Givin' away my junk

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?

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.

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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.

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.

Temporary

Officially, this blog doesn't exist.

You see, I had been planning to wait on creating a blog until I after I had built myself a server, installed it at work (free server colocation as a perk for working at a small ISP--w00t!), and designed a site for it.

That was the plan when Diary-X went under about half a year ago. As of now, I have a server built entirely from second-hand, third-rate hardware that doesn't work for shit. It needs a lot of work and testing before I consider hosting anything on it. Though I could be designing a site for it while it's in progress... meh. One thing at a time. Hopefully, I'll get my server up and running soon enough, and this will become a redirect page to my new server.

I also thought it would be nice to have a blogger ID so that I can comment on Christine, Jason and Richard's blogs.

About me, in general:

• I used to blog at fuzzymarc.diary-x.com before the server died, which I'm still a bit angry about. I managed to retrieve about sixty of my entries through various sources, but lost several of my favorites anyway. Who runs a server with no backups or redundancy of any kind? That's just stunningly, amazingly irresponsible and stupid. I won't even consider putting my server into production without a software RAID 1 array.


• I'm a professional geek working at a small ISP in Wisconsin, which may or may not change in the near future. My lovely girlfriend Megan is current about 1,300 miles away in Idaho, and I miss her a great deal. (Long story. Suffice it to say that she hasn't always been that far away.) I've decided recently--today, in fact--that I'm going to update my resume and start applying to jobs in the Seattle area. "Seattle," you say, "isn't that in Washington, and not so much in Idaho?" Yes, it is. However, I've been to Megan's town. The odds of finding a job I won't loathe are very small indeed. Seattle is the nearest place I think it will be easy for me to settle in. My good friend Mikey lives there, and has offered to let me live on his couch long enough to get my shit together.


• I have no social life whatsoever. I can't remember the last time I did anything on a Friday or Saturday night. This is due in equal parts to having very few friends, a significantly decreased desire to drink myself retarded on a regular basis, and the fact that I work unpleasant, weird hours.


• On the increasingly rare occasions I leave my apartment for reasons other than work or errands, I go to the Buddhist temple in Oregon, about twenty minutes from my place. I haven't actually been there in months. I practice Tae Soo Do, a martial art style created as an introduction to the more hardcore Hwa Rang Do. If done quickly, it's possible to get a black belt in Tae Soo Do in about two years. Upon graduating into Hwa Rang Do, this translates into an orange sash (second-from-bottom ranking).


• I bike to work when I can, which is most days during the summer. Any jokes relating to the 40-Year-Old Virgin are not appreciated. It may not be the most glamorous way to get to work, but I only have to fill my car's tank once a month, suckers.


• I'm blogging from my cube. I'm actually done for the day, but frankly, I don't really want to go back to my apartment. It has no air conditioning, and it is unmercifully, soul-crushingly hot today. Not to mention the fact that I have mice--apparently, I have a lot of them. I caught mouse number six the other night. I've been forcing the saga of my battle against vermin on anyone who will listen. Granted, I know it's something that no one wants to hear... but I have the unsavory habit of unloading my problems on others. More that likely, I'll do my fair share of bitching here.

I think I'm done rambling for now. Expect more nonsense in the near future.