vonnieda.org

For the love of shit, would someone please write a god damn calendar protocol that doesn’t suck dick? Do I seriously have to download and then reupload my entire fucking calendar file every time I want to add an event? Do you have any idea how huge this file is getting? It’s absurd!

Christ, I know open source developers don’t, like, do things, but comon, people will buy this shit. Companies still use Outlook because there’s no other reasonable alternative!

Yea, I know CalDav is coming but that’s such a fucking hack that it makes me sick. Write a good protocol! Microsoft did it! You are smarter than Microsoft aren’t you? Manage the backend with i/vCal if you want to. XML is great but using it as a transport layer? Please.

And Mozilla? Guys? We need Sunbird to not suck anymore please. I use it every day so I can comment on how much it sucks. And the new version which has all kinds of great features (including rudimentry CalDav support) is so slow that I might as well just use dead trees and squid juice.

Now, I know what you’ll say. “It’s Open Source Jason. Write it yourself!” and that’s great. If you’ll look over there to the left where it says “Software” you’ll a bunch of examples of where people couldn’t get it right and I had to do it for them. But I’m tired of having to do it myself every time. You know, just because I can program doesn’t mean I don’t want to just be a boring ol’ user now and then.

Cause see I got this Mac Mini I’m trying to install in my car…

Fuck!

*pant* *pant* *pant*

“Global warming?”, I asked. “Just get out of the pool and eat your turkey dinner. Will ya?”

This morning I drove to work in a short sleeve polo with the windows and sunroof open. Nice weather for November 4th.

When I turned the page
The corner bent into a perfect dog ear
As if the words knew I’d need them again
But at that time I couldn’t see it

I would read that page every day
For the next year

We sat on a shoreline
Watching wind scalp the white off the waves
Sitting on a shoreline
And if i could do it
I’d dog ear this page

We spoke about growing old
And filling the future’s empty stage

I hope the weather holds
But you don’t need the sun to make you shine
These island towns don’t care for city folk
But I think we can starve the city from our minds.

I know we won’t want for much
It’s just you and me and a bed and a shoreline

The great thing about taking all my pictures with my camera phone is that I don’t feel bad that I take shitty pictures. I don’t have a choice!

Man, such a weight of my shoulders…

(snicker)

Well, Fall has completely fallen. The trees on my street are stunning. Lots of rich, bright yellow with red and orange edges. It’s gorgeous. I was worried that with the quick change in temperature this year we wouldn’t get a chance to see the Fall color but it’s out in droves now. I just hope it sticks around till the weekend so I can go driving around to check it out.

And if I do get to go driving to check it out I’ll be able to listen to my iPod in my car! Monday night my Aux Mod from Sylfex arrived. I ordered it back in July and they just finally got around to having enough on hand to send me one. So last night I cleaned out the garage to make room for my car and began the arduous process of taking my radio out. The RX-8 has a fully integrated stereo system and it’s a giant pain in the ass to remove. I had to remove the cover over the shifter area, the ashtray, a cover under the steering column, a metal plate under the steering column, a bolt buried back behind all that and about 200 connectors to get the damn thing out. What a beast.

I finally got it all out, installed and back in and took it for a drive. Sounded great. The only problem was my DSC (Dynamic, uh, Something Control) light was flashing saying it wasn’t going to protect me from flying off the road. That had me pretty panicked for a while but after two starts and stops of the engine it reset and was fine. I guess it needed to recalibrate or something.

All told, it took me about 3.5 hours to convince my car it has a tape deck and to let me play my iPod. Scotty came over to help and to install his own module which he had picked up at Best Buy earlier in the day. It took him about 15 minutes to install and now his stereo can completely browse his iPod, show track info on the display and basically knock my stereo over in the school yard and tease it.

He can’t talk to it though. Muahah! Man do I have something brewing…

Anyone know who knocked a hole in the bathroom wall?
I don’t think it was me. Nothing hurts bad enough for me to think I did it and plus I don’t think I would have tried to hide it from myself with a towel.

I’ll post about the actual party later. Once I’ve slept. I want to sleep so bad.

I honestly don’t know how you are going to make it through your hum-drum day without hearing about my dreams from last night and I’m not one to hold out on the goods so here you go.

Last night seemed to be mostly good dreams. One thing I should mention real quick is that I dream every night. I always have. I dream like a motherfucker. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t wake up having had a full night of adventures.

Okay, so last night I was entered into a karate contest. It seemed like instead of real martial arts it was more like how much you could look and act like a movie karate guy. So that’s what I did. I did like this long routine that looked pretty badass and the judges scored me and I went back to my seat. There were like 700 people there so it took forever. So anyway, when we’re done they announce the winners. There’s this platform where the top three winners are supposed to stand and it’s about 3 feet off the ground. So, they announce third place and the guy runs out of the crowd and leaps up onto the platform all cool like and everyone cheers. Second place does a similar stunt. They announce first place and lo-and-behold it’s me. So I run up, misjudge a step and end up crawling up the side of the platform with no grace or style and everyone groans. So then I’m sitting in the bed of Keaton’s truck with him and Courtney and Courtney is like “You are never gonna get laid doing shit like that.”

The end.

She’s probably right. I need to practice my karate.

Last night as I was falling asleep, preparing for another rousing night of disaster nightmares I began to reminisce a little bit about how much I enjoyed my time on Siren Isle. And then I sort of, you know, remembered that Siren Isle is a made up place in an online game called EverQuest. But for a minute there I thought “Man, it was really peaceful there on Siren Isle and you could just watch the ships sail by and listen to the waves lapping at the shore. I should go back.”

It’s the little things like this that make me question my sanity on a daily basis.

That said, the years I spent playing EverQuest from about 1999 to 2002 or so made a pretty deep impact. I think if you spend that much time doing anything it’s going to leave a mark, or at least that’s what I tell myself. We’re talking 8+ hours a day for years at a time. Yea, it’s a game and it’s fantasy and all that but it’s still a real amount of time doing some kind of task.
Anyway, there’s lots of things that remind me of the parts of EverQuest I spent a lot of time in. Especially music. I’ve talked on this blog many times about how important music is to me, and I definitely associate parts of my life and different experiences with what music I was listening to at the time. One of the most powerful is Mr. Bungle. If I listen to anything by Mr. Bungle I get serious flashbacks to my first apartment and powerleveling my EverQuest character Dunlain by making and selling Tumpy Tonics.

And the disaster nightmares bit? For some reason for the last three nights I’ve had these nightmares about disasters happening to me. Sunday night I was driving my RX-8 down Main Street in my old home town of Mantua, NJ and the front window started fogging up. It got worse and worse and no matter what I did it kept fogging. And then all the other windows did. So I turned on my hazards and tried to pull over and someone plowed into me doing something like mach 3.

Tuesday night I was in a giant train wreck.

And last night was the best. I was in a huge auditorium to see Nine Inch Nails. It looked like a really large high school auditorium. So Trent comes out and the lights go down. He has these two giant bass drums on the floor and he has these big sticks he starts hitting them with. For some reason I had planned to play along so in the aisle in front of me I had my own bass drums and giant sticks. So a few minutes into the song someone to the right screams “Fire!” and everyone panics. While everyone is running for the fire exits a bunch of people trip over my drums. Aside from the doors being stuck for a minute everyone makes it out okay.

Tonight I’m hoping for something space related. I love space.

Alright, I know there are some geeks out there reading this. I’m looking for opinions on cross platform network backup. My requirements are that I be able to backup Linux, Windows and Mac OS X machines across the network and that I can back up to a set of files on a firewire drive. I also want history, not just a current copy. And incremental backups.

I currently use Dantz Retrospect and while it does the job it’s one of the most horrible user experiences that I’ve ever had, and recently it’s been crashing.

I while back I decided I would write the One Backup Application and all would be well. I decided to do it in Java because then it would be very easy to have the client be portable to almost any OS. Some bugs in the JVM on Windows eventually pissed me off enough to stop me from doing it but I am considering starting the project up again.

Are there better options? I’m willing to pay, or at least steal.

Leave a comment, or drop me a line.

Busy and fun. Buzz and drone.

Heh.

So Thursday Adam and JoLynn came over for some down home Dungeons and Dragons: Heros on the XBox. It was supposed to be Adam and I’s “gaming night”, which we try to do pretty often but JoLynn was bored and decided to join us. That happens sometimes and she’ll usually sit on the loveseat, get plastered and talk on IRC. Not so this night! Turns out she’s a natural when it comes to setting people on fire and stealing all the gold in the entire friggin’ dungeon. Sheesh!

So then Friday we’re trying to figure out something to do that doesn’t involve pigging out and drinking cause we’re all trying to lose weight and we end up playing D&D again and drinking down cheap, old wine. When I say old I don’t mean, like, 1827. I’m talking May. We also spent a lot of time quietly starving, or in my case not so quietly. I mentioned pizza about every 3 minutes.

So then Saturday we figured it was probably time to get out of the damn house and we finally, after many months of saying we were gonna, went roller skating! We went to Skate World right down the street from my house and it was a blast. At least, for me. It’s probably been… oh, about 18 years since I’ve roller skated but I picked it right back up pretty quick. I used to skate embarrassingly often. So I had fun. JoLynn had fun too, she did pretty well and got better as the evening progressed. Adam pretty much broke his body in half as soon as he hit the rink and ended up sitting most of it out. Whattayagonnado?

So then it was 75th Street Brewery for some pretzels and very few beers. I had one beer, if you can imagine. I was still stuffed from dinner and wanted to try to be good, at least a little.

Rich Hill had been telling me to come check out his band at Davey’s Saturday so I could vote for them in Club Wars. Round about 10pm I decided I was down for it and convinced Adam and JoLynn to join me. We met up with Charles after a while and got our rock on.

The Duo Trio is kinda funky, jazzy, reggae rock type stuff. Hard to describe. I’d probably say the closest thing I’ve heard is some older 311 stuff. Very good and very fun to listen to. We also listened to a couple of other mediocre bands. Ares to the 9th started off very strong with a badass bass player and Tool like tunes but quickly turned into boring. We eventually bailed after their set. Unfortunately The Duo Trio didn’t win. Ares to the 9th did. Ah well.

And to wrap it up, today we ventured out to Powell Gardens. Adam and JoLynn are planning to be married in the chapel there (see PhotoBlog) and wanted to check it out. Plus it’s always nice to visit the Garden’s anyway. Today it was cold as… a very cold thing, so we didn’t stick around for very long but the chapel was beautiful and if we hadn’t noticed a rogue motion sensor in there someone might have found me camping out in there on stormy nights. It’s a huge, triangular building on a small lake with a great view and is almost completely glass. It’s really awesome. Adam will probably have some better pictures of it up soon.

Capped things off with a little more D&D and now it’s time to prep for the long, boring week. At least I have something to look forward to:

Dick Dale baby, Dick Dale. Back in town on Sunday. Be there or be square.