26.5.09

It's a pretty good night for a drive, so dry up those eyes, and dry up those eyes

I got up late today, which was fine, because I was going to go into work early, worked until 5, went home and cooked dinner. Then I watched the news and ate, and then slowly cleaned up over several hours.

...

I don't know that I can do this for the rest of my life. Like, I enjoyed work today, but... seriously? At least I'm spicing up this domestic lifestyle with Risk and friends.

10.5.09

beach beach beach

I am at the beach. In NC.

Hence, no blog posts.

That is all. :D

8.5.09

a mighty big need to eat sometime this month

After the next 4 hours, I will have given a presentation, taken a multivariable final, and handed in my poetry portfolio. I will then still have to finish my digital electronics project, pack and do laundry, all for tomorrow. Also, somewhere in there I'm seeing Vinny. Aaaaaah!

5.5.09

the party's over, the cd's skippin'. the same hook repeated grows more grating with each passing second

Doing a lot of project work this week. Got everything mostly wired up for my analog to digital converter. All that's left is an I/O select using NOR gates and hooking up the d-to-a to the correct range. And well, debugging assembly. :3

Here's a list of influences for my poetry portfolio, just because it's a humorous mix:

"Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Adam Drucker a.k.a. Doseone, Kyle "El Guante" Myrrhe, Mike Mlekoday, Saul Williams, Neil Gaiman, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Patricia Smith, Katie Willingham, Neil Hilborn, Daniel Picus, Sarah Welch, Jeff Shotts."

3.5.09

foreign policy

I was tricked by your scent
I was lured by your blouse
I was caught by your laugh
Now tear it out.

Your smile fails to procure
The wish we had for you
Your teeth are sunk in us
And I had to tear them out.

How could they pick you, how could you do?
What do we choose now to stay away from you?
What path do we keep now, what savior calls for help?
What savior calls to save us? I want change for myself.

You lead him by his hand, an old pet too near to death
You watch us with shining eyes, I swear I'll tear them out.
We let you rise before us, fake eyes and smiling breath
I swear I won't let you lead us, I swear we'll tear it out.

We need to be free, we don't have time for your sordid policy

We need to be free, there's no time for your sordid policy

2.5.09

there's a million more miles to run

Alright, so gtk recap:

After spending an additional 2 hours on Friday hitting my head against the the Great Dependency Wall, I gave up for the weekend and refused to touch the program. On Monday, I talked to my professor and said I was still having trouble with it, and he said he wasn't surprised. We then went back to his office and he explained what he had done in the meantime, which was actually rather ingenious. First, he set up a really basic makefile without any listed includes or libraries, just a compiling command. Then he used

make 2>&1 | head

to output stderr to stdout for head to recap it into useful dependency errors. Then he used the shell command

locate

to find them and add them to the include list. We ended up using the standard "pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0" libraries, and then ported it to my system with little trouble. After making sure all the needed #includes were present in my program, we made the file with no problem, and it ran fine. Just to double check it though, I uncommented my code that wasn't working due to dependency issues, which was to undecorate the window (take away the traditional "window" portion of it - title bar, menus, etc). Worked! So after about a half an hour more work I now have a working widget! Huzzah!

Now where to put it? There are 4 spots on the screen that a user can always locate, the 4 corners, so these are well used by operating systems and programs. One of the places that doesn't get used on Ubuntu or by most programs is the area directly above the taskbar, so I centered it roughly in the middle and threw it on there. Here are the results, plus MGMT and kitties.



What this looks like is the Songbird miniplayer mode on the bottom of my screen. But what it actually is is a widget containing the miniplayer that I can put anywhere, move anywhere, decorate however I want, etc. The real purpose of all this was to set it to keep_above(), meaning to stay on top of every other window, and to stick(), which means that it can't be moved and is present on every desktop. So no matter where I go, there's music. :)

1.5.09

you tell me it calms your nerves, you just think it looks cool

Huzzah! Gtk program works! It's pretty. I'll post a big post later tonight. :)

Poetry revision coming along well. Also now have a microcode rough draft. Tomorrow is probably some wiring in the early afternoon, which I should do a diagram for tonight, but there are still a couple pieces I'm not sure about. At least I can take some stuff apart and add some other stuff in. :\

After that it's a ska show at Eclipse, doors at 6, show at 6:30, 3 dollars.

I'm pretty thrilled with progress right now. I talk big, but this is all very manageable. I'm just trying to survive at the same time. :)

Woke up at 6:30 this morning, wide awake. I managed to fall asleep until about 7:30, and then got up and did some homework. I had to re-write a homework assignment for today at noon that I had forgotten about when I went to sleep last night, and it wasn't until I actually asked myself, "why am I awake?" that I remembered. My subconscious was watching out for me, which is pretty cool. Still, it'll be a long day.

My favorite kind.