fortune -o (heh)

Do you know what my favorite program of all time is? It is this little program called fortune that runs in the Unix shell. I have it set up so that whenever I open a new shell here at work I am greeted with a message from the fortune. Today, I half asleep, rolled into my cube at about 8:20am. I turn on my computer and start going through the morning chores of warehouse inventory balance-on-hand comparisons. I wrote a shell script that consolidate one hours worth of work into two seconds, so I open up the shell... and am greeted by the fortune:

In the middle of a wide field is a pot of gold. 100 feet to the north stands a smart manager. 100 feet to the south stands a dumb manager. 100 feet to the east is the Easter Bunny, and 100 feet to the west is Santa Claus.

Q: Who gets to the pot of gold first?
A: The dumb manager. All the rest are myths.

Hah... I love it! No offense taken towards my manager though. She is very smart and does a very fine job handling the complexities and headaches of the WIN system.

You want some more examples of fortune? well here ya go...

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
-- Blaise Pascal

A computer salesman visits a company president for the purpose of selling the president one of the latest talking computers.
Salesman: "This machine knows everything. I can ask it any question and it'll give the correct answer. Computer, what is the speed of light?"
Computer: "186,282 miles per second."
Salesman: "Who was the first president of the United States?"
Computer: "George Washington."
President: "I'm still not convinced. Let me ask a question. Where is my father?"
Computer: "Your father is fishing in Georgia."
President: "Hah!! The computer is wrong. My father died over twenty years ago!"
Computer: "Your mother's husband died 22 years ago. Your father just landed a twelve pound bass."

Your lover will never wish to leave you

Finagle's First Law:
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

They are all fun little stories/expressions/fortunes. Most of them are quite geeky... seeing as how most people using a unix based platform tend to be on the geeky side. But I thought I would just share my love for Fortune.

For those interested in learning a little more about fortune check out the Wikipedia Entry

Later!

My Name is Jason, and I'm a Computerholic...

Yesterday I was talking online after work, and all of a sudden I just got this urge to throw my computer against a wall. Was it broken? no. Was I angry? no. I just really didn't want to stare at the screen any longer... so I went over to a friends place and we went for a walk through a local park... it was good.

So.... I realize I've been definitely slacking off on the blog, but I have to tell you by the time I get home from work where I've been staring at a screen all day long, and then working on a few computer related projects at the house... I really don't want to look at a computer any longer.

... which brings me to the topic of today's post (if you haven’t assumed already) ... computer time!

All right, so let's be honest, how many hours a day do you spend in front of the computer? For me at least the number is rather disgusting. In the morning after getting a shower and such I check my email and maybe see if there are any headline news stories worth reading before going to work. So at most I spend 15 minutes on the computer before leaving for work.

+0.25 hours

Now I'm at work, this is simple; I'm on the computer all day at work. I might have an hour or two of meetings, so for arguments sake let's say I have one hour of meetings five days of the week. That taken into consideration with working about eight hours a day, I will give a conservative estimate and say I'm on the computer for seven hours each day at work.

+7.00 hours

Time to head home from work... I hop on the highway and in a quick 30 minutes I'm back at the house, upstairs, putting on more comfortable clothes and doing what? Hitting up pandora.com for all my music needs, checking emails, and chatting with people online. This probably takes about 30 minutes on average.

+0.50 hours

From here on is a little sketchy, it all depends on the day. Everything before changing clothes after work is pretty set in stone, but depending on evening activities I might not be on the computer at all, or I might be on all night. Let's just take for example a 'normal' evening, where I do hang out with people but I still have some time to myself.

Let's say after changing clothes I'm having good conversation with someone online and I keep talking to them. I get home from work sometime between 5:30 and 6:00, so I probably talk to this person, or persons until 7:30, when I'm ready for dinner. Let's say this lasted one hour and 45 minutes.

+1.75 hours

We eat dinner in the kitchen away from all screens having nice conversation and talking about what we're doing for the evening. People are usually over for dinner, so I won't get back on the computer until they leave... about 11:00pm. After they leave I'll hop on the computer, check emails, play a card game or two, chat with other people with no faces until I'm too sleepy to stay up anymore... which is probably around 12:30am

+1.50 hours

Lather, rinse, and repeat, eh?

Let's add this up... as long as the windows calculator hasn't started to fail me now... I'm getting a total of...
11 HOURS

can you say Holy Cow! That is a disgusting number of hours... almost half of one day (including sleep) is spent staring at a little glowing screen. This doesn't even include time that I'm watching TV or playing Nintendo... I should seriously look into making this number go down.

Real quick... that's just 5 days of the workweek, my weekend computer usage is much less.
Saturday: I'll be on for maybe and hour or two in the morning and probably at night, but not too often during the day. So I'm going to estimate 4.5 hours of computer time on a Saturday.
Sunday: Even less, maybe an hour in the morning after church, and probably about 2 hours before bed maybe? so let's go with 3 hours on a Sunday.

That makes a total of 7.5 hours for the weekend, plus the 5*11=55 for the weekdays, we're at a total of 62.5 hours per week. Nasty.

Let's multiply that by 50 for a year (because of vacations and such) and we're getting 62.5*50=
3125 HOURS

I know... 7.5*50=1875 hours of that is at work, which is the majority, but that is still a lot of hours on a computer. What would we ever do without them.... crazy

How many hours do you spend on your computer a day? I know... it’s depressing...

Fun C++ Problem

Hey all...

I ran across this fun C++ problem in a forum and thought it worth sharing. It was quite embarrasing trying to figure out the answer. My mind hasn't had to think like that in such a long time.

Here's the problem:

eh... ok, so I can't paste the code here or else it messes up the browser... click the link below to get the source file... sorry :-(

Click here to download the source file straight to your box.

Best of luck! Hopefully you do better than I did!

If you get it, let me know! don't post the answer though, let's give some time for those (like me) who may not get it all too fast.

They’re coming to take me away… I’m a computer killer…

If only I had an Ultra X3 / 1000-Watt / ATX / SATA-Ready / PCI-E Ready / Energy Efficient / ULT40064 Modular Power Supply… this just would not be an issue…

First off, I'm pretty sure I fried my desktop. I had the box in the perfect sized location between my desk, wall, and TV... unfortunately I don't think I was giving it adequate ventilation, and so one night, it quit. It wasn't the first time the computer had turned itself off in the middle of the night, but it was the first time it wouldn't turn back on. I have to remember to bring my multi-meter back down to school next time I go home so I can check to see if any current is coming out of the power supply... keep your fingers crossed.

Yesterday, I was home sick (I blame it on the no sleep from the awesome wedding weekend), but anyway, my roommate and I were in the family room watching some TV, and decided to watch some of 'The Office'. I have all the episodes on my laptop so we hook up the cords to from the TV to the laptop and I push the Function F4 or whatever combination it is to switch screens... my laptop goes crazy. It looked liked it had been tossed down a flight of steps with a pool of water at the bottom. Needless to say I forced the shutdown and rebooted. When it started back up, the touch pad didn't work...

[let it be known that while typing this I think I just realized what was wrong. i tried pushing other Function + F... combinations while it was all static and I might have turned off the touch pad. i'll have to try that when i get back to the house]

I then went to faithful Google and tried searching for an answer to my issue. Being a Linux machine, there are thousands of forums with so many people willing to help. I tried a few edits to some configuration files that seemed to be of similar problem, however, they only resulted in me blue screening the laptop on restart and having to go through the Unix prompts to fix my newly created issues... I soon resorted to an external USB mouse, which of course worked fine.

That's all for now... talk to ya later,
- Your neighborhood computer killer

A little bit about nothing...

So I was going to write a post on how writing code on a Unix Box really sucks... VI is a great program and all, but I would definitely take notepad over it any day. Yes, I could copy paste, but that involves more movements of the mouse/keys. I'm learning Informix 4GL, and copy pasting after changing minute lines every 15 seconds would definitely add to the production time a few more minutes than I would care to count. But, regardless of this previous paragraph, I decided not to.
Then I thought about what else is going on in my life now... ... ... ... exactly. So I then decided to leave this post at that, not much going on with me right now, working a lot, then relaxing when I get home.
I will say though, there is nothing like a job where you sit in front of the computer all day coding, that really dampers the recreational computing experience at home.

(Current book of choice: Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis)

Websites

You know how in the movie 'Office Space' the main guy is talking about his high school guidance counselor and the topic of your career path? 'What would you do if you had a million dollars? That answer is suppose to be what job you take...' (or something close to those lines...) Peter (the main guy) says he wouldn't do anything. He would sit around all day doing absolutely nothing. Me, well I could go for a little bit of nothing. My life isn't all too busy right now, but I think it is the combination of class being over with for the quarter, the thoughts of no class until September, and of course the nice warm weather accompanied with the desire to be no where else other than a tennis court of golf course. I'd like to take a nap, but I think I'll go to work instead.

So I'm working on updating my blarged.com website. I want to make the format myself, and I think it is kind of ridiculous how my current format only uses a fraction of the screen size. I have the new format posted in a subdirectory, can you find it?

As prompted a post or two ago, here's a run down with summary/review of a few websites I frequent.

http://www.google.com
- Does it really need an explanation

http://www.woot.com
- Every night at Midnight (Central Time) this website posts a new (usually electronic) discounted deal. They have limited for sale and are most of the time a good find. I have bought a good amount from woot over the past year or two. For each new item they have a discussion board where the cult following of woot can discuss the related prices found elsewhere along with the general use/purpose of the item. Great site to check out... if you're the person that always gets the impulse purchase of a Hershey bar at the checkout lane of Kroger, you may, however, want to avoid this one.

http://www.digg.com
- Digg is a user driven community of news articles. Their stream is mainly technology but there are sections for 'normal' news as well. Users of the site submit links to articles they have found elsewhere and Digg hosts discussion boards and the link. Those traversing the site are able to 'Digg' the article if they like it, or 'Bury' if they don't. When a profile is created you can befriend fellow diggers and see what stories they find interesting (what they've dugg). I spend a lot of time on this site getting caught up on my tech news and seeing all the neat things going on around the world.

http://www.facebook.com
- What would college be without Facebook? I would be scared to find out. Facebook is a online community phenomena that became popular at the beginning of the 2004-05 school year. On Facebook, you create a profile where you can post pictures and list personal favorites in areas like TV Shows or what activities you are involved in, where you work... (you know, all the fun stuff a stalker would like to know). I have used Facebook to keep in contact with old friends that have moved away from home after high school, and friends from Indiana University, that I have since lost other forms of contact with after transferring to UC. To those who unfortunately use MySpace... Facebook can be described to you as MySpace with morals. Check out the links on the left for a link to my facebook.

Those are my four basic sites that I use all the time. Of course I'll update with the new sites as I find them. I do frequent many others, but this post is long enough already, and well yeah, this post is long enough already. I'm off to work, Later.

Leeeroooyyyyyyyy Jeeennnnnnkinnnnnns!!!!!

Good evening all.

We were going to have people over to play cards last night... but due to something called exam week which is next week, all but one (our roommate for next year) bailed on us. So what did we do? We played Halo... naturally. In all the fun times that followed through the evening, a video of Leeroy Jenkins was brought up. What? Huh? Leeroy? My thoughts exactly. Let me explain.

In the lovely game called World of Warcraft, there are groups of players called clans. These clans work together to take down their foes. In this video (which I will post below) the character Leeroy Jenkins is AFK (away from keyboard) while their leader drones on about who is running in when and using what ability to take down the enemy. All of a sudden, Leeroy Jenkins comes back from away and yells, 'alright chums... let's do this! LEEROOOOOYY JENKINS!!!' and runs into the cave... with the entire clan left mouth agape, stunned at the stupidity. Their leader of course says... well let's go and they all run into the cave. All the monsters are of course awakened and the clan takes the beating of their life all while cursing Leeroy and his stupidity. But you see, while Leeroy was away from the keyboard, missing the lecture on the battle, he was making dinner. And so the scene ends with Leeroy's comment... 'At least I got chicken' There it is folks, enjoy



I'm not quite sure how well this will work for those folks who are subscribed to the feed. You might need to check into the site for this one.

I have been laughing at this one for the past 24 hours. I played WoW for about a month (a free trial) then I just couldn't see spending the 15 dollars a month to keep going, and of course I knew I would be wasting all sorts of time. But hey, live a little... I know that's what Leeroy would want me to do.

Thanks for stopping by. Next time I'd like to make a run through some of my favorite sites and give quick little reviews. Unless of course something better comes along. Later!