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djotaku's twitter feed
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- no more cable tv for me. Saving $53/month!
- http://tinyurl.com/653oo5
- I just got 2 achievements on Spore! http://raptr.com/djotaku
- just started playing Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- just started playing Spore. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- just started playing Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- Awesome concession speech by McCain, I actually felt really sorry for him
- obama won!
- Partaking in the age-old tradition of following the election all night long.
- just started playing Solitaire. http://raptr.com/djotaku
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Apr
24
Flood Part 2
Category: Me | 
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Here are some pictures of the flood & damage:
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Apr
24
Floods
Category: Me | Leave a Comment
The sewers backed up in my apartment flooding my bathroom via my bathtub and toilet and my living room via the front door with water full of excrement and urine. However, even in these horrible and anoying times, you still have to look at it positively. Our neighbors got flooded throughout their entire house. For us it didn’t spread of out the bathroom or living room. It was royally disgusting and smelly, but at least the cleaning crew worked through the night and morning to get our apartment to a usable state.
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Nov
8
Quote of the Day
Category: Me, Quotes | Leave a Comment
Background: I’m feeling a little under the weather, so I’m staying home today.
Danielle: “I want you to rest today, ok? I’ll send you a list of chores later.”
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Oct
4
Annoying Rest Room
Category: Me | Leave a Comment
I absolutely hate the rest room by my new office. It was clearly designed by someone with a Catbert-like hatred of employees. Either that or it was designed by someone with the sanity of the guests at the tea party in Alice in Wonderland.
Pretty much all of my hatred for the rest room revolves around the washing up phase. There are three sinks there. The left sink opens like any sane sink in the USA - counter-clockwise. The right sink, however, opens clockwise. So right off the bat, depending on which sink you use, you will probably end up looking like a fool who doesn’t know which way to turn the knob to turn on the water. And then turning it off again often has me first opening the water even more.
Then there are the soap dispensers. They are automatic (which is weird because neither the faucets nor the paper dispensers are). Whoever programmed them to dispense the soap set the timing to randomly vary from right away to just as soon as I move my hand away. Sometimes it takes a good two to three attempts to get some soap on my hands. I’m not even sure what problem they were meant to solve. They aren’t part of a touch-free solution. It can’t be to keep soap from dripping onto the counter because that’s exactly what happens when it waits to dispense soap until I move my hands.
Finally the paper towel dispensers seem to be set to somehow always dispense either a half-size piece of paper towel or a double size paper towel. And it always seems to happen in that order. You first pull out a half sheet that can’t even dry one hand and then you pull a double-sheet that is more than enough to dry both your hands and waste some extra tree for good measure.
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Aug
23
what a long week….
Category: Me | Leave a Comment
I’m glad the weekend is fast upon us…..
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Aug
14
My Pathalogy
Category: Me, Psychology | Leave a Comment
According to the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum, I suffer from completism. Completism is when you have to have all of a collection. It’s true I’m always get annoyed whenever I have only one DVD of a Tv series or if I have 9 of 10 DVDs or something. Feel the same way? Now you know what it’s called!
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Aug
12
This weekend was pretty great. I got to spend a lot of time with my wife. They were supposed to call her in on Saturday, but it got canceled, so that made our time together more enjoyable.
Dan came over and we watched him play Guitar Hero 2 on the PS2. I gave it a shot, but it was actually a little painful on my phret (fret?) fingers. The overall game is a pretty good concept and the music was pretty good. But, because it was music being played, it felt a bit repetitive. I’ll probably have to give it another shot to be fair.
courtesy of Randall Monroe over at xkcd
Tried watching “Little Miss Sunshine” on OnDemand. But the POS kept going on the fritz. We decided “to hell with it” and went back to bumping Netflix to an infinite number of discs per month. Today it kept messing up while Danielle was trying to watch some sort of scary movie.
When we weren’t hanging out with Dan and each other, I was busy working on “Sugar”. I started modeling a character named Nick. So if you thought “Sugar” was going to be about animated inanimate objects, you were wrong. Now you’ll really be guessing what I’m going to do. Started modeling on Friday and finished nearly all of the materials/texturing today. It’s my first attempt at a semi-realistic looking human. (As opposed to Raul Domingo, which is just a humanoid)
When I textured the eyes I was creeped out at how realistic it looked. I mean, not photorealistic, but it was like he was looking at me. See for yourselves!
I also started to give him hair, but due to something I don’t quite understand enough yet, his hair came out blue. It’ll be fixed soon.
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Jun
25
A brief respite from computer animation
Category: Jose's Dinner, Me, Photography, computer animation | Leave a Comment
I’ve spent a pretty good amount of my free time to try and finish Jose’s Dinner. Now that I’m done, I am taking a bit of a break from animation to do some of the other things I like to do, such as play civ4. The new expansion pack is coming out and I’m extremely excited. It has all kinds of great improvements like colonies, popes, and corporations. So I wanted to play one last game, Eric XI of the Chinese is probably going to be my last game before the expansion pack comes out.
I’m also finishing up with my pictures from Coney Island.
I wanted to make sure I didn’t get animation fatigue - I enjoy it, but doing something worth showing to others is time consuming and, since I mostly love the animation, some parts of it are tedious to me. However, I have two great new projects I’m working on. One is the project I was speaking of before I started Jose’s Dinner. I’m already in the storyboarding stage there and will simultaneously begin working on creating the characters and rigging them up. The second story is a bit more grandiose. I have some ideas and some scenes in my head, but that’s way,way in preproduction. I don’t even have a script yet.
So keep on checking up, probably starting next week, you’ll start seeing some of the first parts of my next animation.
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Jun
22
Their food may or may not be worth the price, I’ve never been there for dinner. However, I do know that their club is crap. I would have to say that tonight was definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had in terms of going out for a night of fun. First of all, I got to the Powerplant Live area and no one knew how to get into Babalu Grill. The people blocking the area told us to go down the block, the people at the end of the block told us to go back to the original people. When we finally get in, the bouncer said it was $5 per person, but the person taking the cash said it was $10 per person. It was so loud outside from a concert going on that it was impossible to reconcile. Perhaps I was just tired from a long day’s work, but had the concert not been going on a mere 20 feet away, I would have disputed this.
We got there at 2215 (1015 pm) and their website said it becomes a club at 2200. They didn’t even play any music until 2315. Then it was one reggae song after another. My wife went to ask the DJ what was up with all the reggae, where was the merengue, salsa and bachata? (We waited until 2330 because I’ve been a DJ before and didn’t want to be rude) He told her that there was no spanish music tonight. I’m sorry, but is it such a bad assumption that a CUBAN restaurant that moonlights as a night club should play CUBAN music - ie merengue, salsa, and bachata????
So we left right away. I F-ING HATE dancing to reggae. I don’t mind listening to it and if we’re at a dance club and one or two songs go by, I’ll dance to it. But I didn’t pay $20 to dance reggae all night long, I wanted to dance to Spanish music. We haven’t been out dancing in over a year and really wanted to.
If Babalu had put a sign up that said it was going to be a reggae night, I would have never paid the $20 cover. But they didn’t say anything. I ask again, was I wrong to assume that a CUBAN restaurant would play CUBAN music???
I’m never going there again and, frankly, I’m pretty fed up with Baltimore and Inner Harbor. I’m going to give this one more shot some time in the future with a Salsa club in DC, but if they don’t play at least 50% salsa, I’m going nuts on the management.
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Apr
26
Where I see the future of computing going…
Category: Computers, Fedora, Geek Love, Linux, M$, Me, ReactOS | 4 Comments
Recently, Penguin Pete, who’s on my blogroll, wrote this piece about his disapproval about where Ubuntu was taking Linux. Some of his key arguments were….doh! He removed the posts. I guess I’ll have to summarize. He said, in a nutshell, that too many Windows users were going to Ubuntu and expecting it to be just like Windows. But Linux is not Windows. This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with people going from Windows to Linux, but their demands to rearrange Linux, which was made in the image of Unix, to be more like Windows, raelly rubs some people the wrong way. He suggested that if users wanted a FOSS version of Windows, they should go to ReactOS, a Windows clone.
Originally, I was going to post about how I was on the fence about this, but somewhat in favor of Penguin Pete’s point of view. Afterall, I really like Linux a lot for what it is. It served me very well as a web server for a few years and I love the command line. I like the Unix philosophy of small programs that do things well and I like a lot of the software. It’s also easy to learn about your computer and change things in the command line. I don’t want to see all that go away just so we can accomodate lazy users. I’d rather see them stay away from Linux if they are that averse to Linux. So, to me GUIs are OK, but don’t remove the ability to edit the text files! In Fedora, for example, there are some text files that can easily get overridden just because you choose to use the GUI. I think we need to do our best in Linux to cater to both types of users. Keep the command line stuff for those who were attracted to Linux because of the ability to tinker, absent in Windows. Keep GUIs for new users, lazy users, or for those days when even the command line junkies just want to rest their minds and configure some utility without having to read miles and miles of manuals.
However, for those users who want to have Windows, they should go to ReactOS. It’s not ready for primetime yet; in fact, they recommend only running it in VMWare or QEMU for now, but Beta shoudl be coming soon and should be good enough for a good 70-90% of the people. And if people good at programming who love Windows go over to ReactOS, it could probably reach its goals even faster!
Then I read this post on iTWire written in response to Penguin Pete’s article. Key points include:
Trbovich has a great writing style and the logic of his argument does appear consistent. It is also unashamedly elitist. Acording to Penguin Pete, Ubuntu is not really Linux but a cultural cringe to refugees from Windows. Paraphrasing his words, Ubuntu is a Linux distro that is trying to stretch itself like taffy to fit Windows users.
According to Penguin Pete and an apparently not inconsiderable band of Linux stalwarts, Linux is not and never will be an operating system designed to suit disillusioned Windows users. They reckon Linux was designed to be a replacement for Unix not Windows.
….
Some dissatisfied Windows users may argue that they don’t want to replace Windows with another version of Windows - open source or not - anyway.So for Windows users determined to leave the fold, there’s really only two viable choices - Macintosh or a Linux distro. For those not interested in being enclosed in the walled garden of the Mac, Ubuntu has become the Linux distro of choice for a large number of Windows refugees.
I don’t want to put words into Stan Beer’s mouth, but I think he misunderstood Pete. The types of users Stan describes there are not the ones that Pete was angry about. He was angry about the ones that come to Ubuntu and complain about each and every little thing that isn’t exactly like Windows.
Then I read and responded to this blog. And the this post is basically an expansion on what I wrote as a comment there. His key arguments were:
I have been an IT professional for over 25 years. I have been in my time developer, sysadmin (many OS’s), db admin, hardware support, cable puller and all the rest. I have no issues with doing any of that stuff, it’s just that it’s not what I do now. When I’m doing what I do now, I’d like computers to just work. And for that matter, when I’m not working, and I want to play some music, I don’t want to have to google the latest encoding schemes and determine which codec I need to update. I want it to just work. Therein lies a hurdle which Open Source has negotiated poorly to date - one of product management and marketing. And the reason that that hurdle remains is largely in the makeup of the FOSS community.
So, as I propose in the reply to that blog post, I think this is why my (and many others’) fervor for open standards is SO important! When we have free and open standards such as OpenDocument, PNG, OGG, etc we allow people to use any operating system they want. Originally when I created pictures in the the bad old days in MS Paint on Windows 3.11, a Macintosh user could not read it. More recently, when I created MS Word doc files, they could not be read by anyone that did not have MS Word and that means just Windows and Macs as long as MS continues to support office on Mac. Linux users, however, cannot read those files. (Nowadays with OpenOffice.org they are close, but not exact) Imagine the internet if JPEGs or GIFs could only be read by Windows or Macs. It would be horrible!
So my view of the future is one where I see open file formats and FOSS in general alllowing for a fragmentation of the operating system market. And, because of this openness it won’t be like the 80s when Amigas weren’t interoperable with Commodores or DOS. And in this future, the stuff that Penguin Pete, Stan Beer, and Confused will become a relic of the 90s/2000s because people will use whichever operating system meets their needs without having to worry about compatibility between files. People won’t have to use MS Office because they’ll need doc to communicate! We’ll have odt and so they will only use MS Office if MS can provide enough value to convince people to buy their software. When the files produced are just as good in OpenOffice.org as Word, they will need to work extra hard to make their product worth $300. Why do you think they are so opposed to OpenDocument? It’s not for technical reasons, as they claim, but because it threatens their monopoly. After all, if the files were the same, why not use something FREE instead of $300???
So in my future people use whichever operating system meets their needs best. If they are running a server they will choose Linux or BSD. If they want a desktop where they can tinker with every little setting they will choose Linux or BSD. If they want a desktop that will make all the decisions for them and leave them with an elegant and easy to use computer they will choose Windows, ReactOS, or Syllable. If they want a computer which perfect for video editing and so efficiently written that one user claimed he used to play Quake and watch tv on the computer at the same time, they will choose Haiku-OS.
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Apr
21
My photography business is launched
Category: Me, Photography | Leave a Comment
Go on over to http://ericmesaphotovideo.com/ to check it out!
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