So, I found this location-based social network called Brightkite, and I wondered if any of you use it, or have heard of it, or have even heard of LBSNs.
So?
[edited to add: Brightkite lets you choose how specific to make your location check-ins, from exact address to just a ZIP code or city/nearby metro, as well as privacy settings (only friends can see check-ins made in private mode); though if using the service to meet up with new people, it would be hard to do being private all the time.]

WIFE - I have made no progress on my search since my last update. The search continues.
FRIENDS - I have made no definite progress on my search since my last update. I have exchanged a few messages with some people, but nothing that promises to cross into face-to-face friendship any time soon.
CAREER - I posted ads to Craigslist, as suggested, a Saturday, the following Wednesday, and then Saturday again. Then I was off the network for most of last week and didn't post anything. So far, the only responses to my ads have been junk mailings. I am planning to make a new ad today when I finish this entry. I am giving more serious consideration to the idea of offering finder's fees for referrals, but I'd like to have some more input on this. I covet your counsel. What is your opinion of my idea of doing a referral program where I'd pay people a set amount when someone they refer pays me a deposit? What points should I be careful of, and how should I go about doing this? I'm still not sure how I feel about asking people to put forth so much effort with little promise of a return, but this would likely be different from my experience at the window place, because I would not be asking people to go door to door but merely to mention my services to people they already know/work with/patronize. I would put notices on my Web site and in materials I provide for the finders that I do not support unsolicited bulk mailings or other forms of spam, and if I got (many) reports of a particular finder engaging in these practices, that finder would forfeit his or her fees (after I investigated the matter, of course). So, what are your thoughts and counsel on this matter?
WRITING - I haven't really done much, if any, real writing lately. I have, however, been making my way through my old Poland journal, converting the content into a new XML-based display system so it will match the new design of my personal Web site.

So, that's the status of my major goals as of today.

I feel I have made little progress in my goals since my last update over a year ago (wow... I neglected that for a long time!), but here we are:
WIFE - I can't say I've met anyone whom I think is very interested in me, and I haven't met anyone I know for sure has potential to become my wife, but life being what it is, I don't know. I'm trying to build up my circle of friends (I'll say more about this in a moment), but I'm also always on the lookout for my wife. The young lady I mentioned in my last goal status entry soon became involved in a relationship and did not message me long after I met her, so I don't guess that's going to go anywhere.
DEGREE I've finished my degree, so: FRIENDS - I've been thinking about it, and I judge that I don't really have many local friends. I have many acquaintances, some of whom share with me a level of caring, but hardly any I'd call friends. For one thing, there is nobody in town that I would feel I could call on the phone and ask if they're doing something tonight and would they like to hang out. Not one. I've been getting out among people, and I'm proud of myself for doing that, but it is mostly to the game store, where the median age is probably 17. Very few people my age hang out there.
CAREER - My business limps along. It's not the economy that holds me back; it is name recognition. I doubt 1% of the businesses in town know I'm out here doing Web design. Part of the reason for this (and I'm not complaining but explaining) is the time I had to take off to help with family medical crises over the last nine or so months. But part of it is my lack of a social network. I've never been a good salesman... maybe I should set up an affiliate program for people to bring me business and get a finder's fee for bringing me a customer who pays a deposit on some Web work. I'm kind of leery of this, because I used to work for a window company that did things that way. They'd hire tons of people to go door to door setting up appointments for the guy to try to sell them windows. They were good windows, but the whole three or so months I spent walking from door to door in the heat of the late spring and early summer, I only got paid for one appointment; so I know how hard it is to earn money that way, and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with asking people to work that hard for that little return... but on the other hand, it is something someone with a good personality and loads of acquaintances could do more easily than I could to earn a little bit of pocket change.
NOVEL I'll call this instead WRITING - I haven't really done any serious writing lately. I've tried to get back into the habit, but I have not had much motivation internally, and pretty much none externally. No one seems to care whether I write or not. However, I have been using my creative energies. I've been pouring them into making a game world for my gaming group. This interests me and sparks my creativity, but it is unlikely to bring me any money at all. The past couple of days, though, I've been thinking on my novel To Walk Among Stars, so I may do some writing in that... though I'd rather have A Taste of Champagne done first, since it comes earlier in the saga. I'll have to see.
Anyway, that's the status of my major goals as of today.

I had a long entry typed out about this, but I cut it, loaded my browser, and got sidetracked... then shut down my computer for the night and saved the file, forgetting I had cut the entry out to paste it in the browser. Barf.
So, here's the rundown: Saturday, March 28, at about 02:30h, a thunderbolt struck close to the house and zapped a bunch of stuff on my LAN.
dragon: scrambled boot sector or kernel. Kernel panicked when it came back up. Fixed by reinstalling OS.
koko: internal wired NIC can't see the network. Fixed by plugging in PCMCIA NIC (which hadn't worked under etch but works fine under lenny).
yum-yum: zapped either the PCMCIA NIC or the lower PCMCIA slot. Upper slot works, so I can update it, but the old NIC is double height, so I can't test it. Moved files to new machine. Reinstalled OS (tried to switch to Debian, but there was an ACPI conflict, and it didn't work, switched back to Ubuntu), renamed machine dinah.
felix/yumyum: new laptop for my business. Felix is the Vista side, and yumyum is the Debian Linux side. Microsoft was nice enough to include partition resizing tool, which made it easy to trim the Vista partition to a more reasonable eight or 10GB and delete the "data" partition, giving me tons of space for Linux and the actual data files I will be using in my business.
winkie: does nothing when power switch is pressed, assume motherboard is shot. Replaced with...
skimbleshanks: reinstalled OS (I had previously had a failed install (SATA was pretty new when I got this machine)) clean with lenny, and all works well. Renamed this machine leo, because its many cooling fans do roar a bit. Perhaps should have named it aslan.
petronius: My poor little Wii LAN adapter appears to have bit the dust. Need to do another test to make sure. But have already reconfigured it to use wireless with a new wireless router. Will spare you the details of that adventure, but I won't buy another Belkin wireless router any time soon. Linksys is reliable as always.
unnamed? or was it pixel?: My poor old PS2 can no longer even see its internal NIC. Pity.
Two network switches also were damaged.

If anyone can tell me the sources of all my computers' hostnames mentioned in this post, I'll give you a cookie (first person, any time you're in town, void where prohibited... will give anyone who correctly answers a digital image of a cookie), and you can even use your favorite search engine.

So, that's some of what's been keeping me busy lately. What have you been doing?

My church (in Okaloosa County, Florida) is trying to start a Bible study for singles on Wednesday nights. If know someone who might be interested, please show them this note. Interested in the study yourself? Call the church at 682.2018 for more information and to let them know of your interest.
In addition to the Wednesday class, there is also a possibility a Sunday school class will start for singles. If you're interested in this, call the church (number above) for more information.

I started this Friday's article twice (second time in the car, didn't remember the first time existed), and wasn't able to integrate everything, but I thought some of the things I noted in the car were worth sharing. So, here is some of what I came up with:
Individual preferences are important, as well as individual giftings and location. They are secondary in importance, but they exist for several reasons. So, it is legitimate for people to want to find a worship service where their preferences are respected and, to some small degree, kept in mind during planning and decision making.
I am not, however, talking about mere whims or caprices. Neither of these should direct the path of a congregation one step. The caprices of the day, the fashions and fads, and the base desires of the natural man do not approach the importance of sound doctrine and the Holy Spirit's leading. But what I am saying is that God has given the Body of Christ not only various functions but also various preferences. (Perhaps to teach us to put unity above selfish desires)... For example, your skin likes to be fairly dry and mildly oily, while your eyes like to be very moist and dislike oils. Your teeth hold up well in a watery environment, while your fingers wrinkle up like a prune if left in water too long. The Bible supports the notion of variety in nature and in humanity. Some like to get up early, and some like to sleep late. The Bible talks about different watches of the night. The one who takes the second or third watch is unlikely to get up early in the morning.
While worship is not primarily about enjoyment (in truth, it is all about God, His glory and our sacrifice of praise to Him), I believe God also wants us to be fed in worship. We enjoy giving praise. In worship and prayer, we find God's comfort, peace, encouragement, edification, and joy, among other things. If attending a worship service of a particular style, while the underlying doctrine and intent of worship is sound, helps us to be not distracted by discomfort, I think God is pleased with that choice. We have different temperaments, and I don't think God wants us all to worship the same way (see nature's variety), and I think that churches need to be more concerned with whether they are living up to what they understand in the Bible rather than worrying about what style of worship, nor the smaller concern of what type of music, is likely to bring in more people. Understand that no matter what style of worship you have, you won't please everyone. No matter what style of worship you have, someone is going to feel left out or be uncomfortable there or not feel like it is worshipful. So, don't make decisions based on that. Do what is right according to the leading of the Holy Spirit, and if you must make changes, be sure you don't toss the baby with the bath water. And while you shouldn't make changes based on what will be popular, you also shouldn't make changes that the existing members don't see as worshipful. That is, in attempting to engage new people, don't disengage the old ones. If you do, you will push them away.
But all of this is actually silly to use as a focus for decision making. A church should not be focused on the internal (to itself) things, much less the outward appearance of internal things. A church should be focused outward (away from itself) to focus on the things the Bible says are important: Jesus, missions, making disciples, helping the poor, etc. The less you focus on yourself and the more you focus on Jesus and His commands, the more authentic you'll be.

It seems I've been a bit lax in my system administration. The Debian community released Lenney, the new stable version of Debian (5.0), on the 14th of last month, and I'm just getting around to upgrading. I actually didn't know it was out until last night, when I was replying to a forum post and needed to reference the system resources required for Debian, and caught a glimpse of the new version number as I passed by the home page.
So, I've archived all my important files and downloaded a backup install ISO in case of power failure during the install. This time, I've gone to the added effort of backing up my dpkg files and everything in /etc (machine-wide config settings). I hadn't done these during previous upgrades, but I'm doing it this time.
It appears that I will not be able to use LILO anymore. This makes me sad. I like LILO and consider it to be more reliable than GRUB, which is what I'll need to use from here on out. The things I've heard from other Linux users suggest that GRUB is great when it works right, but that when there's a problem, LILO is a lot easier to fix. But who knows. This could be wrong or have changed in the current versions.
Pretty much, I'll be following the steps in the release notes for upgrading (found here). I've cleaned off old packages and removed a couple of big ones I don't use much to free up some space, because my root partition (where the OS goes) was at 95%, which is fine for normal operation, but when installing or upgrading a lot of stuff, it can easily lead to failures. I had a long entry written out about the steps I took in upgrading, but I have decided to forego that. I ran into an error of some sort during the upgrade that turned out to be that I ran out of space on the root partition. It seems I didn't give myself enough space for the root partition way back in the dark ages when I first got Koko...
( Software List Under Here - continue reading; there is more here than the list )
Yeah, here it is Saturday (I started this on Thursday), and I have had a working system since Thursday night (really the wee hours of Friday morning), and as always happens in these things, I have dropped off of major chunks of time setting things up, and now have about 95% of what I do set up for ordinary use done. All that remains, as is always the case, is to do some minor tweaking and set up some things I don't use every day as I find I want to do them. So, I'll end this entry here. I can't believe I forgot to add gimp to my list of programs to install earlier...
I've been doing a few new things, like putting gkrellmd on my server and accessing it from Koko.
I'm enjoying my new install. :)

I'm still not writing on a regular basis, but I put down a premise, a few lines, and some questions the other day on paper.
A while back, I asked for proofers, and a few people responded that they'd like to proof for me. I posted a couple of entries over at my writing community, but I didn't get a single reply. I don't want to just post what I'm doing if nobody's going to respond.
If you're interested in proofreading for me, let me know, and I'll add you to the community skreyola_writes. But if you don't have time to respond, please don't volunteer.
Thanks for reading this.

Well, that's not actually true, what I said above about not writing. It is true about fiction, but I am posting nonfiction articles in my business account online column once a week. If you know me personally, I've probably already told you where to find it. If you do, and I haven't, ask me. :)
I wanted to mention, though, that I'm keeping this account. I have no intention of giving up Skreyola as an identity, so the other one isn't 'my new journal' and this one 'my old one'. They're for different things.
Thanks for reading.

Confidence in an unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a broken tooth, and a foot out of joint.

LJ is celebrating its tenth anniversary. As part of the celebration, they're producing a book. In my comment about some entries that might go well in the book, I wrote the following:

LJ has been wonderful the eight years I've been here. I have done quite a bit of struggling to understand LiveJournal's place in my life, which is why I wrote so many entries about it. The benefit and the problem of LJ is very similar to the benefit and the problem of Linux: It is so many things to so many people, and so many people use it in so many different functions, that it's hard to pin down what it is supposed to be to you. Well, here's to the next ten years of LJ! Na zdrowie!

I figured you might enjoy these thoughts, so I'm copying them here.
What entries on LJ do you think have been the best? You can leave a comment here for me to see or submit them before Feb 25 over at http://community.livejournal.com/lj_turns10/18401.html for possible inclusion in the book.

Have a great day!

When I was studying for my degree, I wrote a term paper about how the people who say newspapers are dying off are wrong. I won't go into the reasons here, because I now have to admit that I was somewhat wrong in what I said.
Oh, I wasn't wrong about my analysis. I wasn't wrong in saying that newspapers have nothing to fear from high-tech news sources (they fill different markets). But I was wrong to say that, on the whole, newspapers aren't dying off. Or rather, I was right that they aren't dying off, but I was wrong in that I didn't realize I'd left something out of the equation.
( Warning: Cut for sensitive concepts. )
The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper.

My mother is so thoughtful.
She returned yesterday from her cruise in the Eastern Caribbean, and she brought back a couple of things for me. One was a nice mug, which is so pretty I may not drink from it. The other was something for my future wife.
It is a silver cross pendant inlaid with irridescent blue-green shell material.
She remembered my mentioning that I thought I ought to start putting some things aside to prepare for married life, and she thought of this deep desire of mine for my future wife, and she got me something very special to go with that.
My mother is the greatest mom in the world.

I mentioned a few entries back that I'm trying to start writing more.
Well, I finally posted an entry over at skreyola_writes. If you're interested in proofing for me, leave a comment on my previous entry: Comment here.
I won't have time to do any LJ this weekend, but if you leave any comments, I'll see them when I have a minute.

There are times when I want to just slap some people silly.
"Greater Depression"? And NPR is treating this as a serious idea for what to call this economic correction?
Are the history classes not teaching what happened in the 1930s? Are people so totally and willfully ignorant of the history books?
Times are tough, but to even compare this situation to the Great Depression, much less suggest that it is worse is an insult to the intelligence of everyone alive and to the hardships of those who lived through the '30s.
Don't believe that nonsense. And don't repeat it. It just makes you look stupid, especially if you work in media. You're supposed to be smarter than that. You're all supposed to be smarter.

I'm thinking about starting a new story, or possibly continuing with the story I was having some of you proof before, A Taste of Champagne. I need feedback to be most effective in my writing, so I'm looking for a few people to commit to reading the scenes I post quickly, and some other who will commit to reading as they have time, who won't be upset if I keep moving forward when they haven't read everything yet.
I need people who will be willing to let me know what they think, good or bad, with as much examination as possible. I don't mind blunt criticism, and if something's not working right, I need to know it.
I may be doing the first draft very roughly, but be assured that I will read and carefully consider your comments.
Are any of you interested in proofing/critiquing for me?

*drool*
http://www.softfield.com/vr3.html - Man, I would love to have this.

On Saturday, I managed to squeeze 12 tall studs into my Toyota Corolla. Want to see them?

Picture One
Picture Two

So, I guess I'll post today.

Yesterday,after weeks of patience (really whining), I finally ran across a Wii Fit at the GameStop in my local mall, at the MSRP. Your mileage may vary by area and store management, but this store was even holding them for people who called in the morning when the truck arrived. If you're looking for one, be patient, be persistent, and don't support the scalpers! Let them lose money or just break even, because Nintendo has been very good about keeping a steady supply of its products coming, and nobody should have to pay above retail to get a game.

That said, I'm enjoying the game. The trainers are a little funny, and sometimes it's hard to maintain deep breathing, because they say some of the wackiest things while you're doing the yoga poses. I'm not sure if they were being serious with these voice prompts, or if they are poking fun at yoga instructors, but some of the things they say make me laugh, which makes me loose focus on my balance.

I was sad today when I weighed in, because my Wii Fit Age went up by like 5.

I just noticed on the login portal that permanent accounts are on sale again. If you're able to, now's the time to buy one.
http://www.livejournal.com/shop/view.bml?item=paidaccount
I don't think I'll be able to scrape the money together by the 15th, which is when this sale ends, not to return for a long time, but I know that some of you were also eagerly awaiting this sale, so I'm posting to let you know, in case, like me, you haven't been paying very much attention.
Have a great day, everyone!

I have my computer set to display a fortune when I login. I get a different one at every boot, so I guess this is not so much a message of the day as a message of the boot, but most days, it comes out even. Anyway, I thought this was quite an interesting point, so I decided to share it:

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that
would also stop you from doing clever things.
-- Doug Gwyn

Being unable to do something clever in a computer session (or a game, for that matter) that you know ought to work ("What do you mean, I can't use these things together? I know this would work.") is one of the causes of user frustration. While this is a necessary evil in a game, it really has no place in an operating system. After all, as the old IBM motto goes, "computers should work, people should think." The operating system should not attempt to usurp your role as the master and thinker, nor should it prevent you from doing what you have thought (however briefly) and decided to do. Linux is built on that philosophy noted in the MOTD quote, so you could replace UNIX in the quote with Linux. That's part of why I love running Linux. It doesn't stop me from doing things I want to do with my machine.