“You said you’ve never felt this way, at least not this early.
We decide to hold nothing back – we’ll act how we want to act.”
– The Good Life – Under a Honeymoon

I haven’t written anything in here in a long time and that is a sad thing. There is big news in Mark-land however, so here goes.

It was a few weeks ago and I had brought my usual boring Lean Cuisine lunch to work, but I wasn’t really in the mood to choke it down. I started a campaign of sorts to get my coworkers to go to Quizno’s to get the Alyssa Milano Sandwich. Tom, being the stubborn prick that he is, insisted that we go to Taco Bell instead. I agreed and off we were. We get to Taco Bell and we place our orders. Who comes walking through the doors of Taco Bell? Jen Sosna. That’s right. The same Jen Sosna that I was looking to get in touch with back in March. So, we have this odd conversation in the middle of a Taco Bell for a few minutes and we exchange phone numbers. I gave her a call a few days later and we made plans to go out for dinner. We’ve been dating ever since. Everything is going really well. We took the Cross Sound Ferry over to Connecticut for her birthday. We ate at Mystic Pizza and visited the Mysitc Aquarium. The ferry ride back was really nice because it was very dark and peaceful out on the Sound. So, things are going well in this department. We’re both very excited about what the coming months will bring.

I ran the Cow Harbor 10K Race this morning. I completed the race in 54:07.8. 10 Kilometers is a little over 6 miles. So, I averaged 8:43 a mile over 6 miles. I’m pretty happy with my performance, but I’m really just psyched that I finished without passing out. It’s a big deal for me to be able to complete a race like this. I felt like I was getting soft in my old age. The town of Northport is really nice. A bunch of the families who lived along the race route were outside with cups of water and yelling words of encouragement. Some of the kids were out at the curb spraying hoses and I was very appreciative. There’s a 5K race coming up that I’m thinking about running in also. We’ll see. That’s all for now.

The mp3 player that I have is the Rio Karma. I really really like it. The main reason that I chose this one over the plethora of other choices is that this one plays Ogg Vorbis files. Ogg Vorbis is a royalty-free music compression format that is not patent-encumbered and is of higher quality than mp3. All told, it is the shizzy. So, I had this Rio and everything was going well. Then the other day I dropped it … twice. The volume up button stopped working. So, I decided to open it up to try and fix it. This was not the best idea as now it doesn’t turn on. Well, it powers up and things start happening, but the drive makes this clicking noise and it never finishes starting. After this unfortunate turn of events I got a little more aggressive with my screwdriver. Here’s the result. I am fairly dependent on a player that plays Ogg Vorbis files. I don’t think this is really that bad. I did paint myself into a corner by ripping all of my music to a format that is not supported by every device under the sun, but I painted myself into a corner that I believe in, so it’s cool. It’s a cozy little corner and it’s mine. A reasonable person would look for a new Rio or some other music player and just move on. However, I’ve decided that it’s better to bid on other broken Rios on ebay that just happen to be broken in a different way (broken screen or controls) and to combine it with mine to make some kind of franken-rio that can never be defeated – not by monsters or gravity. We’ll see how it goes.

The ‘I am the Avalanche’ show is tomorrow. ‘I am the Avalanche’ is a band fronted by the lead-singer of The Movielife. That’s pretty much enough to mean that it’s going to kick my ass. Check out the two tracks they have on their webpage or pickup the split-EP they have out. It’s good.

The LILUG picnic that has been dubbed “The Gaggle of Geeks” is this weekend. I just sent out an email with all of the information in it. That should be a blast. That’s all for now.

“If I were sand, and you were oceans, the moon would be why you’re pulled to me.” — Armor for Sleep – Dream to Make Believe

I have to say how I feel about the recent rating-change of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. For some background information you can read this story on MSNBC. The problem at hand is that Rockstar Games, the company which developed GTA, included some sexually explicit material on the game’s disc, but it is entirely inaccessible until a complicated modification is done to the game. Since the content was inaccessible, they didn’t report it to the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board). Someone created what is called the ‘Hot Coffee’ mod that makes this content accessible. Once news got out that this mod had unlocked this content in the game the ESRB investigated it and decided to change GTA’s rating from ‘Mature’ to ‘Adults Only’.

<rant>This is pretty ridiculous. The whole point of GTA is to run around stealing cars, shooting innocent pedestrians and police officers in the face, stealing all kinds of things, etc. Basically, it is a pretty messed up game. Hell, you can even hire a prostitute, have sex with her, and kill her afterwards and take your money back. Fuck, you can kill her by stomping her to death, running a chainsaw through her, lighting her on fire, or just by running her over a few times with your choice of vehicle. But, you never see any nipple. I’m convinced that that is pretty much what we (and by ‘we’ I mean the public of the United States, whom I’m less and less impressed with every day) has a big problem with. I wish I could get a sky-writing plane to write “Your kids won’t get fucked up if they see nipples.” across the sky. As far as I know we have no proof to suggest that kids who see more nipples are more likely to become criminals, rapists, pedophiles, or smut peddlers. If anyone can find such a study, please add a comment and link to it. I just think it’s absurd that we think that nipples are worse than setting people on fire and listening to them scream. This blog posting is a pretty funny take on the whole thing.</rant>

Oh, here’s a quote from that MSNBC article, “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was last year’s top console game, selling more than 5.1 million copies in the U.S. after its October release, according to market analyst NPD Group.”.
That’s right. They released it in October and it was last years top selling console game. This should be a stellar example of what kind of media we want to consume. We want to be able to do all of these things and more because it is entertaining and fun. I honestly don’t believe that violent and/or sexually explicit video games are bad for children. I have no empirical proof to back that up with, but I haven’t seen any proof saying the opposite either. Besides, such a study would have to show that a child that ends up messed up was actually messed up by the video games that he played and not by absent minded parents or other such problems (which may or may not be the reason for him being able to play such games).

So, I’m not exactly sure how to deal with the bastard mood that I’m in. I’ve just been very short with people lately. I went off on the news media again the other night. I think it’s easier for people to hear me say that I don’t care about Terri Schiavo now because she’s dead. When I say that I don’t care that Natalee Holloway is missing in Aruba or that I don’t care that people are getting eaten by sharks they get upset with me. I mean, it’s not like I’m related to anyone that is missing or getting eaten. It’s not even like I know someone who knows someone who is related to someone that is missing or getting eaten. I do feel bad for these people’s families and I do feel bad for those who are missing or were eaten, but it doesn’t need to be on the TV all day. If you look at it one way, it’s pretty sick. The media outlets are only talking about it because they want to sell you newspapers or whatever. They know that you’re going to buy their newspapers or watch their news reports because we actually find this stuff interesting. We are actually entertained when they interview the parents of this poor girl that’s missing in Aruba. And you know what we’re all thinking? We’re thinking, “I wonder how the parents are involved in this thing. I bet the dad had his daughter killed because she found out about he was cheating on mommy.” And you know what? If we found out that that is what really happened, then put it on the news for a few minutes because that’s a good story. There are probably hundreds of different people missing all over America right now, but we’re all supposed to care about this one girl?

Anyway – you probably understand now that I’m in a bastard mood. All of these little things that bothered me before now bother me much more. Well, I guess they don’t bother me any more than they did, but I feel more inclined to talk about how they bother me. I mentioned this to my mom and she said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” While I think that is sound advice, I feel like all of these small things are ruining everything. For some reason I feel like if the news wasn’t filled with shit like this that it would be showing things that actually might affect those people who are watching it. You know, something educational or revealing; something that gave the citizens of this country more to go on than what letter comes after a politician’s name.

I think I need to take a nap or something. Oh, Jeff is going to swing by my house tomorrow and we’re going to try and do some work on Office Bocce. That should be fun. Also, my work on creating RPMs of Gnome through JHBuild is coming along. It’s not done yet, but I’m getting packages out. I basically just have to figure out what else to do to get all of the packages to install. We’ll see how it goes.

So, I got back from Germany on June 1st and I’m just now getting around to writing about it. I really should have written about it earlier because it would have been easier to remember the details. Regardless, here it goes.

I’ve already written about the plane ride over to Germany and a few other things. So, I suppose I’ll start this list of highlights from when I got off the train. It took me about 45 minutes to find my hotel once I stepped out of the train station. However, the hotel is 5 minutes away from the train station. If I knew where to look I could see it from one of the train station doors. Here’s a picture from the balcony my hotel had in which you can see the train station. The hotel room was pretty nice. The see-through doors in the bathroom were a little weird. So was the toilet with two buttons. I spent the first day tooling around Stuttgart. I enjoyed my first German meal which was a falafal sandwich and chicken wings. I spent a lot of time in the Schlossgarten. It was really great to see how German people live day-to-day. You can’t see that in a museum. I watched some guys play real bocce.

I went to Heidelberg the second day. I wrote about this in a previous post, but I have pictures now. I have one of me walking around Heidelberg with a lemon ice. Once I made my way up to the castle, I was able to take this picture of part of Heidelberg and this picture of part of the castle. There was much more to the castle as you can see in this picture I took from the Philosopher’s Walk.

The third day was when we took the trip to the medieval city of Esslingen. I didn’t take many pictures and the ones I took didn’t come out very well. The fourth day marked the beginning of the GUADEC conference. The conference was really awesome. It really motivated me to get more involved in Gnome. Jeff Waugh gave a talk about trying to get 10% of the desktops in the world running Gnome by 2010. He called it “10×10″. I saw John and met some other people as well. We played some giant chess while John hacked on DBUS.

I left the morning after the conference ended. I had a great time and it was really cool to be so far out of my element. Guadec 7 is going to be in Barcelona. We’ll see where things are a year from now, but I would really like to get out to Guadec again. The Gnome Summit is in Boston this fall and I will most likely be attending that as well. I suppose that about wraps up my post about Germany. All of the pictures that I took and deemed were of good enough quality and relevance are available on my flickr account and are tagged with Germany.

So, today is the last day of Guadec. I’ll be heading home tomorrow. There was a GUADEC party last night that was a blast. I’ve met a lot of people from all around the world. Nokia is giving a talk right now about their involvement with Open Source. It’s very exciting to have a large company like Nokia announce their involvement with the community. I would really like to write more, but I’m trying to pay attention to the talk. I’ll definitely write a bunch when I get home. I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon sometime. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.

This is post number 2 from Germany. I went to Heidelberg yesterday. They have this big castle there which is conveniently placed at the top of a pretty high hill. The walk up to the castle was pretty brutal. I took a bunch of pictures from the top of the castle that came out pretty nice. I’ll try and post pictures tomorrow when I have access from my laptop. Heidelberg is much more touristy than Stuttgart. They have all these little tourist shops and restaurants. I also walked along the ‘Philosopher’s Walk’ which was pretty nice. It also suffered from being at the top of a steep hill. Well, I guess I was the one who suffered. It’s called the ‘Philospher’s Walk’ because Hegel used to walk along it or something like that. I was cursing him as I was climbing up the thing. I took pictures from there also. There’s a really nice view of the castle from there.

I’m writing this entry from an iMac that is in the internet cafe here. That would normally be fine, except this one has a German keyboard or something. It’s mostlty the same except the ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ keys have switched places. Oh, and there are a few more keys: öä€ß§°. :o)

It hit 38° C in Heidelberg yesterday. That’s like 98° F. In similar news, I’m having a little bit of trouble keeping myself hydrated. I’m drinking a bunch of water, but it took me a little while to figure out that that was the problem.

Stuttgart is so alive with people. There is this main pedestrian-only street called Königstraße which is just bustling with people. There always seems to be some kind of fair going on. I spent a bunch of time in the Schlossgarten (a park similar to Central Park) and there are always people there. On a Thursday afternoon the place was packed with people. Awesome.

Alright, I’m going to head over to where the conference is to catch the bus to Esslingen for a little medieval town action. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some pictures tomorrow.

Well, I made it. I’m posting this from some internet cafe in Stuttgart, Germany. The plane ride was a blast. It was really cool to see what I’m guessing was some part of New York or Long Island from that height in the dark. Each streetlight looked like a christmas tree light. The food they served us on the plane wasn’t that bad. While I was eating I was thinking about how flying is entirely ridiculous. We were never meant to fly. I almost laughed out loud. There I was something like 35000 feet over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean eating some pasta/chicken dish and a brownie. Fuck you nature – we’ll make wings. haha. I woke up over France. Yeah – France is just a bunch of farms. That’s it. I came over here and I looked at it and it’s all farms.

Once I landed in Stuttgart I exchanged my US cash for Euros. It’s a very weird experience to hand a person a bunch of $50 bills and have them hand you four pieces of paper that look fancy, have numbers on them, but don’t really hold any value in your mind. What are these things, fancy receipts or something? I dig that they have 1€ and 2€ coins though. Oh, when I got on the train, some kid sat across from me and he was wearing a shirt that said, “Long Island” on it. Pretty freaking weird.

It’s very weird to go to google and get redirected to www.google.de by the way. I’ve got to remind myself to setup webmail for myself because right now I don’t have a way of checking my email. That wouldn’t be such a problem except that if there’s any news about the conference I’ll be getting it in email. Bah. I took a bunch of pictures already, I’ll try and post them later if I get some access from my laptop. Alright – I’m going to try and find some food that isn’t *wurst. Later.

Alright, I’m leaving for Germany in less than 24 hours. I’m finding that I’m more nervous than I thought I would be. I’m kind of surprised because I don’t get nervous very often. It’s not the flight that’s making me nervous. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s not the flight. I think it’s just that I don’t know so many things about what’s going to happen in the next few days.

It’s going to be good to get away. I think it will be good for me to clear my head for a week or so. I haven’t spent 6 nights in a row in a hotel before. That’s going to be kind of weird. It’s long enough that it might make sense to actually put my clothes in the dresser that they have in the room.

There are a lot of things that I’m looking forward to doing in Germany. It may sound weird, but I’m really looking forward to just walking around the park that is in the middle of Stuttgart. I can’t imagine it being anything too special. I’ve seen trees, grass, and hills before, but these are German trees, grass, and hills.

I’m going to try and post to my blog when I get over there. I’ll probably be posting pictures as well. I’ve got to get to sleep now if I have any hope of falling asleep on the flight and dealing with the 6-hour time difference well. Later.