The Case of the Missing Truth

Published on January 29, 2010 in Ian. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

I first saw Clerks in 1995 or so. The stark contrast to the other movies of the time was awakening. (Toy Story, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Jumanji, and GoldenEye were among the movies to be dropped on us that year.) The movie grabbed me by the intelligence, and adolescence and showed me a world that *I* could live in. I was hooked on Kevin Smith.

While I was eagerly awaiting Dogma, Mallrats came and went, followed by Chasing Amy. Chasing Amy is a very personal and touching story about a dude, Holden, who falls for a ‘lesbian’ Amy. I just watched it again earlier today, and I was struck with the realization that Amy was a complete untrustworthy liar.

We learn that Amy, a self described lesbian that tells Holden that she has never been with a man, has lied about who she is to Holden. Holden, who believes he is THE ONLY DUDE the she has ever been with, is pissed not that she has been lying to him about who she is, but that she has had more than a ‘normal’ amount of sex in high school and college.

Am I the only one who is done with Amy at this point? I wanted her out of the movie. It was Holden (and Bankie’s) movie. It was the story of how she damaged them. We don’t need her any more.

I thought I had more to say than that on the subject. Looks like I was wrong.

The Case of the New Job

Published on December 26, 2009 in Developing and Ian. Closed Tags: , .

I have a relatively new job with a marketing start-up. I develop the websites they sell.

I love Wordpress, I an I have been using it here for.. well, ever. When it came time to consider producing websites quickly, guess what I chose?

I have a formal education, but nothing, and I mean nothing, in the world of programming, online or off, beats doing. I have experience with php, so hacking on Wordpress was not that big a deal. The only real hurdle was that I really only ever have hacked on themes I have used. Basically The Codex and I are getting really cozy.

My whole point is this; keep mucking around with things, even if you think you know enough.

Merry Chrismahannakwanizkka

Published on December 26, 2009 in Ian. Closed Tags: .

I know I haven’t been around all that much lately, but I have a reason, I mean excuse. I am working full time and I have not felt like writing anything when I get home.

I didn’t say it was a good reason. Anyway..

Merry Christmas all!.

The Case of My Desktop, Again.

Published on November 7, 2009 in Ian. Closed

Once again, I have fiddled with my desktop. Here it is.

Fullscreen
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Note that at the moment I am running one screen. Rest assured I will change things again.

The Case of GeekTools

Published on October 23, 2009 in Ian. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

A buddy of mine downloaded and installed GeekTools a couple of days back. I have installed/uninstalled several times for various screwings around. Once Dave installed it, I got to thinking, and Googleing, ‘What can (should) be done with this marvelous tool’. As it happened I also subscribed to Lifehacker (finally) the same day. I also got an email with link to some rather sexy desktop layouts.

But I am getting ahead of myself, a little bit.

I have been working a contract on site (that is to say at my client offices as opposed to mine) and as such I am on my Macbook (Mid 2006). It is a Core Duo 2.0ghz model sporting 2 gigs of ram. If you know your Mac well enough, you are likely to realize this is nice enough laptop, but those numbers right there aren’t getting any bigger. (All I have left is to buy a huge SATA2 harddrive, and it is upgraded as much as possible.) This go me thinking about area where I might be able to trim the fat (reduce my memory overhead, and possible CPU load) especially since once in a while I have to open Photoshop, or Fireworks. (Poor Macbook takes it like a champ, though.)

There are some things I like to have always available; my calendar, my to-do list, some system stats (CPU load, memory usage, and CPU temp, mostly so I know when I need to give my poor overworked Mac a break), Twitter, and my current iTunes track info. This is where GeekTools comes in.

From Lifehacker I discoverd, and installed a shell script called todo.sh and something called Remind. Todo is a command-line-interface to do list. it is quite elegant and simple. Remind is reminder program, that you can out put onto a calendar. Between those two I have all the functionality of iCal, locally anyway. (It s unlikely I will stop using iCal, as I put in it my school, work, and various other schedules so I can propagate my info out to my family, and iPhone.

Next up I needed to get rid of Twitterriffic. There is nothing wrong with it, but it takes up valuable resources, so I found a shell script that pulled from an rss feed. Guess what rss feed I have it polling. (Finding the right Twitter feed was a PITA, but once I did, all was right in the world.)

From there I went on to my system info; Uptime, CPU usage, and RAM usage. All I did there was played with uptime and top (both just run from the shell) and fed the output to awk, changing the formatting, until I got the look I wanted. (Top will disseminate a whole lot of info, but is useful to know, but for this, thank god there is awk.)

Finally there was the matter of iTunes info. GeekTools can handle Applescript as well. So through it I grab the info, format it, and output it all in script. GeekTools just calls the script.

And my current background is a free wallpaper clock from Vladstudio. He is a Russian(?) artist with a great eye.

Macbook Desktop
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I like it.