I feel very great today! I woke up quite early (7am), but it was for a good cause. That cause being a breakfast buffet . I was promised one in February for my birthday, but we just couldn't get around to it. So then my parents said that once I hit a target weight, I could go. Yes, I used to be very fat. I was a whopping 141 kilograms (310 pounds). Now I am 118 kilograms (260 pounds). I have 30 more pounds to go until my target weight! One of the great parts to this weight loss is that my old favorite clothes are fitting me now . Note the chubby face.

I can say that my favorite TV show The Biggest Loser has been nothing but an inspiration to me. Seeing all of those people struggle and fight to lose weight is sort of what drives me to exercise.

Something else that inspires me to exercise is the drive to get my endurance and strength back after I had that grand mal seizure. It happened a few months ago, but I still feel the effects in my body. I have been walking four miles 4/7 days a week. The other three days I lift weights and do anaerobic work.

Yesterday I went and saw my friends at the old apartment building I used to live at. Boy they sure have changend. One of my friends is as big as a cow. Others are sucessfully losing weight. Some are crazier than ever and some are rather mellow. I feel sorry for some of them; they are trapped in the void that I once was in . Speaking of crossing the void, some of my medication is being cut back! I am more awake and alert than ever--I can blame my doctor and mother for this. I feel 110% better than I did a month ago. I feel even more so better than two months ago!

I am working on a torrent site with a friend. I don't know much about it, so I can't say much about it. I will say more once I get the info~

That's all for now. I'll post in a few days! ~~

The writing contest is over and I have reviewed all of the submissions. I had to omit one because it was too long (1200+ ish). I have spent the last few days reading and rereading the remaining four stories. Just around an hour ago, I narrowed it down to two stories. Time by Paul K., and Last Chance by Rumpryder. I literally had to take this one down to a grammar and staying on focus contest. Sadly, there could only be one winner. That winner is...Last Chance by Rumpryder. Paul K. came close, but Rumpryder's story had a more definitive ending. Judging contests like this is both fun and challenging / difficult at the same time. Time was a very well-written story, so congratulations to Paul K. for writing well and making it to the final judgment. Keep after it, Paul, you'll be a great writer someday! As for Rumpryder, you are an exceptional author and should continue to refine your talents and you might be able to get some money with your writing skills. I will post Last Chance sometime tomorrow morning / afternoon. It is a sleek 899 words, making it the perfect length! Congratulations to all that entered the contest; be sure to check back in about four months when I have another writing contest.

JesseTyler of #snoopy said something to me about VMware. He explained what it was, and I have got to have it. It basically sounds like WINE on steroids. The only reason I really want it is to be able to run iTunes on my Linux box. VM is a virtual machine. It's like running an OS within another OS. The problem is that it costs precious money. Money is something that I lack at the moment, though. If anybody can score this for free, or find some source code, I would be mucho grateful! I think that it's like Cygwin, but I'm not entirely too sure. If I can get this, then I'm hoping I can run applications off of my Windows partition. And if I could do that, I can't imagine how great that would be! No more taking Nerblog down to organize my music or play some Guild Wars or Fable or even my arcade games that refuse to run with WINE. In fact, all of those programs refuse to run with WINE. I guess I could try CVS Cedega, but a VM sounds a lot nicer . Like I said, if anybody can find an emulator that will let me run iTunes on Linux, I'd much appreciate it. I would use something else, but I kind of need iTunes with my iPod .

I talked with my case manager yesterday. She is going to look to get me in an apartment designed for people who aren't in the best of mental health. It's awesome because it only takes 1/3 of my monthly income for rent. That leaves me with plenty of money for food and internet! I hope I get accepted! I'm going to watch episode seven of Lucky Star tonight; no excuses not to! I might even watch eight and nine if I have the time and desire tonight. I leave my readers with a picture of a smoking hawt girl with plenty of leg to go around. Take care and enjoy Rumpryder's story tomorrow! ~neRd

So my iPod crashed for about the seventh time yesterday. I've been spending the day ripping CDs to my computer so I can insert them on to my iPod. So far I have about 850 songs. I am waiting very patiently for this Fall Out Boy CD to finish copying to my desktop. Of course not all of it is from CD. There are a few downloaded tracks, but who hasn't downloaded music in their time? I know for a fact that Accius (Angry Mexican) has downloaded around 6000 songs. I own quite a bit of Japanese music as well. Most of my music is legal, though, so those reading that work for the RIAA can shove off D:<. I am thinking of starting up a radio station; that sounds kind of fun...neRd Radio! Yes, it has a very nice ring to it. I'm going to wait until I hit at least 2,000 songs first though. The reason for waiting until the 2,000 song mark is that nobody likes to hear duplicates! I need some more Nickelback, Killswitch Engage, Crossfade, Linkin' Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the list goes on. Those are on the to buy list; I'll download some JPop as well to fill out the list.

About 6 months ago, Fable: The Lost Chapters was unsupported with WINE. Well since there have been major changes to the Linux kernel and OSes over the past 6 months, I decided to check again. Much to my surprise, it is supported now! So I am seriously contemplating installing this on this computer (my desktop) and seeing how it runs under Linux (WINE). I've pretty much canned WoW; I simply can't afford it. There are better games out there, too. Not just on the computer, but consoles are coming up strong again. I don't own a Wii, XB360, or a PS3...yet. I do however, own an SNES, N64, 2 GBAs, a Gamecube, and 2 PC systems. All of this is plenty to occupy and waste my time. If I get extremely bored, I might hit up an arcade or something. Arcade games these days blow. The number one hit at an arcade here in Joplin is called TILT. Their number one game is DDR. As fun as it is to watch people make fools of themselves at that game, it really does get quite boring after awhile. Well if I ever get bored with the video games I own, I can always try my hand at women again .

I installed Kubuntu Feisty Fawn on my laptop today. The install process took forever, but now my laptop is running as smooth as ever. Both of my PCs are running up to date software and hardware. Next Sunday I'm going to give my aunt who lives in Kansas City a call and see if I can stay a week there. I've gotta see how I can handle crowds first, though. That's why this Saturday I'm going to go to a get together and talk to people. Remember that the writing contest ends July 7, 2007 at 12:00am CDT (-0500 GMT). Now, for your amusement, a bunny humping a kitty! Take care ~nerd.

I did some upgrading to my system. The OS is now Ubuntu 7.04 and everything is like new. I'm extending the writing contest by another week. So far there are six entries, all are very promising! Take care and happy writing!

More iPod troubles lead today's headlines. It just "makes me SO MAD" that my iPod decides to fuck up at random locs. What's funny is when I "dropped" it, it fixed itself. Thankfully I keep backups of my musical data now (fool me once), so I'm safe in that department.

Got payed a visit from a friend today. This is the same guy that graduated Sunday. He was sporting a laptop he had won during a raffle drawing that night. So what do we do to it? We fuck with it's settings and install WoW on it! He got a nice sounding Linkin' Park album recently too. Come August 1st, he's going to be homeless. I'm gonna move out and be a roommate then. I've wanted my own place for awhile, conditions permitting. Time to eat some food and play some WoW!

My iPod is fixed! Thankfully I made a backup of my songs about a month or so ago, so I only lost about 50 songs or so. All I did was navigate into the iPod itself and delete everything by hand (no progs were responding to it). Remembering then that I made a "backup" of my iPod way back when, I quickly burnt it all off from my win32 partition. Lets just hope that it stays working this time! I'm going to start up n00b situations again very shortly. If you're interested in helping out, drop me a line.

The past two days have been very, very good to me. I am going to talk about many a thing in this post, so here goes. As I mentioned in a previous post, our family does the whole gift-opening thing on Christmas Eve. There was a mesh of gifts under our "tree" this year. Here is a quick overview of what I got for Christmas. I received a new wallet, two hoodies, a surround-sound system for my iPod, the Rocky DVD collection, some clothes, and $200.00 in cash. All I really wanted was the Rocky DVD collection, so I consider the rest a very nice bonus.

My grandpa gave me the $200.00, and I spent $107.31 of it on an external HDD. I looked for an internal one, but they had no Ultra ATA drives there. The external drive I purchased is 200 gigabytes; I am going to use it to store anime videos and backup my data. The box it came in said that it was for WinNT+ only. "Bull," I said to myself, "I bet if I format it just right, I can enjoy the drive in both my Linux and Windows partitions. Scrambling for the right command to enter in bash, I remembered mkdosfs. Feeling fairly happy, I typed mkdosfs /dev/sdc1 into the console. Five seconds later, it was formatted and I could finally write to it. I immediately backed up my "pictures" directory and moved my Azumanga Daioh folder on over. Next I'll pile on my Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex episodes on over, and be content with speedy viewing and massive amounts of data storage. I am putting the remaining ~$93.00 in my bank account tomorrow.

I have needed a new wallet for quite some time. My old one was...well...old. Approximately 6 years old to be exact. This new one is awesome though. It is a trifold, which of course owns; it has a clear slot for your drivers licence, which is nice because I won't have to drag it out each time people need a photo ID. It has less card slots than my previous wallet, but it is still way more awesome as it can hold more cash and there are plenty of places to stash crap inside. It even came with a little dooflingy for photographs--one of those little booklets.

I am a big, big, big, very big fan of hoodies. I also like the boxer shorts and shirts that I got . I will even wear them in the summer on certain occasions I love them so much. I got two of them from my parents, and one from my aunt and uncle. I usually wear hoodies for 2-3 days before washing them since they are like jackets. So I got over a week's worth of hoodie-age for Christmas!!!!

The surround-sound system I got for my iPod looks awesome. Though I haven't decided where to put it yet, I can tell that I am going to love this. You plug the iPod in at the top, and use the wheel to select a playlist. Then you just sit back and enjoy. At least....that's what it appears to do. I'll be sure to post if anything's different. I will look for a place to lay it down today. Getting a free plug in might be the tricky part. Both extension cords and both surge protectors are totally full (I eat electricity for breakfast, lunch, and dinner n__n). I'll post more on this nifty widget as soon as I get her hooked up and everything's flowing.

Last, but certainly not least on the gift list, was the Rocky DVD collection that my parents got me. It contains every Rocky movie ever made. Over the past few days, that's all I've been watching on the TV: Rocky. In this fictional world of boxing, he just shows that heart and desire can overcome any obstacle a man may face. That's what my wrestling coach told me, and that's what this movie series portrays.



Now on a totally differnet subject...I decided not to go job shopping today; I'm going to go at it tomorrow. The traffic wasn't bad at 8:00 this morning, but as the day progresses, the traffic flow is bound to increase. Tomorrow I'm going straight for Blockbuster, then to the Movie Gallery that's a few blocks down. Then b-lining all the way over to the other side of town and put in an application to the Movie Gallery there (provided they're looking). Thursday I am going to the local Radio Shack and see what I can conjure up there in terms of an application. Then on Friday, I'll be going to EB Games and Game X Change to put in applications there. As I mentioned earlier in my blog, I am going to get a job before the month ends. If not then, soon after the new year starts.

Well I had a goal to go over 1000 words this post, but seeing as I can't do that right now, I'm just going to flat out end it right here, although I am getting pretty damned close here, I'm just gonna let it lay to rest . Here's your end of the post picture, take care and I'll write to ya tomorrow!

I just saw the new Rocky movie, Rocky Balboa. I am just going to briefly talk about it with hopes of not spoiling it for people who still want to see it. I would rate the whole series on a scale: 3, 1, 2, Balboa, 4, 5. The movie really grabs at you with flashbacks from the original Rocky. The movie in combination with the flashbacks almost made me cry at parts, and when the film was complete, I had an adrenaline headache; it's really very easy to get into these movies. The end fight wasn't quite what I expected it to be. I'm not going to talk about the movie anymore though save for the fact that it is well worth the price to get in to see it.

I had to drive up to Nevada, MO again today. I had an appointment with the therapist, but there wasn't really much to talk about. The hour long session was cut in half due to lack of topics. I'm glad it was cut short there because I don't want to start bull shitting with this therapist like I did with my first one. Yeah my first therapist and I used to talk about all sorts of shit, seemingly avoiding the issues at hand. I met my current one last year during a hospitalization up in Heartland (a facility for the mentally-ill youths in Nevada, MO). This was back when I was 17 and in a hell of a lot worse shape than I am today. I'm beginning to digress a tad though, so let me get on this one last few topics.

As the days trickle on by, I get closer and closer to making DVDs with menu selections with the Linux operating system. I almost had it today, or so I thought... Irayo says that he's gonna give it a shot this weekend. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to stop. It is probably some sort of "duh" thing that's right in front of my face. I'm going to try a couple of other things tonight and perhaps utterly waste a few more DVD-Rs. The local stores apparently don't believe in purchasing DVD-RWs for their customers, so I'm just sacrificing DVD-Rs in the ongoing struggle toward making the "perfect" DVD!

Couple of last things to talk about here. One, I will not update my blog on Christmas Eve because that is when this family usually does the most celebrating. I will however, post an update on Christmas itself. Tomorrow, Monday, or Tuesday is when I am going to head south to the Ozark Mountains to take photographs. I expect to bring home at least 30 photographs, 10-15 of those will be ones that I keep. I will be posting all the ones that I keep in nerd photos for everyone to look at. I will be doing a large server cleanup on Christmas from 12pm-1pm. I will also be editing up Nerblog's source code as I have found some things that may bog the site down. I will "spiff" things up a bit all on Christmas Day. I am also considering switching from PHP to PERL for the site as I have heard reports of PERL being able to handle large amounts of data more efficiently. I know there are programmers/scripters that read my blog on a regular basis. So please leave your input as a comment, or e-mail me. Most, if not all comments made on instant messengers will be ignored. I will respond on IRC however. To connect to me on an IRC network, scroll on down to the contact information page. I leave you with a screencap of the new movie Rocky Balboa. Oh yeah, my linux desktop got a little bit sexier (mostly males will find it enjoyable). You can view it here or on the link in the crusty panties section. By the by, 10 brownie points goes to the person who posts a comment about the obvious title of the post.

Over the past few days, I have been experimenting with DVD creation on the Linux operating system. It's very simple to create a DVD with no menus, no intro, etc. with many, or one, file(s). The tricky part, the one that I haven't quite figured out just yet, it creating it like a normal DVD. I found a great tutorial page, but it's still all Greek to me. Here is the tutorial page I'm talking about: http://mightylegends.zapto.org/dvd/dvdauthor_howto.php. Everything seems easy until it comes time to authorize the DVD. "dvdauthor" is a tool that I am struggling to find help with. Either way I am sure that by next Monday, at the latest, I will have created a fantastic DVD. Then I can put all the episodes of SaC on it. Speaking of that, apparently episode 2 was "corrupt" and wouldn't encode correctly. So my DVD collection, when I get it completed, will be lacking episode 2

I got an application for a video store known as Crown Video yesterday. I filled in the app last night and turned it in this morning. The guy seemed pretty optimistic about me getting hired there. I sure hope I get on. I've wanted to work at a video store for so many years now; ever since I was a little kid, I have been fascinated by them. If I don't get on there, then there's always Blockbuster and Movie Gallery to try. Either way, once I get a job my first $80 are going toward this bad boy right here. I'm going to use it to keep backups of my server, pictures, and music. I'm also going to store any videos that I can't successfully put on a DVD there as well. The guy said that I'd know by around Tuesday (he said "late this week or early next week") if I'm going to get hired or not. I really don't care what the wages are, I just want to work at a video store. Plus, any wage is better than sitting on my ass here making no income at all .

I was downloading more anime last night, and my bT program suddenly crashed. "The application KTorrent (ktorrent) crashed and caused the signal 6 (SIGABRT)." This occurred rather suddenly and got me pretty darned pissed off. While I'm looking for a new way to leech anime from the internet, aka. another torrent client, I'm gonna keep fiddling with this DVD thing. Also I'm going to remove the "Reccomend to Friend" link from the posts as they no longer work. When I feel like dicking around with sendmail more, I'll put em back up. In the meantime, enjoy this picture.

Well, after many trials and tribulations I have set up World of Warcraft on my linux partition. I ran into several problems along the way of doing so. It makes me so happy to say that I didn't waste a full day of reading to find out how to do this.

The first problem I ran across was Direct3D support. Wine (Windows Emulator) doesn't support D3D at all. So what was happening was I would launch WoW and then get hung up for awhile by 1fps speeds; I couldn't do a thing like this! Seeing that D3D was a no-go, I then tried OpenGL to see if that would cut the mustard. Sure enough, it didn't even load!

After coming to terms that a plain flavor of Wine wasn't going to do the trick for me, I made a vent post in #snoopy. I was then told to get Cedega (aka. WineX) because it has DirectX support. I gave it a shot but it also didn't work out for me. I bounced back and forth trying patches here, fixes there, and I even went in circles and repeated some of my mistakes!

After some careful googling and a few more vent posts in IRC channels, I stumbled across this wonderful page. It was a shell script that did automatically did what I did by hand about six times. "F*ck this," I said to myself again and again, "I give up." Then I had a breakthrough: "Error: Could not start 3D acceleration!"

Seeing this message stabbed me in the heart and woke me up a bit. "Perhaps I don't have the correct video drivers?" I thought to myself. Sure enough, I was using a generic "nv" driver for my video rather than a solid nVIDIA driver. I went all over the place looking for a driver and came up empty handed. Then I thought I'd check the Ubuntu package database. Sure enough it had what I needed (and I didn't have to recompile my kernel like a shell script said I would ). I did a test or two and found that I indeed had 3D acceleration going (yes!).

So I reinstalled cvscedega along with Wine (with WoW patches that I got working up; there was an ubuntu package for WoW with Wine, but that didn't work out well either :#). I did the usual "wine WoW.exe" command and waited....it popped up and it wasnt laggy! I just had a regular mouse pointer over the finger that you see when you launch WoW. I'm sure there's a fix for this somewhere, but I thought I'd try OpenGL again to see if that'd work. Sure enough it did...with no mouse bugs!

Yes, I'm a Linux newbie, but I sure did learn a lot from this experience. Now World of Warcraft runs smooth as ever on my Linux partition just like my Windows one. Even though my knowledge of this system is limited, it is growing daily. If you would like to set up WoW on a Linux partition and are like me (tried basicly every guide on the Internet) and can't get it running, post a comment, e-mail me, catch me on IRC, etc. and I'll see what I can do to help out. I would like to extend a special thank you to Max for pointing me in the direction of Cedega.