technobang

Until now.

When I started this website, the idea was to discuss (in a somewhat civilized manner) issues at least somewhat pertaining to technology. But I quickly realized I garnered a slightly larger audience by simply dropping the “geek” pretense and taking things that only slightly annoy me and blow them out of proportion so I can go off about them. Sounds like a familiar statement from me, right? I assure you, I’ve often repeated it.

It’s become a personal blog. My efforts to avoid it were, after all, futile. Any questions?

The trouble with this is that I don’t like the idea of any aspect of my life being an open book. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying I’m a closed and private person—however the idea of people actually gaining insight into me and my oddly eventful life is enough to disturb me. After all, it’s websites like these that I look for when I myself am researching into someone.

Oh yes, future employers, I’m referring to you.

Now taking advantage of that clever segway, I’m working toward making a change in my career. For those of you who didn’t know, I am now out of my contract job with my previous employer. That’s a whole other set of… interesting… stories… that I will gladly get into later. However, the place I’m hoping to get into is a small company called TechAngels. Essentially, they’ve offered me a dream job, and on Monday I will be meeting with their owner to see if I made the cut. Needless to say, I really hope I do.

For the past 8 months I’ve been in a brain rut. The job I was working didn’t offer me the chance to actually use my brain, and after doing some side jobs for various people and companies, I realized just how much I missed what I used to do. Yes, a shocking new development: I actually like working hard. AMAZING, coming from the overweight goliath that I am. Looking at me, you’d think my idea of working hard is either slouched over on a couch tapping on a gamepad or crushing small children’s bones for my cookie dough. You decide.

Whatever, in other news, I’ve migrated completely back to Ubuntu. Hell, I even have Monique using Ubuntu. When things work, it’s the easiest operating system ever. EVER. I’m using free software to power my entire apartment, there’s no way you can tell me that’s not an accomplishment in itself! My desktop is a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 seated on an Abit motherboard (yick) in this cheap acrylic case that I snagged from my former roommate. Within it we have 1.5GB of RAM, some cheap NVIDIA video card, a fantastic Hauppauge PVR250 hardware enc/decoding TV tuner acting as a TiVO passthrough (more on that later) and my favorite sound card ever, the SB Live! 5.1 with the EMU10k1 chipset. Combined with my XBOX controller with a USB cable soldered to it and my ATI Remote Wonder which was taken from my All in Wonder 9600 (complete crap in Linux, fyi) it functions as the perfect multimedia machine. Plus, I have VMWare Server installed, which allows me to run Windows XP when necessary. Even though Linux is the primary operating system, I still have to keep sharp. Or I don’t, whatever, who cares.

The TiVO passthrough I thought was somewhat intelligent. As it stood, I had a machine that is piping one X screen to my LCD monitor and the other X screen piped to my TV via the S-Video connection on the video card. This way I’m left with two mostly independent environments. It worked well, until I realized that I actually wanted to watch TV and didn’t want to hassle with changing video inputs. It’s not a laziness thing, I just have a much better surround sound system hooked to the computer. So using the IVTV driver and mplayer, I can run my TiVO through my tuner card and back out to the TV, utilizing my THX certified surround speakers in the process. This assures me maximum sound synchronization with the least amount of audio garbage. There’s a few kinks to be worked out, but all in all it came together quite nicely.

Pictures and screenshots to come.

Whatever that’s my update. And look, there was minimal cursing! Must be because it actually dealt with something real. How unusual…