Clippings

I've been doing better about scanning my reading list lately and thought I would point out my clipping RSS feed. It's pretty cool, contains any article I think is worth it for someone with my interests to read. I could probably sort them into something like tech, poker and other, but I haven't yet. But maybe I will try that soon. Anyways, here it is.

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/ClippingsRSS.aspx?uid=374239

It's probably worth it, today I point to an article on the Unreal 3 engine which makes me want a new computer, and a few other things. If you like anything in it, or have your own clippings let me have it.

Upgrading Gentoo

Well, I upgraded gentoo recently and noticed dbus had been masked. I unmerged it as usual, and went to work the next day without thinking much about it. My wife called at 9 saying stuff didn't load and after going home I realized a "revdep-rebuild -i" was in order to fix it. Not too bad, but be prepared when you emerge world.

Also, the new harddrive is really making my computer load faster. At least it seems to me to be doing so. I've been enjoying that allot. I'm thinking about trying FreeBSD 6.2 on some machines and comparing it to my Gentoo setup to see if there's any difference there. I'll post numbers if I do. "emerge --sync" goes wicked fast now which seems to be the main plus. I don't know if the other drive is going bad or just old / slow.

Also, for the copy, I used
rsync --delete --verbose --archive --one-file-system --exclude=/lost+found/ / src /dest to copy the file systems onto the new drive before doing the grub / lilo update.

Well I guess that's it, I'll post some podcasts soon as I've got a few good ones.

Moving on and Other Stuff

So I've thought about blogging about quitting my job for awhile, but I wanted to wait til I put my 2 weeks in just in case. So now I'm moving on. One thing I've been fairly amazed and troubled at is the way small business owners expect people to work themselves to death for the most part. I'm talking more than just getting the job done when it's needed, but more like "You should work 45 hours a week". Now, the first thing, is that even if I love my job enough to do it, the fact that it's expected makes me say, "You should pay me for 45 hours a week worth of work then." But the next thing is, it seems like allot of great companies have figured out that this doesn't work. Eventually you get tired, and if you're good, the company looses your service. Managers like this also seem to micro manage or have odd rules to some point which many big companies seem more willing to drop.

The view the good manager has seems to be something I heard J.C. Penny realized when he started that company. That is that you have to find the right people and let them do what they do. Makes me wonder if I was able to just run the Software Group the way I thought would be most productive what could have been. But it's not my interest anymore, I'll be out the start of February.

So, beyond that, more iPod ripping. I've got 60 Gigs in one of my computers and I had to bite the bullet and buy my second +100 MB drive. Most of it is going into wav files I recorded from tape. I 'm quite happy with the one tape I remasterd, and will have to do the other two soon. Right now I'm trying to get some video going, which should also happen soon.

For pod casts, the one great one I'm enjoying is se-radio.net . Now that I'll be driving an hour a day, I'll get to focus on these while I commute, which will definitely be good for me.

Audacity and Amarok

So before the NFL playoffs this afternoon I spent some time streamlining my media management and moving over to using Amarok. I think I finally got things going correct, but Amarok's a bit clunky when it comes to the iPod. What I love about it is it's podcast management, that seems to be well done. Right now adding a new song seems to go like so.

Start with GRIP, rip to music/encode to get it ready. I had grip go straight to music/mp3 where I have my music but they seemed to fight. I made it use "--preset extreme" to lame which is half the size of insane but sounds good to me.

After that, load the files in Amarok, do whatever edits to the id3 tags I want in the /encode dir, and then "move to collection" which drops it into music/mp3. It's id3 tag editing is a bit better than gtkpod's was if you ask me, but both are pretty close. The main thing I like about Amaroks is that if I select 3 tracks, it defaults to multi-edit mode, and it disables a few things like Track Name from being changed in edit mode. Then you can go to single edit mode and do all the track names and other track specific stuff. Very slick.

Now this is where things get a bit hairy. I wish Amarok could just tell me what is different between the collection and the iPod and either automatically sync things up, or prompt me to handle everything. Also, if I change the rating on the iPod I don't think it grabs that correctly, or even lets me browse that on the iPod. I've been using the rating to flag items that need work with a 1-star rating. Then I figured I could work on it and get it back. That brings up another problem, to change the file I'm working on, (i.e. to change it's genre), I need to edit it, then copy it to my collection, overwriting my old item, and then it seems everything goes well. There may be more things that gtkpod handles correctly and Amarok doesn't, but that's life I guess. Oh well, maybe I'll help out with Amarok development for iPod related stuff or just use gtkpod for that stuff.

One more feature is grabbing the CD cover art, I really dig how it grabs it and sends it all to the iPod. Not shabby at all.

Now, I'm also taking this time to "digitally re-master" some tapes I have, copy them to a CD in case I want it, and then encode them. Audacity is a fairly good .wav editor, and I'm digging it. The "Noise Removal" tool's been pretty good, and it's "Bass Boost" and "Equalizer" plug ins have been good. So I'm happy with the one tape I have done and I've got two more I'm going to do in the next week.

So that's what I'm wasting my time with for the moment. Hopefully I'll ahve it done soon and play with videos on my iPod. Then I can get back to working on the house.

RSS Feeds

I've been reading blogs for awhile now, so I thought I'd post some. With the iPod and my impending commute again, I'm also planning on getting into some podcasts, but I'll wait until I've listened to some to say which ones I think are worth it. For what it's worth, I'm still using NewsGator as it's been good to me, but maybe I'll have to switch, we'll see.

So for Gentoo related stuff, two guys have stood out.
FlameEyes Weblog at http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/xml/atom/feed.xml and
Taviso's at http://my.opera.com/taviso/xml/atom/blog/
Also Stu's but he's no longer a Gentoo Dev, at http://blog.stuartherbert.com/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1

There is finally http:.//planet.gentoo.org and http://planet.gentoo.org/universe which I used to read, but I just scan that now and skip half of it. The guys I read, I keep them separate and double mark their stuff in planet/universe separately.

Next on the list are two corporate sites I like. First is the official Google Blog, it's about 50% good, but worth a read. I love it blog reading because the 50% I don't like, I just click read when I see it and go on with life, very nice. It's at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Next, the Flash for Linux site is at http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/atom.xml . I was getting up to snuf to do some Flash development for a guy, but that fell through. Oh well.

I have to mention the http://www.ars-technica.com blogs as well. They are what I started reading, and though they've fallen in favor from what I must read, they are still good.

http://new.linuxjournal.com/ is the linux journals RSS feed, that one is pretty good as well. But again, my reading on these has been iffy.

Lastly, I'm trying to find some good poker blogs, but I haven't quite found some yet. I've also started playing with ESPN's poker club, which has been alright. I'll have to play some more. I even passed up a chance for a game because I was getting sick of taking some loose college kids money. We'll see, if I get decent I think I'll do a few 100 dollar satellites and see how it goes.

First a DVR now an iPod

So I finally got one. It's been pretty good though, I'm digging it. I keep hosing the database and having to reload it, but with back ups it's not too bad. I just wiped it today because I wanted to play with the video features. iTunes is not my friend anymore, but the iPod is back to where it was a week ago, which I guess will do. All in all, I do like having the mp3 players for whenever I'm doing stuff that I want music for.

Yeah so, someday I'll get busy, but for now I'm still farting around. Maybe I'll get things to shaken up soon, but we'll see. I'm so Blah as of late, but I'll fight through it I guess.