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 *   asty.org                                            * 
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 *   Copyright (C) 1999-2005 Chris Allegretta            * 
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 *   Welcome to the 5th major redesign of my homepage!   * 
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2004.12.25 - Merry X-Mas to my Xian friends, Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends, Happy Winter Solstice to my Deist, Wiccan and/or Pagan friends. A nice holiday at home was just what the doctor ordered. Too bad it didn't snow though!

Anyway, last week I went to NYC for the first time since New Year's Eve, 1995 to see my friend Rafi. After having visited and seen the non-touristy side of the city, I really liked it! I had some good pizza while I was there, met some cuties at a party including the hottie hostess whose name I still can't remember. Also got to make some more progress in San Andreas, yay!

Been working on a new programming project. More on that when it's farther along ;-) Oh, also Im now running FreeBSD full time at home, things just seem to RIGHT with this OS....dunno what it is. Anyway, Linux is still OK, but not on my desktop!

2004.11.30 - Me likes to procrastinate. Have to turn in a job summary for the year, due tomorrow, no wanna do. Actually it shouldn't be that bad, since I've been an employee for GEGR for less than a year. Thanksgiving was wunderbar, LOTS of pumpkin pie and custard. Monique is walking really well now, makes getting a house with hardwood floors seem a bit short-sighted. Ahh well.

In site news, one year and five or so months after moving to JohnCompanies, I have moved my server to Linode. I liked JohnCompanies just fine, but for only $30/month I get what I was gettin at JC, root on my own box, 4GB of disk space, ~40GB of transfer, plus a really awesome control panel to manage my box's OS (you can even run Slackware or Gentoo), and ssh access to my servers console. Sweetness. I was worried about the 'committed megahertz rates' seeming so slow, but the box seems pretty zippy so far... Will report again when I have been with them longer.

Also trimmed down the front page considerably, moved a lot to the old news page.

2004.11.15 - Let's get it started, HA, Let's get it started in here. Damn that song is catchy. Yeah it's been forever since I updated, so let me catch you up. Monique turned 1 year last week, and we got to see lots of folks for presents and cake. Went to Dave's Halloween party and probably had the best time I've ever had at a party. Unfortunately this weekend I got some kind of bug and had to *gasp* miss a day of work. Anywa, since my sleep schedule is so messed up (slept almost 20 hours) I'm still awake at midnight. Gonna go try and get some more sleep.

2004.08.05 - Yup, I should update the page. Well, with a 9 month old and a new house that needs a little fixing up (not to mention finishing unpacking), things have been a little too busy. Such is life. My high school reunion is coming up soon; it's surely a sign that I've grown up that I'm more concerned about being away from the baby than I am excited about going to the reunion. Ah well! LCHS, only one week away!

2004.06.27 - Ok, feel free to hate me. Once again, first person to read our page gets to find out, rather than us having to pick who to call first and worrying about slighting someone. We're buying a house. Move-in date is July 11. Anyone who could help us move that day? Here's a picture:

2004.06.09 - I do have some good news, new job at GRC, Monique is doing well. But it is overshadowed by the death of my grandfather Joe Allegretta on May 31st. Amy's grandfather Howard Cayea passed away June 2nd, so if you talk to me and I don't have that happy ring in my voice that would be why. Here is a picture of my grandpa holding Monique over Christmas holiday:

Grandpa, you are missed.

2004.03.15 - Yep, not a lot going on. I am officially a member of the Server Management team at GRC, which is a promotion of sorts from the Unix Ops team. In personal news, I celebrated a birthday recently, and one of my wunderbar presents was Champions of Norrath for the PS2. Probably the best game I've played in years, Amy is even obssesed with playing it, perhaps more than I am! Anyway, here is a Monique picture, since you took the time to come to my page and all :-)

2004.02.08 - Enough politics for now. Not a whole lot different here, apparently the job scene is settling down a bit. I will probably be staying at good old GE Global Research (and getting promoted at that), but that's not a sure thing yet. Amy is settled into the stay at home Mom role, and Monique no longer seems to roll over, after her initial triumph over gravity awhile back. I think Amy may have pushed Monique into it (har). Anyway, I'm about sick of this snow. In an effort to actually get something accomplished this weekend, I updated the Hacker Key Guide, enjoy updating your keys. ttyS.

Oh yeah, one more thing I forgot to mention. Penny Arcade is the funniest comic. Ever. Period. If you aren't reading it yet, you should be. Go catch up. It's video game humor, what more can you ask for?

2004.01.24

That's my candidate! It's so nice to see a human being running for President, someone who ACTS LIKE HUMAN BEING and doesn't read off a cue card in a carefully constructed, monotonous tone! Holy cow! A candidate with a pulse! All this hubbub about Dean is hillarious, and it just makes me more sure he's the person I want to vote for. Thank God we live in a country where we get the chance to elect someone like Howard Dean to the Presidency. Not that I won't vote for whoever gets the Democratic nomination, as I think my 10 year old brother would make a better President than W.

Yeaaaaaarrr!!

2003.12.29 - Well, to drive down traffic further at my page, here is a link to one of Amy's sites, which includes more up to date pictures of Baby Monique, including some new holiday pics. Not much to say otherwise, holidays went well, even though I managed to forget the Winter Solstice was the 21st, which is one of my own religion's holidays. Oh well. Enjoy the new pics courtesy of Amy!

2003.12.10 - Okay, I know people only read my page at this point to see pictures of the baby. We did reach a milestone today, as Monique rolled over for the first time on her own onto her tummy!

Baby Monique just after rolling over

An alert Monique

A not so alert Monique

taking a nap with mommy

2003.11.19 - Nope, still haven't been able to get that page together. In the meantime here are two more pics:

A newer Chris & Monique

Monique yodeling?!

2003.11.19 - Well, Monique is definitely keeping me and Amy busy, I have finally to scrape together enough time to put up an HTML version of the Hacker Key Guide. If you know what a hacker is (hint: it's not what you hear on TV), then you should definitely check it out!

2003.11.06 - Okay, here are some more pics of mom, dad, and baby. I will put up a nice page explaining what's going on and when (especially the pic of me playing Gameboy). Ttfn!

2003.11.02 - So you're wondering to yourself "Why is Chris even more quiet than usual? This should clue you in:

Monique Elizabeth Allegretta
Born: 2003.11.01 at 6:28PM
Height: 17"
Weight: 5lbs. 8oz.
We'll be home later in the week to answer email and phones but for now rest assured that Mom and baby are doing just fine.

2003.09.29 - A site redesign! Yay, since I haven't put a lick in on nano I decided to put my crumbling C programming abilities toward a new site setup. Work is good, my lady is good, moving to a new apartment, new baby coming in Nov, lots going on. Must sleep now though.

2003.09.01 - Yes folks, blogging is finally dead. Why? Because I have one (many thanks to 'ren for the invite to livejournal. I'm usually the last person on the bandwagon before it collapses, so now's the time to sell your shares of blogging companies (are there such things?) Warning: my blog is updated only slightly more often than my homepage, so I'm really just making it harder for people to keep up with my life. Oh well.

2003.07.30 - Well, here she is in all her glory! No, no pictures of our leeeeetle one as of yet (you DO know Amy is pregnant, dont you? :), I only have pictures of my brand new, 10 year old car Jenny (it's bad luck for a boat to not have a name!)

2003.06.22 - Okay, I'll update! I'm almost afraid to, it's been so long. Let's see, who haven't I seen since the last update?? I got to see my friends Mark & Lesie. Jeremy & Dyanna and Tara whom I know from my old job this weekend. We also were visited by Joe and Jay on Friday (yay :-) and had some pizza and ice cream for Joe's belated birthday :) And Rich's birthday was earlier this month as well!

Last weekend it was Dave and Jess' wedding, besides the happy couple, we also got to see Sandy (mom), Nana, Rafi, Pat, Chris & Jen, Steve, and Kirsten, Lauren, and Chris R (no way Im spelling that last name :-), and I even remembered everyone :) This is no small accomplishment for someone as bad with names & faces as I am.

We also tried to visit MatCHOO recently but time was against us: while we were in VT at his place, he was in Plattsburgh, heh. We got to see him, (and Erika and Jay, and Q and Francesca, at Rich and Liz' wedding, oh yeah and got to see Rich and Liz too ;-). Lots of fun there also.

Man, I'm probably leaving out a ton of stuff, but that's what happens when you don't update in a month and a half. Anyway, gotta run!

2003.05.06 - Blah. Enough black, no one reads my page anymore anyway. Not like people give a damn how I feel about the war either. Somehow now that the war is "over" the only thing I feel is disgust for my goverment. Yep, we kicked ass in Iraq, I never said we wouldn't. We have the most awesome fighting force in the world. I just can not agree that we ALL OF A SUDDEN needed to take out Saddam. Okay, that's the last bit on the war you'll hear from me.

Went to Rich's bachelor party a little while back. In retrospect, I brought too much food along. Other than that a nice evening out for the boys. Also, I'm now the proud owner of a 1993 Chevrolet Boat, I mean Caprice. I'll have to put up a pic when I get my new plates. 2003.04.09 - Haven't updated in awhile, I don't know if it's this war, the seemingly endless snow, or both that is getting me so depressed. At least I have Rich and Dave's weddings to look forward to, and oh yeah, the bachelor parties too ;-)

Jeez, when was the last time I talked about work? It's great actually, thanks for asking! I'm not even going to jinx myself and talk about workload. I really have to start working on nano again though....

2003.03.18 - Yes, I changed the page, you noticed? This is my way of protesting this....this...witch hunt. I doubt any 9-11 families will feel any comfort when this war is over, all we're going to accomplish is to further infuriate mid-east nations and prove that our President is not acting in the interests of his people. But why would he, did you vote for this nut case? I sure didn't. Hmm, we have a President who is trying to abolish the separation of Church and State, and declares war without getting the consent of his people OR the United Nations, yeah that's my kind of guy! I can't wait for election day.

2003.03.03 - Happy Birthday to me, I'm an RHCE. Yes, the song part is a joke, anyone who knows me in the least knows I can't stand being sung to, especially that cheesy copyrighted song, and at the ripe old age of 27 at that. However, I think this has to be on of the best birthdays I've ever had.

Backing up to last weekend, we were up visiting Amy's family in Pburgh. I went over to MatCHOO's place for GeekFest 2K3, and had fun playing (and getting pretty badly beaten overall) at Battlefield 1942 and Jedi Knight II. Then it was off to training in Boston for my RHCE certification. But first we stopped by to hang out with Dave, Jess and Pat, for Dave's 27th bday and some good grub at Fire & Ice. Yum.

In Bahhston, we stayed with Joe and Jay , I developed some kind of fascination with Counter-Strike, and I finally got to see the movie AntiTrust, which isn't nearly as bad as everyone was saying it was. Then on Friday, after I took the nerve-wracking test, Amy went over to see Sere for a girly get-together. I went over to Rich's for some video games and to go over some wedding stuff. Then it was back to home Saturday, to get a day to unpack and unwind back in good old Albany. Time to update the resume, but whew, what a week+ it's been!

2003.02.09 - Well, I finally got with the Phoenix program. For those not in the know, Phoenix is a lighter and newer web browser based off the Mozilla project. The most recent milestone, version 0.5 (don't let it scare you folks, it doesn't seem to crash) has nice features that IE will get sometime next year.....maybe. Besides tabbed browsing, which Mozilla users have been using forever, you can assign different homepages to each tab! No more browsing to each of your favorite sites, each of your favorite pages can open in a new tab when you open your browser! Phoenix also supports a very intelligent popup blocking system, where you can selectively allow popups from sites where you actually want to see them (banking sites maybe?) Yes, it's available for Windows as well as Linux, here's a screenshot:

(got to love that rubber ducky theme on Sere's page!

Personal news: This month we were blessed with a $270 electric bill! Woo! Apparently Niagra Mohawk in their infinite wisdom only actually READS your meter every other month, and ESTIMATES how much you used the months they dont' read it. Good thing they didn't think I would use a lot MORE HEAT in January than I did in December, seeing as how it was HELLA COLDER out! Maybe my bill would have been REASONABLE this month if they had.

2003.01.27 - Yes, two updates in 7 days. Believe it. I need to ask everyone out there if I've gone completely crazy. I can't stop listening to Enya! I had one of her tunes (Only Time) stuck in my head, so I went out and sampled an album. I liked what I heard and liked some of her other stuff, so I picked up both Paint the Sky With Stars and A Day Without Rain and I love them! I wonder if this is just the pendulum swinging back toward a kinder, gentler asty. I haven't been that in awhile.

Speaking of asty, I don't think I've smiled so much recently as when Sere called me that over last weekend. I miss being called that. Perhaps it's just the conflict of being named Christian, when I'm in fact a born again Deist ;-). Maybe it was the UU church the wedding was held in. It's amazing how much weddings can affect your thinking.

Anyway, I'm not usually this personal on my site so I'll go back to my normal updates: Hoping to chill with MatCHOO at GeekFest at the end of next month, then going to my RHCE training in Bahhhhhhston, and hopefully getting to see all my voonderbar friends out there: Dave and Jess, Rich and Liz, Joe and Jay and (if they're back in town) Sere and Jay.

2003.01.21 - Well, what a wonderful weekend it was! We got to go to Jay and Erika's wedding, had a very restful yet exciting time. We got to see many friends, including Rich and Liz, MatCHOO, Q-age and his fiance Francesca (apologies if I'm spelling it wrong), and Christine and her hubby Chris. We also got to see some of Jay and Sere's friends we met on previous occasions, and met some new folks too! I feel bad because I'm so poor with names. Jay's and Erika's parents and siblings were so nice to us too, we felt like part of the family.

The other thing of note that happened this weekend is that version 1.1.99pre1 of nano was released. Hopefully we can get a 1.2 release by Valentine's day. One can hope. Someday we'll have a weekend home, but what are the chances :-)

2003.01.10 - Well, I was told that I simply had to post this, though I don't know exactly why:

This is a pic of my Sharp Zaurus I got for Christmas. It was my gift to me, from me, for being such a good boy this year you see what I'm sayin! Anyway, this things rocks, you simply cannot be a geek without this thing. Yes, someone likes Aqua Teen Hunger Force just a weeeeeeeeeeee bit too much :-)

2002.12.26 - A very Merry Christmas to all. Since I'm both horrible at calling people on the holidays (or any day for that matter), here are some pics of our holiday, including a nice shot of the 2 feet of snow dumped on Albany, our stockings hung by the TV with care, our beloved kitties, and Amy and myself.

2002.12.16 - Happy Holidays! We've moved (and thus I updated my resume) and are *almost* unifinished unpacking after being here for only a month ;-). The biggest thing happening is that delbie goes back to VW on Tuesday, I will miss him dearly but we really can't afford two cars anyway. Work is good (it's nice to be able to say that regularly :-) and everything else is about the same. More as it happens.

2002.10.20 - Okay, I guess I can update again ;-) Went out for the annual Dave Halloween party on next to no notice, and hence ended up not telling anyone in Bahston we were coming except for my wonderful son and daughter in law who let us stay at their l33t apartment. Much fun was had by all! Dave, I still have much to talk to you about, so don't let me forget. Work wavers between good and great, which is much better than my last job which wavered between sucks and sucks more.

Let's see, what else...we're moving at the end of November to a new place in Latham, much closer to work, which should be great. Also Amy and I are fighting some kind of cold, but we're not completely sick yet. Okay I'll stop now and think about updating the music section on my about:asty page!

2002.09.04 - Yup, another update. Don't get used to it. I just wanted to mention that I'm sick as a dog. I even missed work, which is a pretty good indication of how bad it is. Wah. I hope I don't have to miss tomorrow too, I'm going out of my mind at home. Time for some cough medicine and a good 12 hours of sleep :)

2002.08.28 - Okay, it's been a LOOOOOOOOOONG time since I posted, I'll have to make this good. Work is going well, but I'm still busier than I like. The fun part is our workload is supposed to more than double in January, I should be having my first heart attack just before age 27.

Since I last posted, my good friends Joe and Jay got married, Amy and I had a wonderful time with Rich and Liz. I cried too, I blame that on being Italian :) I miss all my friends, it seems like the days are going by faster and faster now. My sister is getting married this weekend, which should be fun. Hopefully I'll get to see Dave and Rafi at the wedding.

So let's make this fun. I have been meaning to do this, but I'm really going to do it this time. Here's "Whose Web Sites Chris Reads, Like Anyone Cares":

• Rich, the Batmeister. Rich's page is usually about as up-to-date as mine is, but sometimes a lot more often. i still think he needs to invert the main graphic with the logo, the black-text-in-a-white-box-on-a-page-with-a-black-background thing just does nothing for me ;) He said on his page he doesn't read other people's pages anymore, I wonder how long it will take him to see this *evil grin*
• Matchoo, the IGeekus. I absolutely love that freakin ASCII bottle, it rocks. I admit I don't read Matt's page nearly as much as I should. <Computerized Voice> Mouse Mania!!!</Computerized Voice> ;-)
• Leafy's page probably renders the best on my computer (As I only use Mozilla), I think that's because she really doesn't try anything incredibly fancy which is good. I'm there for the content, not spinning logos or mouseovers. :)
• I kind of gave up on Sere's page awhile back, because it (1) never rendered well at all, and (2) changed so often I gave up trying to navigate it. It actually looks pretty nice now, I will start reading it more regularly.

If I missed your page, well I'm a bad person. Email it to me and I'll read it :)

2002.07.20 - A quiet weekend at home, at long last. I still have to update my resume for Dave (I'm working on it right now dude), who I don't call or email nearly enough. Actually there isn't one person (except for my Mom who calls me almost every night) that I keep up with as much as I would like to or should. Basically I'm a bad person. We still haven't been able to find a decent apartment closer to CRD than where we are now, so I guess it's stay another month in this apartment *shrug*.

Congratulations to the Debian project for releasing version 3.0 of their wonderful GNU/Linux distribution. I have been using Debian for 4 years, they really rock. Speaking of wonderful free software projects, I will probably even do some work on nano this weekend too, GASP! ;-) 2002.07.05 - Happy 4th, a leetle late. Going back as far as I can remember (since it's so long since I did an update), I had a lot of fun when I visted Matt a few weeks back; it was actually a real blast. We played lots 'o video games, and I am now a huge Chu Chu Rocket fan, even though it's now considered ancient in video game time. We had dinner with Rich and Liz when they were stopping through town, which was very fun, and also quite yummy.

Work-wise, I haven't stopped moving yet. I love CRD (even though it's a LOT of work), and don't mind that my old boss from Benet still mails me questions even though I don't work there anymore. I did have to tell a friend that I couldn't help with a commercial endeavor that looked like it was going to be a lot of fun and a great opportunity for me because I just don't have the energy, which really brought me down and made me feel very bad about myself. I also haven't looked at nano in so long I sometimes forget how proud I am of it. I may have an hour to spare on it this weekend though, maybe.... But hey, I can't hog all the jobs, there are plenty of hard working, good people who are jobless right now, I shouldn't be doing all the Unix and C work anyway!

Since I am carrying the pager this week for GE, I can't do any 'celebrating' for the 4th, but I guess I was never a huge drinker anyway. Still, it's annoying to not even have the option to do something, in this great free country in which we live. Anyway, it's been an up and down time for me... I must mention Leafy's page which I have been reading, since we saw her and had a nice lunch with her at Crossgates. I don't know Court, I really miss that long hair ;-) Heh. Anyway, enough for now, there are tiny bugs crawling across my keyboard, eww.

2002.06.09 - Work, work, work. This job is a LOT of work. I guess that's a good thing. Unfortunately it seems like it's spilling over into my (lack of) personal life. The commute isn't bad, I actually enjoy driving and listening to the radio on the way to and from work, but I'm so tired when I get out I don't even want to exercise. Which works well since my exercise bike is broken atm. Still shopping around for a new one, at least we finally replaced the broken air conditioner. One down, one to go.

Anyway, nothing new to report, other than it seems like I have no time to even read my friends' blogs (Matt even redid his, and it looks awesome. And Rich is dying his hair??!!) And apparently I have a 109 IQ apparently, woo. Tip: don't take a timed IQ test while logged into an IM client. Bad for the self-image.

2002.05.23 - Yes, only a week between updates!! I'm settling in at the new job at GE (I can now expected to be hated by rabid environmentalists instead of rabid pacifists, which is fine since I'm a pacifist ;-), and things seem to be a little more hopeful in my life. Because of the work transition I've been completely unable to focus on nano, so hopefully I'll be able to get back into things before all the other developers get fed up with me.

Also, the site is now hosted by JohnCompanies, basically the deal is for $65 (and there's a special discount for Free Software developers like yours truly) you get your own server with 2GB of space and 40Gb of transfer, as many domains as you want, whatever services you want, it's YOUR server! How can you beat that? I do still highly recommend PHPWebhosting even though I no longer use them, I had 0 problems with their service in a little over a year. If you're looking for more inexpensive hosting and don't have to manage a bunch of domains, I'd say they're the best you can find.

2002.05.17 - Just under the one month update interval. Well, I can finally publish here that i got a new job. I'm going to be working as a contractor at the GE Research & Development Center in Schenectady. I'm not sure if it's the right move for me yet, and I did enjoy working at Benet as much as I whined about it. I'm taking quite a benefits hit though, so I'm not sure what my long term future is. Boston/New Hampshire still looks so tantalizing, especially if a good majority of my friends are going to be living out there for the immediate future...

2002.04.18 - Update, what does that mean? Anyway, it's been more of the same around here, still no job leads, but at least my job itself is keeping me busy and not thinking about how miserable I am. We're going to see Rich and Liz this weekend and hopefully do some sight-seeing and chilling this weekend. Aside from that, I've been procrastinating on nano a lot, I wrote some prepend file code that needs some work though. Must try to get all the patches I'm behind on onto my laptop for this weekend.

2002.03.31 - Happy Easter! Well, I finally did it, I released a new version of CMatrix. Hopefully this won't become a regular thing, but I guess when people won't take your Free Software project off your hands, you have to pay it some mind once in awhile :) Now, back to job hunting :/

2002.03.24 - Oops, forgot to update again :) Well, I got to go to my training in Boston which was fun, I also donated blood yesterday which makes me feel good, and we are staying with Amy's family this weekend which has been enjoyable thus far. On the down side, I'm changing contracting companies for the 2nd time in as many years, making this my third company since March of 2000. I really need a new job :/. I made some calls and put in some applications, but so far no luck. Bad time to be looking I guess.

2002.03.09 - Well, the belated birthday messages seem to have stopped trickling in :) Most of my friends seem to have remembered, which makes me feel good. In the good news department, I will get to go to my training in Boston. It's actually been paid for by my good-for-nothing contracting company; the one my job is prematurely terminating its one year contract with because they've been so delinquent. The bad news is we were sick this week and had to stay home from work and use up sick time, argh. I hate not working, I feel like a loafer :)

2002.03.05 - Oh, I forgot! Guess what program has finally made it to sunfreeware.com, the place for all thing Sun. No, not nano, it's CMatrix! Yes, the useless program that I haven't worked on in well over a year! Can't run a Solaris box without those adorable Matrix-style lines on your screen I guess. Anyway, Amy and I have strep so we're stuck at home, and the training that I'm supposed to be going to next week, the first training I've ever asked to go to since my professional career began, my employer may not pay for. Needless to say I'm thrilled. When life sucks are you supposed to make suckade?

2002.03.04 - Hmm, keep forgetting to update this. Well, I updated my resume, we got to see Weezer which totally rocked (Say it aint soooooooooooooooo!) a week or two ago, and oh yeah, my birthday was Friday. I can't wait until Rich realizes he only called me twice Friday and still didn't remember, or maybe he did and was trying to get me to mention it :) Some people didn't call me at all *sniffle* *grin*. Amy got me an awesome Logitech wireless optical mouse. woo!

2002.02.12 - Okay, it's been a month, I really should update. The past few weeks have been hectic as gritch's motherboard died, and apparently took the power supply with it (or vice versa :-). Rich was the one who figured this all out, I had suspected the P/S but never strongly enough to actually buy a replacement. I don't just have 300 Watt power supplies laying around, even being the geek I am.

Other than that it's been fairly quiet. I think I'm going to be doing some traveling in the near future, I haven't been keeping in touch with the people that I really care about enough lately. Too much computer and not enough face time is bad even for me :-)

2002.01.12 - Just a small update, I updated the invis patch on the PGPlus Patch Page to work with version 1.0.11. There were a few rejected diffs, but I'm not sure if that's because of code changes or differences with the new version of indent I used.

2002.01.10 - Well I guess I better fix my date, since Rich noticed that the date of my last entry was off by a month. In personal news, I gave life again Tuesday, which I am immensely proud of and that annoys some people, but oh well :) Another fun adventure giving this time, they made me lay back down again after I had sat up, because apparently my lips were too blue for their liking. I had been laying down for like 10 minutes before I even tried sitting up, argh! Also, it snowed like crazy shortly after my last post, and since I'm reporting it now it wont snow again for months (yeah right :-)

Anyway, nano is still coming along, and will probably have more releases again soon, I need to get cracking on the syntax code though...

2002.01.04 - Where'd that winter go?! After my previous message, we've probably gotten less than 6" of snow, and it's January already, how annoying! Well, aparting from having a very cool Christmas and becoming addicted to GTA3, things have been quiet. Getting ready to release nano version 1.1.5 which should fix a lot of things and make the mostly broken color syntax highlighting slightly less broken :) NYE2K2 was fun too, we went over to Joe Jay & Rich's && hung out with them & Liz, played cards, Joe whooped me at NFL2K1 && we watched de ball drop. Whee!

2001.12.11 - Winter is here (finally!). We got 7" of snow here in Albany over the weekend, it was quite a treat. We also got to meet Rich's gf Liz, as well as have lunch with her and Rich, his sister Joyce and her hubby and baby. Joyce had her digital camera on hand and took some pics which I used for the web site above. The 3rd picture up there is of Me and Amy at Colonie Center Mall. for the curious, my shirt (which I ordered from copyleft) says "01000101", now I will brazenly state that I am the first person to put this on a T-shirt, muhahaha! Be cool like me and put binary numbers on your personalized clothing. Anyway, here's a pic of Rich and Liz, aint they cute?

2001.12.02 - Well, the web sites finally have a favicon.ico file for you IE and Mozilla folks. Being a non-'doze user, I created mine by making a bitmap in The Gimp, copying it to my web site, and then pointing the Java applet at favicon at it, and voila!

In job news, things have been suckier than usual in parts but better in other parts, better because I support some incredibly reasonable and polite users. There are a few people at Benet I can't stand, but it's SO much better overall than the impatient idiot percentage at Plattsburgh.

In nano news, I've finally started banging out syntax highlighting, check out this pic for a sample. I guess, all things considered life could be a lot worse, that's the most positive way I can phrase how I've been feeling recently =-)

2001.11.15 - Retro is cool! Yes, I stole the idea from Sere, but I happened to find my archived homepages from 1998, about a month after I started working at my first real job, at Plattsburgh State. Check it out! I still want to find the one I had at naples.net, the one EVERYONE based their damn homepage on back in the day. It's hard being a trendsetter ;) I actually really like the simple design of the pages, perhaps putting the navigation icons all the way at the bottom of the page was a bad idea though :>

Honestly though I'm just kinda nostalgic and pretty much feel that no one actually reads my website, it just get hits these days to download CMatrix. The program hasn't been touched for years, yet people just keep downloading it. Sigh...perhaps I'm one of those people that will be considered really cool after I'm dead...

2001.11.09 - Aha! The Next Big Thing, I have found it I have! It's tabbed browsing. And Mozilla finally has it in the nightly builds! Check out this screen shot. No more annoying multiple browsers open, five web pages in one window! I already have the wife and kid hooked on it, who's next? *grin*. Mozilla 0.9.6 (and of course 1.0) is going to ROCK! I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft steals this awesome feature that mozilla stole from Opera :-).

2001.10.29 - Well, it's been awhlie since I updated. I updated the computer section of the GNU/Linux page. Other than that there's not a whole lot going on, except for we got to see my son who was quite under the weather this weekend. I hope you're well enough to read this page soon Joe =). We also went to my friend Dave's Halloween bash, and we invited him to ours which is coming up =) In other news, I found a huge bug in nano and released the newest development version, 1.1.3, last week. The next stable release containing this bugfix, version 1.0.6, should be released tonight.

2001.09.07 - Okay, a minor update, I added some bits to the music section on the about me page regarding the new albums we've bought recently and TCM's website. In other news, not a whole heck of a lot is going on, except that I'm totally procrastinating with nano, and, as Rich says, I'm not answering my email. Must be some kind of autumn laziness, I just dont wanna do anything. Probably because of my work/living situations which are in flux but not actually changing very fast...

2001.08.16 - Man, what a few weeks it's been. After not having flown in my entire life, I've flown twice in as many weeks. First it was a job-related trip to a SAN vendor, then Amy's brother Del got married in Alabama. Boy I understand why people don't like propeller planes now!

In browser news, Netscape 6.1 is out! Netscape's fork of Mozilla 0.9.2 but with a few more default features (the web AIM is cute) is actually pretty nice. Netscape 6 was a piece of junk, I admit. But this one isn't nearly as bad. Presumably Netscape 7 will be Mozilla 1.0 + Netscape's additions, so at least the future may not be TOTALLY ie based. Not that IE is a bad browser, but how EXACTLY am I supposed to use it on my GNU/Linux box?

2001.07.28 - Woo! After a few hours of playing with ISOs, hard drive cables, and cryptic (well not to me) Linux commands, I am now the proud owner of an 80 hour TiVo! Many thanks to the wonderful people who wrote the Hacking the TiVo FAQ and a wonderful drive from Western Digital.

And a huge thank you to TiVo, one of the few companies who not only understands what the word 'hack' means, but does not mind if its product is enhanced by the user (which is the user's legal right). This is the exact opposite of most companies these days who feel the need to squash any creativity applied to their products that's not from within. I HIGHLY recommend this wonderful box (and company) to anyone.

2001.07.22 - So I finally cut down the main page size a little. I decided to make my main page a little more blog-like, so I'm archiving the older news now and getting it off the main page faster.

In personal news, Amy and I had a blast this weekend in Boston hanging out with Sere & Jay, Rich, and Q-age. We saw Vertical Horizon and BNL and they basically rocked. After a lot of tailgatin', dancin' and singin' it's back to Albany and the grindstone on Monday. I need to either get more friends locally or just deal with the traffic and move to Boston.
"Get yo' hand out my cookie jar!! Raaaarrrrr!!"

2001.07.02 - I've written my first editorial piece since I started writing Free Software. It's called When Non-Free is "Free Enough", and you can read it here. I hope you enjoy it, this topic is something that's been eating at me for quite some time.

2001.06.29 - Mozilla 0.9.2 is out. Loads faster, renders even better than before, and apparently now you Windows users can have it load most of its code when your OS starts up (which Internet Explorer basicallly does too regardless of what Microsoft tells you, even if it's just the 'components' that load, same difference). I am so excited, 1.0 getting closer and closer!

2001.06.10 - Happy Birthday Rich ! Now about your homepage... In other news, Mozilla 0.9.1 is now my official full time browser at home, I only have to switch back to Netscape to visit Crapital One (grr). Also, it's been almost a month since I formatted my partitions with XFS and I couldn't be happied with it: several reboots, no fsck delays! Yahoo!

2001.05.25 - Uh oh, it was Amy 's birthday yesterday. Did you remember to call or send her a card? Of course, since everyone except blood relatives forgot my birthday this year I guess it shouldn't have been as surprising. Well, if you want to find out what she got, perhaps you should call her and wish her a happy belated birthday ;-) (yes Rich, you did mention it the day before yesterday, you're off the hook).

2001.05.19 - Cool! I downloaded the latest Mozilla nightly today, and it has an awesome skin, check out this screenshot to see what it looks like. Man, I can't wait for 1.0, but I'm going to use the prereleases as they're MUCH faster than netscape.

2001.05.09 - At long last my Linux page is back, sort of. Being the GNU convert I am, it is now called my GNU/Linux page, but the gist is the same. Info on my systems, the kernel howto (I had no idea how many people linked to that page!) and the like. No more reviews though, as I've pretty much stabilized on Debian GNU/Linux for my systems, and I don't have copious amounts of time to test distros anymore, unfortunately.

2001.04.19 - Well, I fixed the silly javascript mouseovers, the page should load much faster now ;-). Also, someone pointed out to me something I noticed and then forgot, a certain well known talker site has completely ripped off one of my own pages and passed it off as their own , without even a mentioned to my page. They even link to images off my page! The nerve. Well I guess when it comes to the talker world, people will even rip off each other's web pages, not just code. No wonder I'm a GNU believer now.

2001.04.12 - Another day, another provider. asty.org is now hosted by PHPWebHosting . I really wish my cable modem's TOS didn't forbid me from hosting the pages on my own box, it would be so much nicer to pay for BOTH my home connectivity and my web pages also, maybe DSL will come into my area soon...
 

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