Eric’s Blog

As we all know, this is the Memorial Day weekend, and just about everyone gets Monday off, but I would be willing to bet, the vast majority of Americans have NO IDEA what Memorial Day is. It really is unfortunate that we as Americans are so quick to forget our history, and become apathetic to the plight of the troops that had to serve in a war. World War II in my opinion is at the top of the heap- here the 70+ year old men and women are dying off, with no one to listen to their story of how their lives were changed when WWII was happening. Many of these men and women have stories that would make you feel thankful for the cushy life that you have, and help put in perspective the troubles that we deal with on a daily basis. The sad thing is that few people even care to hear what they have to say, and some never tell anyone before they die.

Times are different now- back then men would commit suicide if they could not enlist in the war, nowadays, soldiers are shunned by the naiive youth of today. Did we lose our patriotism and our pride in being Americans? Does anyone care about doing something selfless and putting your own life at risk for the benefit of your country? I don’t think so.

Well, this weekend especially, I am going to think about all those men and women that gave their lives for this country, and how proud I am to be an American. It’s too bad that I am a small minority that has this view, and I am glad that those that did die can’t see where this great country has gone.

I don’t have much to say today, but as a hobbyist programmer, I’m always looking for fun things to write. I think one of them will be to replicate how Bloglines works. It should be comletely doable in PHP, and it will give me a great excuse to learn how to do object programming in PHP.

I am sure there are others, but essentially there are two kinds of people that make me looney- the first are what I call “zero-effort” friends. These people are the ones that you would hang out with, but only if you go over to their place. If you suggest they come over to your place, they come up with some lame-ass reason as to why they can’t. I have one old friend that I think I can count on three fingers the number of times that he has swung over to my place, and every other time, I have had to go to his place. What is the deal with that? Is it just laziness on their part, or perhaps I’m not a good enough friend for them to make an effort? So guess what? Now I don’t hang out with him. Who knows.

The second are those people that are totally or partially self-obsessed. These are the ones that seem to be completely apathetic to anything that is going on with you, and if you bring something up, it’s usually a springboard for them to talk about themselves again. It’s quite amazing. Why do I ask them questions about what is going on with their lives, when they don’t with mine? I’m not one to keep score or anything, but if they couldn’t give a shit less about what is gonig on with me, perhaps I should so an equal amount of disinterest in what is going on with them. Would be an interesting experiment, but I really don’t think they would ever recognize it, and they would simply call me an asshole or something. Funny thing is, is that they are really calling themselves one since I am simply matching their personality.

You know, my sister once said “life is too short to be around people you don’t like”. How true is that?!

Well, Fedora2 was released, and I sucked all the files from the ISOs into my kickstart server. Overall, piece of cake to get all my binaries over- some of the nice things was that Exim is now in Fedora 2, so I don’t have to do anything there. The only thing that sucks is that the file /usr/share/system-config-soundcard/system-config-soundcard has to be run from an X session- this is bullshit as I would like to be able to have the soundcard automagically detected in my finish scrips after kickstarting the box. Grr. Why can’t they do a “system-config-soundcard –try” or something, and it will try to use the defaults that it finds, and go from there, then, if there are problems, use the GUI for additional assistance

Geeklog is no more. It was pretty nice, but it was more of a portal than a blog app, so now I’m using Nucleus. Seems nice so far, but it does have a funky interface. Who knows- maybe this will get me to start writing in it again. hehe.

Earlier today, I didn’t feel like doing crap. I managed to get the lawn mowed as I haven’t done that in like 2 weeks, so that is good. I had some fillet mignon in the freezer that I needed to cook up, so I grilled both- one with bleu cheese on it, and the other with a bit of salt and garlic powder. I figure I’ll save the garlic+salt one for work on Monday. Who knows, I may crave Pho on monday, and eat the fillet tomorrow.

After what I think is two years, I finally have use of the sliding door in the family room- it was disabled to act as a make-shift cat door, but I was getting tired of looking at it, so I took the plunge today and cut a 3″x8″ hole in the wall next to the garage door (between house and garage), and cut the same size hole for the garage side door. The cats aren’t too happy about the change, but I’m tired of walking through the master bedroom if I want to grill anything! Now, I need to clean up the holes so it looks professional, and that’ll be one project that I’ve been putting off for a while that will be done.

One other thing that sucks, I was bored so I figured I would hit the gym. I got there at about 8:30pm to do my cardio, but after doing the stair mill for 30mins, I found out that they closed at 9:00! Son of a… I guess I can go tomorrow.

A little over a year ago, I met this girl online. We didn’t really hit it off, but we continued to chat online through the year. She had quite a few qualities that I didn’t like that she had, but I looked past them and enjoyed our conversations we would have sometimes. Anyway, to make a long story short, I became aware of a side of her that I really didn’t like, and last night I wrote her a letter to basically say that I had no interest in being her “friend” anymore, and that she has *no* qualities that I look for in a friend. I didn’t go into the specifics, but she has absolutely no sense of humor, she has this elitist attitude that is based on her being an Engineer (good luck finding a job when the engineer jobs go to India), all she does is talk about her dates (she is so self-absorbed it’s nauseating), and how all her dates are ‘jerks’, blah blah blah blah. Anyway, good riddance.