Have a great day today (tomorrow actually but I want to beat the rest) Robert!

So, yeah ok, the ‘winter’ banner is up and, well ready ;). I had a nice backrgound I wanted to use instead of the mountain view thing, but it looked like a bunch of gnomes had pissed all over it, so I decided to scrap that design and just put this one up instead. I’m pretty pleased with the result, except for the urinating midget disaster *cough*, anyway, since it was all done with The Gimp and not Photoshop. I feel so leet and stuff.

Like I do each year around this time I’ve looked back at what I’ve been up to. Everytime and again I get depressed, not that I should, but I do anyway. My biggest hobby is computers/linux or just generally tinkering with either. When I look at what I’ve contributed to those I always come up with a pretty empty list. Most people I know, they have this one speciality that they’re good, scrap that, great at.

I know a lot on a more general level but as soon as it becomes specific I have to bail out. It tends to make me feel rather inadequate during discussions where I always get the impression that I’m either too stupid to grasp some common things or that the others in the discussion think I’m a total morron for not knowing some of the basic stuff they’re talking about. My biggest problem is when people ask what I’m good at. My answer would have to be: nothing I guess. I know it’s not like that, that I do know my way around the things I toy with, but when I think about how it would help me in a search for another job I get pretty scared.

My biggest wish would be to be part of a big project. Something where people would know my name. I guess I just want some recognition like everyone else.

Oh well, I’ll get over it. Not that anyone reads this anyway. Judging by the comments at least. Still, it felt good to rant a bit about it.

It’s here, it’s loaded on my machine and it’s… rendering all wrong *sob*. After going through 4 different sets of drivers, which gave me all kinds of results, I ended up with this. I think it might be the video card (no shit Sherlock) since when HL2 eventually crashes it shows a fucked up ASCII bootup screen when it comes back on. But not to despair, tomorrow evening I’ll have a nice shiny and new ATI Radeon 9600XT! I’m feeling better already. Now let’s hope it renders fine so the feeling lasts :/.

So I’m watching the 2 boxed DVD sets from Alias (season 1 and 2) which I bought in the UK a month or so ago and I was pleasantly surprised when I came across Marshall typing away on his computer running, hold on to your socks, KDE! Yes the Alias geek extraordinair uses an Open Source desktop environment. I should’ve seen it coming though, all throughout the second season the use of IT material was very good. Uploading files using an ftp commandline client, cat’ing readme files, talking about encrypting data as an mp3 and putting it up on audiogalaxy, etc. I don’t know, it just makes me all giddy inside seeing this kind of stuff on screen ;).