Ramblingon.net

I have other things that I planned, but I need to rant about the Rangers.

Gaborik is amazing. Best player in the league thus far. It’s incredible how invisible he can be, and then suddenly he has the puck for half a second then it’s in the net. Del Zotto is amazing. I swear, his passes are works of art. He plays great offense and sound defense, plays a physical game… and he’s a 19 year old rookie. He’s already my favourite player on the team. Lundqvist also rocks. But we already knew that. Despite his subpar (for him) season thus far, he’s been picking it up lately. Yet we can’t win a game?

Seriously, it’s ridiculous at this point. Someone besides Gaborik needs to learn to hit the net. It’s getting way too painful watching Higgins get 3 breakaways a game and either shooting wide or straight into the goalie. Not to pick on him in particular, but I feel like he epitomizes the Rangers lately. Effort, chances, and no killer instinct at all.

Today, I purchased an Apple iPod Classic. I feel really, really dirty.

I have decent reason- I need my music. As you might be able to tell, I like to have a song playing. I won’t call myself an intense audiophile, but music is an important part of my life. And unfortunately, nothing goes above 32gb anymore! All companies that used to make MP3 players with HDDs in them stopped. The choices are pretty much limited to the Archos 5 (gigantic), the Microsoft Zune (I owned one once, and it arbitrarily broke, and it doesn’t work with Linux), and the device I settled on.

Every time I think about it I feel a little queasy, but when I’m listening to music I can easily stomach it. I’ve hated Apple with a passion for a long time now, and I adamently opposed the iPod line, citing better alternatives. Unfortunately, it has come to the point that there is none. How depressing is that?

The positive side, however, is that it works quite well with Linux. I installed gtkpod, mounted the device, and immediately began throwing stuff on. I filled up 32gb of space today in music (and only music). I also have quite a bit more to be added.

It’s been way too long since I last posted. I have some new rants that have taken way too long, and some things to tell the depths of the world wide web, but I’ll save that for tomorrow and beyond.

Fear of the Dark – Iron Maiden

My next post was originally supposed to talk about my idea of making my own Linux distro, but I got lazy and stopped writing it halfway, and eventually lost it when I restarted my computer a week later. So I’ll save that for next entry: I’ll make this music related. I decided to make a list of my favourite 100 songs, in order. Then I made it into a playlist. Then I put it on repeat and random. Try it some time. Below is my top 100.

Over the Hills and Far Away
Achilles’ Last Stand
Ramble On
Baba O’Riley
Tube Snake Boogie
Rain Song
Time
Love in an Elevator
Fear of the Dark
The Crunge
Behind Blue Eyes
Freebird
Thank You
La Grange
Walk this Way
Back in Black
Carouselambra
Hotel California
YYZ
Life’s Been Good
War Pigs
Babe I’m Gonna Leave You
Welcome to the Machine
Tush
Heartbreaker
Layla
Dazed and Confused
Moby Dick/Bonzo’s Montreux
Who Are You
Flight of Icarus
Cheap Sunglasses
Eat the Rich
Burning For You
Love Reign O’er Me
Stairway to Heaven
Panama
Godzilla
Every Little Thing She Does is Magic
Jukebox Hero
She Talks to Angels
2112
All of My Love
Fade to Black
Sympathy for the Devil
Bad Company
Fool in the Rain
Dream On
Double Vision
Pinball Wizard
Get a Grip
Comfortably Numb
Tears in Heaven
No Quarter
Sharp Dressed Man
The Ocean
Rock and Roll
Paradise City
I Wanna Rock
London Calling
Hey Hey What Can I Do
Wish You Were Here
Gimme Shelter
Feel Like Making Love
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Communication Breakdown
Don’t Fear the Reaper
A Tout Le Monde
Sweet Emotion
Hot for Teacher
Kashmir
Hard to Handle
Just What I Needed
Black Water
5:15
Ruby Tuesday
Immigrant Song
Whole Lotta Love
The Best of My Love
The Wanton Song
Bron-Y-Aur Stomp
Closer to Home
Tea for One
The Devil Went Down to Georgia
Iron Man
Misty Mountain Hop
In the Light
Legs
Where Eagles Dare
When the Levee Breaks
The Rover
Symphony of Destruction
The Call of Ktulu
Hangar 18
Message in a Bottle
Castles Made of Sand
Light My Fire
Werewolves of London
Hot ‘Lanta
Black Sabbath
The Battle of Evermore

So, I’m browsing the OM forums today, and see some people on who I haven’t talked to in forever. In the process of conversation, some old jokes are brought up. I then get a bit nostalgic, and start looking first through some old threads in Interstaff, and then in the normal Staff thread. Finally I start reading through the oldest Staff thread- it was me saying to MO and SK- the two mods at the time- that we’re at the new forum for a reason… to get important threads in place for when the new forums open. I bump the thread on impulse.

Then I notice the date marks for the posts- 8/1. I go and check when we opened the forums: 8/3. So happy second birthday, new OMF. Odd things have happened to make me remember. Coincidences do exist.

Closer to Home- Grand Funk Railroad

Now, it is most likely that while the majority of my non-existant audience realizes that I am a huge Hockey and Rangers fan, many do not realize that I am a pretty big Mets fan- although hockey always takes precedence, even when it’s a Rangers preseason game in comparison to a Mets playoff game. But anyway, back to the Mets. They’ve been having a most dismal season- and for once it’s not even their fault. Plagued by injuries, very few Mets players have managed to stay off the DL all season long. Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, and Carlos Delgado- 3 of the four key Mets players- have been out for significant amount of time, and are still gone. Ironically, Alex Cora, the backup SS, is waiting for Reyes to return so HE can go on the DL. The list goes on and on- outfielders, pitchers, and more. You know something is wrong when you’re relying on a washed up Luis Castillo as a huge part of your offense. The only key Mets players who haven’t been out- and haven’t sucked- are David Wright, Johan Santana, and Francisco Rodriguez (K-Rod). Yet the Mets have suddenly been scoring runs. And they’ve won four games in a row. What’s going on here? What the hell happened to the Mets?

Pinball Wizard- The Who

Another reminder that Im not cut out to be a programmer. Yesterday, I wrote a simple program in Cuda. Cuda, for those of you who don’t know, is a version of C that runs on the GPU and is great for multitasking. The little program I wrote was simply to test running multiple functions at once and then returning them in an array. My program kept on returning garbage values, though. I combed through the code a number of times. I then proceeded to try and figure out where it was going wrong. Finally I reduced it to a simple 3 liner- int n=1; printf(”%d”, &n); return 0;. It was still failing. Finally I convinced myself that it must be a compiler error. I rename it to a C program, anmd start using gcc instead of nvcc. It still fails. Finally I start reading through the howstuffworks tutorial and realize that printf doesn’t require the inputted variable to have the & sign- in fact, it doesn’t allow it. It’s scanf that needs that. This whole process took about 2 hours. Syntax sucks. Give me parentheses, please.

In other news, my emacs has a working email program set up in it. I decided that I didn’t like emms for music, so instead I can use ncmpcpp in the terminal. Next up: IM and IRC.

Speaking of IM, I got urgencyhooks working in xmonad. It changes the virtual desktop number with a new IM in it to red. So now if I disappear in the middle of an IM conversation, it’s not because I didn’t notice a new message- I’m either ignoring you or AFK.

She Talks to Angels- Black Crowes

OK, I’ll admit, I suck with consistency.

Anyway, vi users often enjoy saying that Emacs is a perfectly good operating system, it just lacks a decent text editor. http://i29.tinypic.com/20szj39.jpg is my response. Some Emacs users enjoy saying that Emacs is their OS, Linux is just their device drivers. I can now say that I understand that.

I decided to actually play with Emacs’ real capabilities a bit today, instead of just using it to code in. First off, I’d just like to say that running Emacs from within emacs is really bizarre. What’s weirder is when you start attaching things like w3m to it. Emacs is so customizable and flexible that it’s scary.

It’s awesome.

Sympathy for the Devil- The Rolling Stones
Probably my favourite Stones song. The whole premise of it really amuses me.

Well, I’m back, and I like the color black, despite the fact that my shirt is white (besides the design) so I figure it’s an apt enough title.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve used this site. I plan on not disappearing for a while. So, recent news. I got a new computer, after my old one died (a bit). Biostar mobo, Intel Core 2 Quad at I think 2.33 ghz, 4gb memory, BFG Geforce GTX 260…. nice machine. Fun stuff and all. Best of all is that all 5.1 of my speakers now play… I can get music LOUD now (as I turn down the subwoofer on Dazed and Confused, then realize my Bass is as low as it can go *gulp*). On the software side, I migrated from StumpWM to Xmonad, due to problems with the Stump. I also got mpd working, on my eighty thousandth try. It was worth it though, I now understand why it’s so hyped. Much easier to work with than PCManFM+SMPlayer. I’m also just about the only CLI-ish user in the world who still doesn’t use Screen or dtvm.

Well, I ran out of things to talk about right now, so…

Bad Company- Bad Company

So, I made the plunge and switched completely to StumpWM (although my .xinitrc hasn’t been changed yet, so I still need to add the /usr/bin/stumpwm argument when running xinit). Along with a change in window manager comes a change in browser, a change in some program choices, and a bit of a change in attitude. I have become one of those people that use terminal programs just for the hell of it now. Yes, I switched from ktorrent to rtorrent… not completely unwarranted, perhaps, because I’ve been carrying a lot of unnecessary libraries just to run one KDE program, but I could have gone with Deluge or something similar… instead I choose a terminal program. I also have been using irssi for IRC, midnight commander for file managing (in conjunction with PCmanFM) and htop for a system monitor (makes sense). What I haven’t switched to yet for terminal applications are IM, Email, and music… I’m still going with pidgin, thunderbird, and smplayer, seems easier to me.

I also made a switch in browsers, to Conkeror. It’s a keyboard driven, emacs (and slightly vim) inspired mozilla based browser. Happens to be made by the creator of stump. It fits right into the window manager, and emacs. The only problem is I’m probably going to end up screwing up all my prefix key-combinations . Surprisingly, I still don’t use Screen; it just seems easier to use tabs and multiple terminals, espescially with a tiling window manager already handling the splits.

On another note, today two people who I converted to Linux (both accidentally) also (at least started) installing Arch. I’m not just spreading Linux, but spreading hands on distros too.

Completely changing the tone of the post, but Let’s Go Rangers!

For those of you who don’t know, the Rangers are now 2-0 in their playoff series against the Washington Capitals. Pretty much no one expected the Rangers to have a shot in the series (including me).  It seemed like a really bad matchup, because the Caps are such a dynamic offensive team; AO and Semin up front are obviously a force, and Green on the blue line has a great shot (even if he’s hardly a Dman ). But King Henrik has performed spectacularly, getting the SO today, and we’ve manage to limit the point production of the reigning MVP. It’s also been a pleasant surprise to see both Redden and Naslund, overpaid veterans (espescially the former) pick up their play and look like they belong on the team. The hardworking, post hitting Callahan got a much deserved GWG off a feed by Naslund today, and I’m very happy. Not to mention that we signed the Hobey Baker winner, a NY (LI) native, and he looks to be good.

Music: Sharp Dressed Man- ZZ Top

Stairway must be the most peculiar song ever in its perception by the masses, rock fans, and Led Zeppelin fans.

To the masses, it represents rock. It pops up as the greatest rock song of all time. Rock fans (but not ones that know a lot of Zeppelin) tend to prefer songs like Black Dog, Kashmir, Immigrant Song. And Led Zeppelin fans tend not to think too much about Stairway.

What makes it weird is it is one of their better songs… I think that it makes their top 20, and if not, their top 30. Lyrically, it’s awesome. It undoubtably has a great solo. The song is similar to Freebird in structure, but I think Stairway is the better song. While I’ll laud Over the Hills and Far Away, Achilles Last Stand, Ramble On, and a few others as the best Zeppelin songs out there, Stairway shouldn’t be obscured by its own popularity.