Yes thats right i now have a web-cam, i cant believe I was right. I got a digital camera. Here is the link sirtimbo.hobbiton.org/cam.jpg

Wahoo! I finally got around to doing this, I spent hours attempting to find out how to make this page look good and work in browsers other than IE. I believe the current version is acceptable, it looks better but takes a little longer to load. I have also split the rants up into seperate pages with 4 rants on a page.

• in a loosely related event - I just found where to buy Penguin Caffinated Mints locally. I have been hyped up on these things all day because I had to go in to work for the early show (4:45 AM), and didn�t get much sleep the night before.

Err, well I in all sincerity meant to update this sooner, in fact I sorta did. I simply forgot to cd into the www/ dir when uploading the update via ftp. Any normal person would have taken a few seconds to look at the site online before getting up and going to eat. heh. I am very happy that I now have Unreal Tournament, I intended to play on the DHBiT server, unfortunately they use the RA mod but its a 20 meg download, on top of the 7.5 Mb patch. I have a crappy old computer for my linux box without any USB ports. My rio500 mp3 player is USB, and it can be used in linux. I would like to do a dual boot with linux on the good computer but that means that I need to buy a new HD that is big enough that I can still install all my games for windows. See my problem. Well, this rant may actually get put up when it is supposed to

Wow! am I glad that the job market for techs isnt entirely dried up. Reports flood the internet about homeless web-workers, but there are niches out there for the technoligalclly inclined. It seems that there are plenty of businesses that just dont yet realize that they need a tech. I was recently hired for a local news station as a production assistant, I am still relatively young so I am not to worried about really high paying jobs, but for my age I am getting a great deal of experience. Most of my friends work at department stores or fast food places. At the place I was just hired they needed a web-page so the manager learned HTML(or some WYSIWYG tool) and made the web-page himself. I was impressed and hope to do some work with that project, but it made me realize that there are lots of companies out there other than dotcom�s that need internet techs to do various work. Its amazing how depressed our economy got with the first sign of growing pains in a new industry.

Today I�m not going to go with the expected rant on the benefits or detriments of GUI�s themselves� they are here and used I am going to discuss the variations. Specifcaly the Unix desktop variations. There is Gnome and there is KDE. Both suck� they both continue o get steadily better with each release. The very fact that there are 2 seperate desktops which are independant and incompatible with each other, is sick and wrong. Sure it�s great to have options but programmers end up spending so much time trying to make programs compatible with either KDE or Gnome that the quality of the product could be lost. Personally I believe that KDE is ridiculusly ugly and inefficient, its like an old windows gui come back to haunt you. Currently it seems that gnome is the best option for a Linux envroment.

Yay for Microsoft free friday - http://davenet.userland.com/2001/06/13 this article has sparked discusions on a international effort to make websites not accept requests from MS IE on fridays! It sounds like a great method to get away from the Monopolys efforts to show smart tags down our throats. Well, thats enough from me, this guy rants fairly well also.

The floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders.

Well, I have finally moved. It was rough moving on the 4th of July but at least on independence day many people have a day off of work� it�s great to have friends and relatives that are willing to sacrafice their time and physical strength to help us out with moving. I moved out of Nebraska and back into Iowa whence I came 2 years previously. It turned out that moving to a small town in Nebraska away form any cities was a big mistake (Duh!). Now I was able to pick my intelligence back up at the border and resume a semi-normal life near civilization. I skipped a few days between rants because I was busy hauling things to our new house, and one of those things was my computer. Yesterdays post was only written yesterday I posted it today and am now commencing to produce this little note. I hope you all have a good independance day.

mp3�s or rather digital music in general is a great thing, there is no doubt about that, but there are some difficulties involved. If you spend most of your time listening to the radio in a car then you are likely to hear a song but not find out it�s name or artist. Streaming radio is great because the shoutcast plugin for winamp also sends the songs title, unfortunately the internet radios for cars that use satelites dont display the song title. Therefor knowing the name of a song to download it becomes very difficult.

I found an ironic piece of information. There�s a list of endangered historic landmarks in the US. Read this excerpt from an article about it :

�The Bok Kai Temple in Marysville, California, which was built in 1880 by Chinese immigrants to honor the god of water, is on the list for fear it may not survive another rainy season.�

*-generaly i dont like forwards, but occasionaly a person who is an obsessive Fwd:�r also happens to have good tast about what is funny and worth reading or viewing, so far I have only come across 2 people that fit that description. Please, dont abuse e-mail, for the sake of humanity.

Well, there is only one type of culture though isnt there? The geek culture. Thats not entirely true is it, within the �civilized� world, recently there has been a huge influx of deviant social types, such as goths and skaters. Any social type that has emerged recently seems to be one that is dedicated to being different and indifferent to what the popular crowd thinks of them. Is it possible that this idea is in fact becomeing popular therefore cancelling out the whole point, well yes. But that is fairly natural. Luckily though this current social division system is still healthy because instead of highschool aged people becoming outsiders they are simply able to form new social cliques where they are accepted, the whole being part of the in-crowd idea is incorrectly conceived by most parents. Each to their own kind is what I say. That is part of the geek way isnt it? Everyone different from their RealLife(TM) peers, but geeks are able to form their own social circle through the infinately superior technological medium.

If I ever get a laptop, then I will run Linux on it. Therefore it must have a name, I�ve always considered namin a series of computers after subatomic particles. So I think I would name the laptop Photon, �cause its light.