Timmerov's Blog
mouse pad
my mouse pad wore out. so i "replaced" it right around the time i put my office back together after painting it. and by replaced it i mean g gave me b's. eventually b decided to swipe it back. leaving me with none. i used to get these things by the stack. but i have only one left. and it's a trouble with tribbles mouse pad still in its original shrink wrap. so i'm inclined to leave it there. out of other options, i made one. i cut a thin square board and glued some old blue jean denim onto it. i have lots of old blue jeans that i wore out or no longer fit. cause re-using is way better than recycling. anywho, the new mouse pad works great. and it feels good too. winning all around.
fag marriages
as a matter of law... if the government offers a contract between two people... can the state restrict what type of people are eligible for that contract? sure. each person can only enter this contract once. okay. majority age? okay. sound mind? sure. sound body? um, no. one person must be black and the other must be white. um, not okay. clearly. one person must be tall and the other must be short. okay, now i'm just being silly. one person must be "liberal" and the other person must be "conservative". timmer! okay okay. so if the state can't restrict a contract between two people based on their physical characteristics or their behavior... then why would anyone ever think it would be okay to restrict said contract to heterosexuals only? and yeah, i'm looking at this from a pure law point of view. in which case the supreme court should have ruled 9-0 long long ago. the problem is - this legal contract is named a word which has other meanings in other contexts. people generally experience no difficulties with words that have multiple meanings. in fact most words have multiple meanings. artemis tied a bow on her bow. i'm honestly baffled that some people suffer such paroxysms about this one word.
amsterdam 2
the dutch love their bicycles. there are a whole lot of people in amsterdam. and most of them are going somewhere at any given time. by bike, boat, bus, car, foot, train, tram, truck, and more. i thought about spinning some yarn about how we ice skated on the frozen canals to get places. cause it was pretty frikken cold. being 52 degrees north does that. even on the summer solstice. but still. it was cold. i wanted my warm hat. and gloves. anywho. bicycles have their own lanes. and seem to have right of way over pedestrians. which have right of way over motor vehicles. not sure about cars and trams. was a little busy trying not to die. the granny style sturdy dutch bike is preferred over all other styles of bikes. i saw a few high tech jobs. but 99.44% were the rusted tank style. we rented bikes one day. that was fun. i couldn't steer the first one. coaster brakes. seriously? gads. lotta dutch text and bike. some text with both hands. it seems to work for them. i saw one collision. everyone seemed really really surprised. the gentleman turned out to be as sturdy as his bike. which was good. many bikes carry multiple passengers. little kids sit on handlebars. gramma sits side saddle on the rack in back. which older kids stand on. i saw one toddler riding on dad's hip. okay. i'm seeing the value of coaster brakes. sometimes bikes are modified for passengers. saw some with an enormous cow catcher wheelbarrow thing in front. in which several children could have played tag or had a piano lesson. i got yelled at a couple times because i'm sure i did something stupid. no idea what. but for the most part it was organized chaos. the general rules seemed to be 1) you're responsible for yourself, 2) don't kill anyone, and 3) traffic rules are only in play when there are multiple parties. so they can be ignored. provided you abide by 1) and 2). which pretty much makes amsterdam my kinda of place. except for the cold.
amsterdam
hey sweetie, want to go to amsterdam? sure! when? next week. what?!?!?!? heh. this is the proposal i laid upon the beautiful and talented alisa. she said yes of course. and things were a bit more exciting than i'm letting on. mostly on account of my passport being expired. gramma stayed with the boys. we had a great time. she had twice as great of a time as i did. cause it was a half working vacation for me. course she had to figure out how to get money in a foreign country without me. cause i kinda left ours at home. oops. credit cards too. it's an adventure! yeah. funny to timmer. alisa not so much. so anywho. dutch people are tall. i mean seriously. like many women were taller than i am. which was really really weird. cause i'm not exactly short. and dutch dudes are even taller. not that there's anything wrong with that. though there was this one bathroom where the urinals mounted on the wall were almost too high to use. usually though the urinals are floor mounted jobs. and often outside of the his and hers bathrooms. with no doors. huh. okay. works for me.
vscode
okay so i'm running centos now. cause microsoft is evil right? yes! well. i might have to amend that position. to what yet i am not sure. cause vscode. it's a nice little code editor. from microsoft. free. on linux. it's not perfect. far from it. you can't compile and debug. but having a modern editor is really nice. and it's from microsoft. it's free. and runs on linux. blink blink. give me a few days to wrap my head around that one.
ads
so i'm running centos7 now. am pretty happy. except for the ads. ads? wtf? i thought i killed them. oh wait. i did. on windows. by pointing the worst offenders at localhost in the hosts file. heh. so i copied the diy ad blocking from windows hosts to centos7 hosts and voila! my web pages are full of gray sad faces again. yay! no really sad faces are good. that means there's no auto-play video running. and no annoying run me cause you happened to mouse over me popup ads. well maybe not no. but certainly a whole lot less. hrm. i suppose i could run a web server that always returns a smiley face. that'd be cute. hrm.
centos7 the bad
i'm going to miss visual studio. that ide is pretty awesome. vim and gdb. sigh. gnome in centos7 has a few boogs. the first one i encountered was trying to configure my displays. i have three. and they're all vertical. the gnome display gui thinks they're 1920 wide. which is their unrotated width. so i can't place them correctly using the tool. it was kinda weird to have the cursor and windows disappear for 500+ pixels between screens. fortunately the configuration is a text file in my home directory. it was easy to edit manually. and copied it to gdm. which is the thing that does the gnome gui log in thing at startup. the other major boog is when the screens are locked, sometimes one remains black. usually the rightmost one. but sometimes the center one. the workaround is to unlock, re-lock, and re-unlock the screens. which was a bigassed pain when timmer had a password. and not so much not that it doesn't. it also doesn't seem to happen as much anymore either. weird.
centos7 the good
pretty much the first thing i did after installing centos7 was install chrome. once i got it working, i removed firefox. cause why would you need two browsers? installing stuff on centos7 is pretty easy. yum does all the work. sometimes there are pre-requisites. which you need to just pray to google. and hope for the best. i like listening to music. there's no itunes for linux. but there's amarok. which can use my itunes music library no sweat. setting up the playlist the way i wanted was a matter of negotiating an unfamiliar user interface. blech. but it seems to be picking an album at random, playing all of it, then picking another album. and the last thing to install was skype. which failed miserably yesterday. but worked find today. no idea if the difference is version 4.3.0.37-2 instead of 4.3.0.37. or if it was the way i installed it. from terminal as timmer: su admin, su root, yum install skype. run from the applications menu. or if it was the way i ran it the first time - from applications -> internet -> skype. as opposed to the command line. so pretty much everything i need is working. woo hooty!
linux
okay so everyone knows microsoft is evil. and apple really isn't much better. but can you really cut the cord? most of what i do i do in a browser. so maybe. one could run linux. which has its own set of issues. the first is which linux? gawds there are way too many choices. actually, there are two main categories: those that use yum, and those that use apt-get. b uses ubuntu, which uses apt-get. i ended up using centos7, which uses yum. great. just cause that's what my new temporary employer is using. and i figure i could get some free it help. muhhahahahhah! anywho, installing it was pretty straightforward. burned a cd in windows. heh. installed gnome. which was fairly painless. but was unable to switch to kde. weird. i created an admin account that can sudo. and a timmer account that can't. kinda got used to the convenience of not having a password. so far so good.
