riding 50 miles/week, then ramped up to 75/week, and then last week jumped right up to 145 in a week (which is hurting right now). Just shy of 500 miles for the year so far; not bad considering I’ve got another 10-12 weeks of good weather and 1,000 miles left toward my goal.
  • Being goofy. Yes, I’m a goof.
  • Kicking some serious ass in the IT department’s completely unofficial but incredibly serious(ish) mini golf tournament. It’s an intense sport I tell you.
  • The fact that bars in Chicago are open till 4 in the morning — enough said. This is simply trouble for a guy like me!
  • My truck has been in the shop more hours than I’ve driven it. I’m giving up — I am going to sell it; I don’t need it anymore!

I’ve been up to a few interesting things lately:

  • Setting up my own shiny new Linode to host vanstaveren.us stuff (websites, email). Exim + Dovecot makes for one heck of a good email server. I should probably write about Dovecot as it’s pretty swift, not too challenging to set up, and the LDA makes it even better. Cooperates much better than my old host’s IMAP server. Don’t ever consider 1and1 for any kind of hosting unless you like server load averages in the double digits, spiking up to 50+
    • Thanks Aaron for pointing me to Linode!
  • Trying, oh so hard, to make my Nokia 770 listen to a simple Ogg Vorbis stream (or even a file). No seriously, I think I’ve spent quite a few hours on this, and I can’t get it to work. I’m getting near ready to re-flash it and start over I’m so distraught. Isn’t Ogg Vorbis one of those things that Just Works on a modern Linux machine?
  • I’ve set up my own rsync mirroring system for Gentoo’s Portage tree. My Linode box (sam) sync’s every night, my server here at home sync’s from that, and my other three boxes (including my box at work, behind a firewall, over my VPN) sync from there. Think how much traffic Gentoo users could save their mirrors if they only had a similar setup!
  • I’m finally — yes, it’s true — starting to work on Banshee again, working on MTP stuff. I’m going to be traveling in a month and my goal by then is to be able to send tunes and playlists to my device with zero trouble.
  • I’m planning to go to GUADEC; this will be my first, and hopefully a lot of fun! Hopefully while there I can gather up a bit more motivation to get back to writing a bit more code :) I’ll also be visiting my job’s London office the following week. All in all it’ll be a sweet trip! If anyone is looking to split a room in a hotel, please drop me a message — I’m certainly looking for a roomate!
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