Since last I journalled here, I have survived another bout with cancer (this time osteosarcoma, see my homepage in the cancer section for the long story). This time I come away permanently disabled (my ulna nerve in the left arm is pretty much useless leaving me with absolutely no sensation in my left pinky, half my left ring finger, the top of my forearm, most of the top of my hand and a portion of my palm) with a metal plate (titanium or surgical steel, I forget right now and am too lazy to look at the surgical report right now) and 8 screws holding my upper arm together.

I'm a licensed electrician, a handyman, and licensed business owner with a pick-up truck (redneck style, too). No kids, am highly active on Facebook and Twitter, kind of active on Google+, and occasionally still messing around with /.

Not much else to say that you can't find on my homepage.

As of 12 March 2011, I am a married man. (:

The first month's posts for Audio Verse of the Day are being tracked over at Legit Torrents. You can go right to the torrent page by clicking here.

Update, they can no longer be found at LegitTorrents. The tracker sucks. They can now be found on Demonoid. I'm looking for other trackers, too.

That seems to the common theme when an article showing even the hint of giving ancient peoples credit for knowing something was helping and were possibly able to track it down to a source that was providing a benefit.

Apparently only modern American humans are capable seeing that something has a beneficial aspect and tracking it down at the very least to a certain substance made in a certain way. Apparently we invented the scientific method, science, medicine, and everything else that represents the ability to comprehend it as something other than "magic". I'm rather sick of this crud. It smacks of cultural elitism when there is no evidence that such is not warranted. If this is the prevailing attitudes of the so-called elite, you can bet this will happen 2,000 years from now when they dig up our bones and discover the chemical cocktails that we ingest every single freakin' day from rBGH (meat, dairy products), (over)vaccinations, excessive use of anti-bacterial products and antibiotics.

God forbid we accept that a bunch of Nubians from nearly 2,000 years ago might have been on to something when they found that drinking their beer made from "moldy" grain had healing properties. I mean, it's not like they had brains and could work out a method for empirical testing. After all, they were only desert-dwelling Nubians.

You people make me sick.

First, I'd like to thank TheRealGrogan for this comment. Without it I'd still not have a fully updated and patched system. Stupid Windows.

So life in 2010 is going pretty good. On September 1st I start classes at TTCM in their industrial electricity program. Some people (here on /. none-the-less) look at this with some sort of derision, either because of my age or choice of training program. I could easily go into industrial electronics too, but I figure it's no good if you have no electricity.

Why is any trade looked upon with derision (aside from the criminal trades and prostitution), though? Especially here, where one would think that continuing education -- no matter where that leads -- would be looked upon as a good thing.

Life is good in 2010 so far, let's see how the rest of the year pans out.

I'm wanting to organize several coding bounties to get several ports on FreeBSD updated (such as Java) yet the only bounty site I've found is Pledgie, which forces you to choose who it is going to before you begin collecting donations. That's all well and fine when a project has a defined maintainer, but something like a coding bounty, it's not so good. Does anyone out on /. use an escrow service for this purpose? If not, how do you collect and disperse funds for such a thing?

I have the beginnings of FreeBSD-8.0RELEASE on one computer.

Going to use it as a test server for slashcode and a few other things.

Still single.

Saved.

On Facebook.

So yeah, still single, but only because I choose to be. I'm literally having to beat women back with a stick.

For those on /., NOT INTERESTED. I've had my fill of relationships for a few years. Come see me in 2012 and we'll talk then.

Its been quite a while since last I've posted, almost a year to be exact.

I'm no longer engaged, but I am dating again. I must not be that much of a geek if I'm dating beautiful women. Either that or geek is more acceptable.

I'm having an MC-LUUG meeting at my place of work, which happens to be a buffet style restaurant with two party rooms. I'm hoping some folks show up. I'll be showing off Knoppix on Big Blue, talking about ways of advocating Linux without alienating, and problems people have encountered when trying Linux. Then I'll chow down on all I can eat sirloin steak cooked any way I like (30 seconds on each side, thank you very much). Mmm, sirloin.

I wonder when Slashcode will be ported to Apache 2.0

So I've metamoderated a few comments about how "I don't need religion to tell me that taking an innocent life is wrong". Well I'm very happy for you. Now go and don't get an abortion. As for you having a moral right to force that view on everyone else, I say fuck you and the rest of your Republican bullshit.

I don't like the idea of abortion either but I'm not going to make it illegal for two reason.

1) I don't want backdoor butchers to return that killed half as many women as it helped.
2) It's not my body and I do not have to live with that decision for the rest of my life.

So how can I live with myself? I try to make sure my friends are fully informed on the alternatives before they make a choice. I make it a point to make sure that the alternatives are really viable. That is all I can do. I refuse to put my personal beleifs into law and everyone else should be refuse to do that as well. Morality does not make for good law. You want a country run by morals move to Vatican City (yes, it is a recognized country with it's own standing army) which is run by the Pope who is supposed to be the most moral man in the world. Otherwise live your own life as you will and let others do the same. Stupid fuckers.

After more of the same problems from Debian I've switched to Gentoo and have never looked back. It has to be the best Linux distro around. It's package manager is the easiest, best organized package manager I've come across in the years I've been using Linux.

If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, you're definitely missing out.

Sorry I was gone for so long folks, but a multitude of more important things (such as school) took over my life, but I'm back and slowly putting stuff back up (such as all the web sites I hosted). It's going to be a slow process, but I finally made the complete switch to Debian 3.0r1 (:

I probably won't be actively commenting just yet, but I shall be around, you can count on that.

I not only have almost finished reading Just For Fun: The Story of An Accidental Revolutionary one day after it arriving at my house via UPS, I have taken it upon myself to email Linus (via my LUG's email addy) to ask for a sort of mini-interview as I prepare for a speech I'm giving in one of my college classes (which, interestingly enough, is called Fundamentals of Speech (aka public speaking)) and which I might reuse at the LUG's next meeting at our local Waffle House on 13 September 2003.