Corner of Seven

After reading this post on LifeHacker, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I should start doing something like this.  I mean, it works for Jerry Seinfeld, it can’t be all that bad.

Basically, as described on the link above, the idea is that you keep a daily calendar of all the specific goals you want to accomplish.  Every time you do something related to a goal,  mark off the day on the calendar.  Once you have a few days consecutively, that is a chain.  The object of this motivational strategy: Don’t Break the Chain. Seems like a simple enough thing.

In the spirit of bringing in new ideas in order to make things work, I’m going to use a modified schedule, but the chain still takes effect.  Different days for me will be devoted to different goals/tasks.  Mondays and Thursdays I tackle some Ruby code, so I can stay fresh and learn about some of the newer developments that I’ve missed, having been out of the Ruby loop for a while.  Tuesdays and Saturdays are devoted to Corner of Seven.  That’s right, you might actually see more blog posts. In addition, I’m looking at building new and experimental pieces onto the domain, including rails and Java webapps, and playing around with php and python, so I can apply these to the blog, and keep the site as a form of digital portfolio.  All of my things will be up here, so it makes it more centralized.

Motorola Droid

Finally, the big hurdle in my calendar, and what is to be the biggest chain – Android.  I’ve been looking at the mobile phone operating system for a while now, but haven’t had the drive to fully enter in and create things for it.  That is, until I saw (and afterwards, held) one of these.So, starting today, once a day I will try to do something new in terms of Android development, in an effort to increase my skill and knowledge in the mobile OS.  Hopefully we’ll get to see some neat little apps come out of this “Don’t break the chain” mentality.  Hope you’re along for the ride – I guess we’ll see come every Tuesday and Sunday.

Cheers for now.

I’ve found a place to work, and it’s right around where home is.  I’m currently working as a contractor on the Rock Island Arsenal, as a contractor through a company based in Virgina called Sysorex.  Essentially, I’m reviewing and cleaning up code written for a transportation system.  Outside of that, Rhythmbox EQ has found a more permanent home over at Google Code: Check it out here to see it in all it’s new, shiny, google-fied glory.

Outside of that news, not much new going on here.  I’m single again, as Laura has decided she no longer feels anything for me.  I’m still a bit pissed off about the whole thing… it doesn’t seem like she’s losing much out of the arrangement (her parents never really liked me anyway, to the point of her dad saying that he wouldn’t come if we got married), where it’s been the second time I’ve contemplated giving her a ring.  Hooray for putting too much emotional attachment on something that doesn’t work.  But, in the process of that recovery, I’ve found a fantastic music group and group of friends that I couldn’t have ever imagined.  Toting the name I Fight Dragons, their music is part rock band, part 8-bit NES game, all crazy fun and awesome rolled together.  I suggest heading over to theSixtyOne and listening to them.  I’ve gone to one of their concerts, and am planning on going to another one at the end of this week. I’ve also made lego figurines of their 8-bit caricatures; some of the results of that:

Packy - Guitar, NES

Dave - Drums

Bill - Plays what I refer to as the "Octo-pod"

Laura - Vocals and Controllers

There are two more of the band members, Brian and Hari.  I didn’t forget them, I just ran out of legos.

I do need to get on here and put up some more things on occasion; I just don’t always have something to talk about, and so things get lost in the process.  I was humbled when I realized this comic was talking about me: http://xkcd.com/621/.

Have a good day, and I’ll catch you guys on the wire sometime.

Update: Today RBEQ 1.3 was released.  Find it on the google code page.

Yes, a month plus later than expected, RBEQ version 1.1 is out.

Updates since the last release:

• The window for the equalizer no longer wrests control away from Rhythmbox itself.  This makes it easier to change the EQ and play with volume and songs to get things working optimally.
• Added GConf hooks to allow persistent states for the equalizer between sessions.  Most requested feature from the previous release.
• Full base-code rewrite, much cleaner to work with and understand.

Next up, adding a load-save functionality to the EQ so that you can swap settings on the fly.

As always, the download is located here, and the install instructions are the same.

Download from http://rbeq.googlecode.com

Installation instructions:

• Open a terminal, and enter this:

tar -xvzf rbeq-1.3.tar.gz -C ~/.gnome2

• That’s it!  You’re set.

Hope that this release is as popular as the last.

Chris

UPDATE: The Rhythmbox EQ has been updated.  You can find it at  google code.

I’ve finally gotten to the point where my basic rhythmbox equalizer is up and running, so I figured I’d let the package sit here as an available download.  I’ll also link it to the rhythmbox devels, in hopes that it generates a bit more interest, and someone might come along and clean up and add to it more, in the true open source sense.

You can download the package here: Click Me!.

Installation instructions:

Uncompress this package using an archive utility (file-roller) to the ~/.gnome2 directory, or use the following command:

tar -xvzf rbeq-1.3.tar.gz -C ~/.gnome2

And that’s it!  Open rhythmbox, and go to “Edit -> Plugins” and select “Rhythmbox Equalizer.”

Screenshot (by request):

Screencap for the Rhythmbox EQ.

It feels good to finally have a project of my own out there to help the community.   Ciao!

Hey guys -

I know I don’t update this much, but I figured that I’d say something real quick about the job hunt.  I applied for Mailtrust, an email hosting company in Blacksburg, VA a couple of weeks ago.  On Monday, I received an email stating that they have met their hiring quota for the quarter, and that they’d start opening up hiring again in a couple months.  So, bust.  My current aspiration is with a trading company called IMC, at their branch office located in Chicago.  I’m still waiting on a response from them, so we’ll see what happens.  I’d really like to know that I’ve found something before the end of the school year, which is approaching quickly.  I’ve got about 2 weeks left with all of my studies, and then I’m off for the real world.  Yikes.

Take care, all.

In the realm of personal web startup pages and managing, these two titular offerings stand out.  I offer to you as readers the option to try out both, in hopes that one of them sticks for you.  For me, it makes the time working around trying to find my usual morning reads of pages, blogs and activities like twitter and facebook that much easier to take care of. read more »

Found this earlier today on Wil Wheaton’s blog, and I think that it very well fits the message given on this site as well.

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work
I’ll get some stuff put up here later, because I’ve been neglecting this little corner of webspace.

Slashdot | Teachers Need an Open Source Education.

A rather good set of readings showed up on Slashdot today; I was especially interested in this one concerning Apathy, Lies and Fear.

In the articles listed above, the issues arise when teachers do not have the knowledge of what something does.  It’s a situation of brand loyalty taken much too far.

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Well, I’ve gotten myself a way to make money this year – I’m working on some research for one of my professors. We’re designing a knowledge base/data mining tool for HIV research, and we’ll be using a product called protege (http://protege.stanford.edu) to handle the similarities in the data and the operations on them. I’ve got a brief ontology ready up here, at This OWLDoc link. Let me know what you think.

Sometimes, there’s a story that causes people to stand up and say something.  This is one of those moments.  I caught this article when I was looking at my news stories in the morning on Slashdot (http:/slashdot.org):

Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes
stonedcat writes “A Wisconsin woman has claimed that Dell computers and Ubuntu have kept her from going back to school via online classes. She says she has called Dell to request Windows instead however was talked out of it. Her current claim is that she was unaware that she couldn’t install her Verizon online disk to access the Internet, nor could she use Microsoft Word to type up her papers.”
(pulled from http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/15/158216)

So here we have a prototypical case where a computer user who is unfamiliar with a new operating system has trouble with her computer because it’s not what she’s used to.  I can accept that.  Then, I proceed to read the article (Something rarely heard of on Slashdot…)

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