Givin’ away my junk

July 20, 2006 - 12am

I have far too much junk cluttering up my apartment, and certainly a lot more than I want to move with me to Washington.  Here’s the thing, though… people are actually coming to my front door and taking this stuff off my hands for me.  Tonight I gave away an old NES (I had two) and some RAM that I couldn’t use.

If you haven’t heard of freecycling, I’d highly recommend it.  Go to freecycle.org and find a local group for your area.  People advertise what they have and what they want in mailing list, then make arrangements for pick up.

Some of the requests can be fairly inane: “I want a laptop computer!” and “Who wants to give me their car?” are actually quite common.  I’m not sure why the moderators don’t just block the messages.

Similarly, so are some of the offers: “I’ve got a coupon for 20% at Bed Bath and Beyond!” was one a while ago.  Oh, you mean the coupon they mailed to everyone in Madison, including me?  Yeah, we’ll pass.  But thanks.

I’m thinking I should start clearing the crap out of my storage space with freecycling.  It seems to be the place that my things go to die… once something goes down there, the odds that I’ll ever want it again shrink to close to zero.

PDF Viewers, anyone?

July 20, 2006 - 12am

Adobe Reader can eat my ass, and here’s why:

  • It’s slow and ugly.
  • It integrates itself into my browser without asking me during install.
  • The Adobe browser plugin will pop up dialog boxes under multiple other windows, making the entire browser unresponsive until I can find it and tell it to just open the damn PDF.
  • It begs to be updated constantly, frequently trying to get me to download other Adobe products I don’t want and don’t need.
  • There are a slew of screen-cluttering icons taking up precious screen real estate across the top of the screen.

Here’s a shocker for you, Adobe… I hate your damn PDF files. I hate them. Give me straight HTML any day. It’s faster to search and scroll through, usually easier on the eyes, and easily created and modified.

However, I’m frequently required to deal with your damn PDF files.

All I want is from your reader is for it to read PDF files. That’s it. Your installer downloads 20MB of data to do a task that could be done with overkill in 5MB.

So, I’m wondering–what alternative PDF readers do people use? I can’t be the only person unwilling to deal with Adobe’s atrocious Reader. If you have an opinion, please let me know.

Update: In case you care (and I’m sure you don’t) I found this on Digg not long after I posted. Strangely, I’d already downloaded and installed the program in the blog post by the time I found the review.

I Have Nothing To Say

July 19, 2006 - 12am

Seriously… nothing to say.  I’m just stunningly bored at work, and I thought this might entertain me for a bit.

:: indifferent shrug ::

I have Thursdays and Fridays off (weird schedule, remember?) so I’m going to be spending my “weekend” rewriting my resume.  Mikey offered to try to get in contact with a Google or Amazon recruiter for me; hopefully he’ll be able to do that.

So, at the moment, here’s the master plan:

  • Update my resume.
  • Get a fantastic job on the other side of the country.
  • Move to Washington.
  • Get a two bedroom apartment with Megan.
  • Be happy.

<geekspeak>
My server is coming along quite nicely.  I’m still getting some errors on boot from the hard drives, but they seem to be ok.  I installed Fedora Core 5 today with software RAID1 across two 40GB drives.  I might get a third just because I don’t trust either very much.

Mikey gave me an old stick of 256MB PC133 RAM which, if it still works, would max out the server at 512MB.  The odds of it still being good are slim at best… he didn’t know if it worked when he gave it to me, and I threw it sans anti-static bag into the front pocket of my luggage.  Assuming it wasn’t destroyed by baggage handling or static (and was good to begin with), the bottle of massage oil on the opposite side of the pocket burst open, soaked through the dividing fabric, and coated it.  I’m concerned that even testing it might trash the motherboard I put it in.
</geekspeak>

That is all.  Go about your business.

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© Marc Teale 2008.