Check out my new toy. It’s the weapon of choice for an awesome geek comic. And, it can be modded to be even more badass.

Yesterday, Casey and I were engaging in some of our daily banter at the office, commenting how dead it can be. It’s a nice floor, but the people are very intent on staring at their screens for a long time. He immediately went to the office warfare section of thinkgeek to spice things up. Then, realizing we would be in midtown in the evening, we made a pact to go to Toys-R-Us and pick up some blasters.

I feel like a kid again.

Speaking of, I’ve seen two polar opposites of children on the past two days’ subway rides. There was this kid who was just the spawn of a hell-beast and did everything exactly contrary to what his mother directed. He didn’t understand that the world contains more than just him and his superman toy. That said, he was still innocent. And she, his mother, seemed really burnt out.

Then, this morning, I encountered the funniest kindergardener I’ve ever seen. This kid was on his way to school with his father, who was a very close resemblance to Drew Carey with the same glasses. He was smiling, making jokes with his father, and seemed so happy. He even successfully employed sarcasm in an adult, non-acerbic way.

And the well-dressed girl standing next to me (who gave up her seat for the kid) was totally cute and we were totally smile flirting while listening to the kid.

So I decided a while ago that Xen + Linux was a brilliant idea. I quickly learned, however, that Xen + Gentoo is just a pure mess. I’ve read about a lot of people having trouble with it and I personally found it hard to install.

I gave up.

I installed Kubuntu. Then I didn’t like that so…

I installed Fedora. And it’s treating me well. Until just now. I wanted to install X headers to compile a theme I downloaded to make my box look like this guy’s. So I start up Fedora’s “Package Manager” click on the package that I want (oh, and a anti-RSI program) and next thing I know I’m in package dependency hell. That’s bad for a program that claims to manage dependencies. So I’m clicking away thinking, “Alright, I must really need these random X headers.” Then it complains about dependencies. So I click a bit more. And some more. Then I click finish. Hooray! Dependencies resolved, it’s going to go download some packages for me. The first package: evolution-data-server. How did I get duped into installing that?

Grr. I miss gentoo. But to get to the state where I am now with Gentoo would have taken days and a lot of patience. I kind of like Fedora. I even have anti-aliased fonts right out of the box!

Horde Project

Horde is an open source project that consists of an application framework and a smattering of applications in various states of development. The community is very keen on outside help and it was fun getting into the project, under the hand of Matt Selsky.

• IMP - a very mature and feature rich webmail client that is used by small to large organizations. I’ve been contributing random bugfixes and small features and getting paid for it.
• Qonos - a non-Horde core application, Qonos will be similar to Horde’s Kronolith but be more part-time worker timesheet oriented. This is partially being developed for another programming team I’m involved with. Wrong. This idea was ambitious, but not pursuable for the timeframe involved. I still hope to make a homebrewed Horde app.

Personal

Every now and then I get the urge to work on something that isn’t associated with other external forces. Some people call this creativity. I call it being a geek.

• Xen on Gentoo - according to the community, it can be done, but it sure isn’t easy. I hope to create some documents and revise some existing ones that will help other ambitious people use the Xen virtualization on my favorite Linux distribution, Gentoo.