September 14th 2004
And I did halfway decent, which is much better than normal for myself.
Most notably, I ran the 1.5 mile course (about 2.5 km) in 12:35. Last time I ran the PRT, it was 17:30. I needed 13:30 to pass, so I’m quite happy about that result, especially since I was convinced at the end that it had taken me much longer.
September 14th 2004
So, I just saw a preview for The Polar Express. Don’t get me wrong, I actually have quite a fondness for many animated movies. But this looks like the biggest excuse for a piece of crap cartoon that I have ever seen. This is especially distressing seeing as how Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks (both from Forrest Gump) are part of the movie team.
September 13th 2004
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted a blog entry. I literally just now noticed that Derek’s latest CVS Digest was posted to the Dot with the tagline mpayne-are-you-still-there, which convinced me to start blogging again.
The initial reason I stopped was due to Hurricane Frances, which eliminated my power, and then my Internet connection. I had come very, VERY close to switching ISPs, but Comcast managed to restore my Internet access in time. So I’ve been online for about 4 days now I think.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been too motivated to hack on anything since Ivan’s coming. It’s slowing down now (bad for Cuba!), so I guess I’ll start to work on some of these JuK crasher bugs. Either that or my homework, which is always an interesting decision…
P.S. If grammarian.homelinux.net goes offline in the next week or so, blame Ivan. And be patient…
September 7th 2004
I earlier blogged about Erinn Clark evacuating Jacksonville, wondering what she was afraid of. Apparently even a weakened Frances hundreds of miles away was enough to wreak utter havoc here in Jacksonville. :-( It doesn’t help that Frances’s path through Florida kept it within striking range of Jacksonville at all times. It is as if she was strafing around us.
We didn’t take severe damage, not like places further south of us like Cape Canaveral. However, Frances did enough damage to take out power to several hundred thousand (at least) of Jacksonville’s occupants, who were among 6.5 million Floridians with no power. This is especially serious in cities where the water supply must be pumped, as residents lose power and water simultaneously.
As I’m typing this, my cable service is shot all to hell, which is a pity since it handles my Internet connection. I had a bried period about 14 to 15 hours ago where I had both power and cable Internet, but that unique arrangement has yet to repeat itself. I have just recently passed what I think is the eighth consecutive hour with electricity. Electrical service has been spotty here for 36 hours, including a stretch of 16 hours straight with no electricity. This means that I have to throw away most of the things in my freezer and refrigerator, and I’m one of the lucky ones. :-/ I miss my yogurt though, as it is easy to eat with my still sore lower jaw, and it’s not like I can just run out to get some more, as grocery stores are either closed for repairs, for Labor Day, or because they have no electricity either.
With the loss of power also comes the loss of traffic lights, which I thought would be absolutely horrible. But it turns out that the other drivers on the road were for the most part very well behaved at the intersections, yielding to other drivers as necessary without any conflict.
A friend of mine had asked me over while the weather was calm last night. We were standing outside as I was leaving when we noticed that one of his trees grew out of the ground at an odd angle. He didn’t like the way it was swaying, so he backed his car out of the driveway and onto the street. It was a wise precaution: Today he told me that the tree did end up falling, and it would have destroyed his car if he had forgotten to move it.
I am hoping that Ivan, which is predicted to hit Florida as well, fizzles out or something, because its projected path last time I was able to check has it curving almost up the coast of Florida, which would be devastating to a state already weakened by two direct hits. Also, I don’t want to be without power again. This is the longest that I’ve been without electricity in my life, and service is still spotty as bands of thunderstorms buffet Jacksonville, undoing all of the hard work of the utility company electricians. Now that I’m without cable, I find that I’ve been effectively cut off from the rest of the world, as I can’t check weather updates on TV or from the Internet. Radio would be nice, but it’s so hard finding a station that is playing a weather report at the time you happen to be listening for one.
Anyways, I’ve been using this downtime to re-organize my music collection, and the network copy operation just finished, so I guess it’s time for me to end this meandering entry.
September 5th 2004
So, it seems that Erinn Clark, who is President of the Jacksonville Linux Users’ Group, has evacuated from Jacksonville due to Hurricane Frances. In case her server is still down, I read the entry from Planet Debian.
To this I say, “Bleh.” I also live in Jacksonville, and I had briefly evacuated for Hurricane Charley, and that was only because my wife was freaking out. We only briefly considered leaving for Frances, seeing as how the storm is a) much weaker than a few days ago, and b) is hitting the wrong side of the state to concern me.
So, have fun in Georgia, Erinn! I’ll be sitting here resting my aching jaw. :-/
September 4th 2004
Hours after the recent trip to the dentist’s office I started to be able to feel the right side of my jaw. I should have taken this as a hint to apply the painkillers for when my whole jaw would feel pain again, especially since the left side of my jaw would be under much more pain than the right.
I didn’t however, and so the pain was almost unbearable by the time I took the Vicodin I had been prescribed. Then I went to lay down to try and sleep. Surprisingly, I was unable to fall sleep, even after a double-dose of the Vicodin. The pain went down however, so it wasn’t all bad.
Because of all this, I got myself a new soundcard as a gift to myself. It seems to work pretty well so far, which is nice. Now I’m feeling very tired however, so it’s time for me to go to sleep.
September 3rd 2004
Just got back from the dentist’s office. I’ve had my lower two wisdom teeth removed. One came out rather frighteningly easy, and the other the dentist literally cut in half. No splinters or anything either. I was very impressed. ;-)
On that note, I love anesthetic, especially since whatever he shot my gums up with doesn’t affect my mental faculties. I now have some Motrin (what must be the Navy’s official analgesic) and some Vicadin in case the pain becomes severe. I don’t plan on taking the Vicadin unless the pain is unbearable though, because I hate medicine that screws with my head.
I wish I could have snapped a photo of the teeth after being extracted, but I didn’t bring my camera.
September 2nd 2004
Just figured I’d post this so that there would be a break (namely, this. ;-)) in the flamewar about to erupt on Planet KDE.
September 1st 2004
I spent 5 hours today fighting with KDialogBase over a new delete dialog for JuK. At first I thought I was having problems because of the use of Qt Designer, but it turned out that hand-coding the widgets into the code resulted in the exact same problem.
Turns out that for whatever reason, you have to add your own layouts in some modes of KDialogBase (namely, the one that actually worked, Plain).
I’m doing this work in the hopes of being able to re-enable the file-deletion feature of JuK. (I’m the kind of guy who is always holding Shift when clicking on Delete in Windows to keep the file out of the Recycle Bin). Scott and I have been discussing how we might do this, but I forgot to write it down, so I’ve pretty much forgotten everything. :-(
I think the conclusion (if we reached one) was that there would be a checkbox in the dialog to delete the files instead of trashing them. There is no checkbox in CVS yet, but that won’t be hard to add. I wanted to commit my current changes before going to bed since they at least have the benefit of changing the default action from Delete to Cancel, which is suprisingly hard to achieve with KMessageBox.