eccentric blog

Our lotto pool at work won a few dollars on the 6/49 here today. It turns out we had 5 of 6 numbers... One number away from 15 millon dollars! So close. I guess this is the second time the pool has had 5 of 6. Works out to $72 each. A nice little bonus and means I've made more than I've spent so far anyways :)

posted at: 14:30 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

In an act of stupidty I went out and spent some more dollars on a projector. Picked up a BenQ PB6100 DLP Projector at Staples who had it on sale with a mail in rebate thing for $999 after the rebate. They didn't have any in stock today but it should be in tomorrow. That should eat up a whole bunch of my time in the coming weeks getting everthing setup properly. Gonna have to get me some screen goo as well.

I also went and upgraded my linux workstation to an Athlon XP 2000+ and replaced the Epia M10000 board I was uning in it previously. Its much faster now although quite abit more noisey since I couldn't fit my zalman flower cooler in the Antec Aria case. Might have to look into getting a smaller quieter fan for it sometime soon...

posted at: 14:19 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Well despite having most of they equipment stolen, Camper still put on a great show last night. I guess they got together much of they're equipment for the show from local bands and such which is nice. The show was excellent and I'm glad I've finally got to see them in concert despite how tired I was today at work since I didn't get home until 3am last night.

On another note, I did end up getting the computer upgrade I was looking into and am now running an Athlon 64 based system. It helped performance quite a lot on my machine and things are running alot smoother now. I haven't had a chance to test out a whole lot yet since it took most of the day to build the system and then reinstall windows as of course it lost it's mind when I switched motherboards. Linux of course booted up just fine without a single change. Using the debian kernel I didn't even have to recompile for the change in network card/sound card support.

posted at: 00:14 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

I decided to do a computer upgade to bring my Athlon XP 2000+ up to a XP 3000+ by buying a new cpu. So I went to pick one up today but they don't carry them anymore because the price went up quite a bit as AMD is trying to push the Athlon 64's now. So I've decided to go ahead and go that route now and get an Athlon 64 3000+ and a new motherboard to support it. If all goes well I think I'll go pick that up after work today. It seems every time I decide to upgrade something it turns out to cost twice as much as I had originally planned...

posted at: 15:16 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Noooo! I just got an email from the cracker mailing list and it seems that their gear got stolen last night in montreal. This sucks even more because I have tickets to see them in Toronto tomorrow. Here is the details from the email...

I just got this message from Jonathan Segel - and confirmed by phone with
David Lowery as they were headed down to the police station. Get
the word out about all this as fast as possible!

If you have info, email me: john [at] cursion [dot] com

Or better yet - contact the Montreal Policer.

Message from Jonathan:
all of camper van beethoven's guitars and violin and our merch got
stolen last night in montreal. if anybody has any contacts up here,
tell them to look for our stuff in stores. or hunt down the robbers and
kill them.

jonathan's violin with stickers all over it
jonathan's 1971 strat (sunburst) (with a couple stickers, etc.)O
victor's 1969 precision bass (natural finish)
david's green charvel surfcaster
david's black jackson surfcaster
a couple ibanez acoustics
johnny's black eric clapton strat
greg's frankenstein strat (black) and tele (tobacco sunbusrst)
(warmoth esp or something)
plus mike duclos' precision bass and ezster balint's gibson sg and
danelectro semi acoustic.
maybe more.. not sure yet.
a few tshirts and a road case of cds. including the email list we
collected last night, preventing this from going out to montreal fans!

posted at: 14:19 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

I was talking with hurt a while ago about image viewers and I mentioned how I wish there was a good viewer that supported matching images by content (to find duplicates and such). He pointed me in the direction of gqview and now I'm hooked. It's perfect for sorting through large numbers of images and is setup just right with hotkeys and everything to make life easy. The image matching stuff is working great too and seems to be doing a good job of finding the right matches. It's alot faster than the eterm window and qiv for sorting images :)

posted at: 20:23 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Was reading the debian weekly news today and noticed this great project called DebBlue. The aim is to create a nice consistent set of debian themes to make everything look uniform (grub,bootsplash,gdm,gnome). I think it's a great idea and the theme looks quite nice.

posted at: 15:29 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Went ahead and purchased Counter-Strike: Source through Steam on the weekend and have been playing that quite a bit. I'm pretty happy with the game even though they didn't change anything besides the graphics and sound. But it sure does make a difference. I love the sounds now as they really add another level of realism to the game. Good endless fun :) I also pre-purchased Half-Life 2 so I'm all set to play that when it gets released now as well.

posted at: 16:22 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Hurray! The linux binaries for Doom 3 were released today and so I think I'll go out and pick up a copy of the game here today. One more thing to eat away at my available time :) Seems there are lots of good games coming out recently and a bunch more due out soon as well. It's that season again...

posted at: 13:22 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Just another late night up working on various projects. I seem to have far to much stuff that I'd like to get done these days, although it keeps me busy at least. I purchased a computer today from a co-worker and am suppost to pick it up on Wednesday and that should keep me busy for a while. Got a bunch of work done scripting up some php pages to pull data from a database. Most of the time was spent creating the sql as it turned out the be alot more complicated that I had expected. All the hard work is done now, just need to be tidied up and it should be good to go.

In other non relevant news, I found some episodes of That's My Bush! online and have been watching them over the past few weeks. It's a pretty humourous show and worth checking out if you have the chance. It's not on the air anymore of course (all good shows get canceled don't they?) but ya. Good fun.

posted at: 02:44 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry