Okay, while I sit here blogging instead of doing Combinatorics and Number Theory homework (ugh...), let me catch up on things. First off, hello to my cousins Aaron and Sarah. They recently started to read the blog, and they're the ones who gave me the wonderful excuse to visit California by getting married. I'm going to go to a Skillet concert with them and some of Aaron's brothers this Wednesday, which I'm totally stoked for. Skillet's pretty much brought Christian music back into my life. They're spectacular, particularly "Comatose," their latest CD, which I will probably buy at the show. They're a hard rock band with a good male lead, a very nice female backup vocalist, and a terrific sound. If you have the chance, check out "Rebirthing" and "The Last Night," both songs are from "Comatose" and are up on their MySpace page. "The Last Night" is probably my favorite song of theirs.

I've been burning a lot of time on webcomics. I've scripted the prologue for the one Sapph and I are going to try to work on, so that's getting along. For reading, I probably look forward to TwoKinds the most. I love that comic so much, for so many reasons. Tom (the artist) has the fantastic ability to salute the cliches and then move on (I might have mentioned this before). Also, I'm a Natani fanboy. The fact that I can look back to when I started reading, and see the improvement in his art (which was already fantastic), just over the course of these few months, gives me hope about my own pathetic attempts (even with the thing Sapph and I are going to do, I'm not going to give up DP as my own largely gag strip). For something that's different and still very good, I've been reading Hero By Night, which is presented as diary entries by the hero. So it's mostly text, with images as newspaper clippings, photos, sketches, and diagrams. It's a very different way to see a comic portrayed, and I find it to be a much better superhero story than most. But I'm not really a superhero comic guy. I would go into a long tangent here, but I'm probably best off not diluting this post with all that.

I got started reading Outpost Nine. I've just about read everything on the site, and I'll have to move on to Gaijin Smash, the author's other site, which is all about his time as an English teacher in Japan. I really love Az's work, partly because it has a distinct tendency to sound like things I would or have written. Az went a little farther than I did, actually managing to drop the nice guy and become a jerk, which I haven't been able to pull off, but our perspectives on things, especially women, are not terribly different. Maybe my media-born terror about Blacks is totally misplaced, since the only ones I actually know are really cool guys a lot like me and not at all like what television, music, and movies keep trying to tell me Blacks are like. Are all their comments on minorities wrong?

Otherwise, it's all been school and work. Why is it that everything goes wrong at work when I'm in class? Is it because I'm not available that everything has to break? Needless to say, work's been a little frustrating. I've pretty much cemented a hatred of Red Hat and Fedora Core. Nothing like paring the worst package management in the industry (seriously, RPMs and Yum are about as bad as you can get and still call it package management), with a tendency to not load configuration files at boot time. We lost the network at work two separate days because FC (like Red Hat before it) sometimes doesn't load things like our IPTables config file. Not that bad on a standalone machine, but when the computer in question is the router for the office, that's a crippling problem. Then the next day, I learned that it didn't bother to load the rc.local file either, so the dhcp server didn't start up, and when everyone's IP addresses expired, they couldn't get new leases and lost the Internet again. Thanks Red Hat. I can't properly express how frustrating working with your product is. What I wouldn't give to have the chance to put Debian on all our servers instead. Or Gentoo (which is my personal favorite distro, it's just probably not the right one for my workplace).

At least I've still got my webcomics and my endless stream of movies from Blockbuster. *grin*

Labels: life

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