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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Mon, 29 Nov 2004

HD Football
blog

Yesterday (Sunday) was pretty much an awesome football Sunday (which is what we call Sundays around here these days). Started out by sleeping in until 8am or so... packed up Rupert and headed off to breakfast at our favorite spot. After a tasty ham and cheese omelette, we went to our favorite coffee & tea spot, and had a cup of coffee and decaf tea.

10am rolled around and we headed to Costco for our weekly shopping trip, picking up some odds and ends. Got home at 10:45am, unloaded the car, and sat down to watch the Chargers and the Chiefs in glorious high definition, courtesy of DirecTV and CBS.

Watched the game, did some chores, etc... enjoyed some leftover wings and pizza from Dominoes for "lunch." After the Chargers pulled out a win against the Chiefs, the next game: the Patriots beating up on the Ravens in a mud-slogged game.

Watched that game, which was fun because of all the mud... might have done some more chores, can't remember. That game ended around 5:30pm, did some poking around, watched the NFL highlights on ESPN, then fired up the Broncos vs. the Raiders in glorious ESPN high definition at 6:30pm.

Commented to Mystique that she was absolutely awesome for allowing such a cool football Sunday. We watched and enjoyed the snowy broncos/raiders game... had some great plays in it, etc... right up to the end where the Raiders pulled one out of their hats. Good for them.

What a great end to a four-day weekend! So good, in fact, that I took Monday off. Gotta love the holiday season!

Watching these games in high definition is great... if you haven't seen a football game on a large screen in HD, find one sometime on a Sunday and check it out. The sound, too is great... I was watching the Patriots game and because of the Dolby Digital sound (true 5.1), I actually heard a fan yell from just the rear right speaker, "Come on offense, get in the game!" It was just like being there, except I was warm and dry.

In other news... today is my brother's birthday. I won't say how old he is, but he is my older brother. Ok, he's the big three-five! I can't believe it... how do we stop this aging thing? Anyhow... a very happy birthday to him. I'll always be proud to be called "JJ's little brother."

Tue, 23 Nov 2004

I have issues
blog :: linux

Big surprise, I know. I really need to talk to someone about my fascination with window managers. Is it healthy? Is it just a big ol' time sink? I wonder how many days of my life I've squandered by focusing on such a small thing.

Anyhow, I'm using the classic window manager that was the first one that I ever made a switch to: fvwm. I remember using this window manager on my first Sun box at Motorola just out of college... ahh, the memories. I had switched from twm and thought fvwm was simply amazing.

Kind of funny that I'm back to it... I had fired it up a few months ago just to check it out, but didn't stick with it for some reason. I think the one thing that sticks with me from ratpoison is that the ability to use a prefix key to "protect" all the window manager keys. This means that only one key is "stolen" from regular X applications (specifically, emacs).

Unfortunately, that's not quite directly supported in fvwm. I do have a hack at it that I found on the mailing list, but it's not ideal. I'm powering through that inadequacy, though... the windows key is handy for use in the window manager since I never use it in emacs. Kind of awkward to get at, but we'll see how it works out.

What I'm finding interesting, though, is how much (or more accurately, how little) of the "special" features I seem to be using. Fvwm has a bunch of modules, such as a very flexible iconbox, pagers, "toolbar" (buttons) support, etc... but as I look at my screen, I see four things: an emacs window, an xterm running screen, the fvwm-console module (which simply allows me to type in fvwm commands), and fvwm's mini-pager, which I use to navigate the virtual screens with. That's it. To move to another window without using the mouse, I also use the built-in WindowList, but I can't think of much else I use.

Which brings me back to thinking about using sawfish again. My fascination with sawfish, of course, is mainly because it uses a lisp-variant to control everything. But then, I'd have to rebuild everything that fvwm provides "for free". So why go through all that? I guess because it's the journey, not the destination. Seems crazy, but that's my only excuse.

But enough about window managers... on to the Zaurus! I'm beginning to get the clamshell-zaurus itch again... I'm really enjoying my 5500, even moreso after install OpenZaurus 3.5.1 on it... I use it daily for my schedule at work, so that's good. Now I want something more... the 640x480 screen is really appealing -- I think at that size I could read PDF documents more easily which would be great. I haven't tried a Safari book on my Zaurus lately, but it'd be great to be able to keep those PDFs on my Zaurus.

So I'm looking at the C860 even though the new C3000 came out that sports a 4gb hard drive. That's tempting, but I'm afraid of the battery life, plus the C860 has a bit more memory (because it's expecting the OS/user files to be on the hard drive). Plus, the C860 is better supported (currently) by the open source distributions. I think I might have to hit ebay again soon... first for selling (gotta find some stuff), and then for buying. Maybe in January.

And just to bring this rambling post full circle... if I install the pdaXrom on the clamshell zaurus... I have to pick a window manager for it!

Wed, 17 Nov 2004

Lots of Stuff
blog

Wow, lots of stuff going on...

First off, Half Life 2 is absolutely incredible. I've only played for a few hours, but it's definitely the best game I've played in recent years. Looking forward to the SDK so I can poke at it and never get anything done in it (at least I'm being honest now!)

I know you've all been waiting for my weekly window manager update, so here it is: fluxbox at home (still) and now back to enlightenment at work. I don't know why I switched back to E, just felt like using windows again, I guess.

Back to games for a minute... what a great month for games this is: Everquest 2 and half life 2 were released, and in a week (I think), World of Warcraft will be released. Very cool. Even cooler is the fact that two of those companies are users of my company's software. Oh yeah, Grand Theft Auto was released for PS2. And no, I don't care that Halo 2 was released.

Ok, when I started this entry it seemed like more was going on... I guess there isn't. Oh well.

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