use Perl

I wiggled around a while yesterday and finally got a start on my personal Mason project. It feels good to get back to this in a structure environment, even if the structure is my own. (Actually, especially since the structure is my own.)

Most of my frustration from trying to read the SICP and work through the examples stems from my strange inability to read long documents these days, but it's certainly not helped by the differences between Scheme and CLISP.

DAMN YOU WILDLY VARYING IMPLEMENTATIONS!

I've been trying to deal with a lot of stuff that's PP* as opposed to PNP**, and I've kind of lost track of the journals of those I have friended here. No big; I'll catch up.

As this is intended to be a journal of technical doings on my part, I should probably mention that I'm trying to fix various niggling things about my Slackware installation so that I don't feel the need to boot into WinME any more at all.

In order of importance, with my strong suspicion in parentheses:

• Sound card (needs a driver)
• Resolution (needs a driver)
• DOK/mp3 player -- can't tell if they always show up as consistent devices or if it's not necessarily consistent (need to find out before I edit fstab)
• Mavica drive (can't mount, need to find out how)

* Physically Proximal.

** Physically Not Proximal.

I'm looking for a tiny keyboard.

This isn't really about my laptop needs (although it would be nice to have a single interface device I could use for both my laptop and home computer, and just cart it off when I take my laptop) so much as my current level of desk space.

Plus, I essentially don't play PC games at all any more, which means I don't need to have all this extra crap floating around on my keyboard -- I pretty much just need the letters, the numbers, the symbols and Ctrl, Alt, Delete, Enter, Shift, and Caps Lock. (I also don't boot into Windows much now, which means I rarely need to reboot, which...well, the benefits of that are rather obvious, I'm sure.)

So I'm hoping to find a tiny (like, less space than a sheet of paper) keyboard, and hoping it can be wireless, and hoping it can lack pointing devices. So far I've found one that's tiny and wireless and includes a pointing device, and one that's tiny and corded with no pointing device, but not quite what I need.

Any recommendations? I only seem to come here and post now when I've got questions about equipment, sadly. :\

If you're so inclined, you can Take the MIT Weblog Survey. I did.

Things are sweet. I'm settling into my new home.

Since I essentially don't play PC games any more, I have no real need to boot into WinME. It's pretty nice.

I've finally gotten around to configuring my desktop the way I like and slapping a coat of wallpaper on that drab gray backdrop. Per my new interest in Samurai Champloo, I have Jin as my WinME wallpaper and Mugen as my Slackware. (Of course, once I install Debian on here as well, I'll need to find a wallpaper of Fuu.)

In biologically oriented news, R's knee was been checked out by an orthopedic surgeon yesterday. His detailed analysis consisted of a "sunset" x-ray of the knee, examination of the charts, a determination that everything's basically okay and that R can begin to bear weight on the knee, and...and inappropriate comment about her weight. Well, scratch that -- it was appropriate. It was a little more glib than he might have intended, however.

It wasn't so offensive as to cause crying so much as anger, which was fine. R doesn't get much flak about this from people that I see or hear, but I know she thinks it.

Other good news -- saw her regular doc this morning, and she's apparently lost 20 pounds since the last visit, which was about two months ago. This is amazingly good news; more downward traffic will help her knee recover and hopefully turn her back from the brink of diabetes.

Speaking of which, I am currently about twenty glucose points higher than my doc wants, so I'm cutting out the bulk of starch in my diet. (Most of the sugar was already gone.) I am still losing weight, which is great and wonderful, etc., but no longer significant to me, because I have zero hunger awareness now. I have to make sure I eat protein, and there's still food I like to eat, but I don't consciously get hungry. And, if I distract myself with something, I can usually forget about food for at least a whole day.

My burn is healing up well. Almost all the blisters are gone, and now it's just a matter of time while the last open spots scab/crust and then the skin tries to knit itself back together properly.

And now, a haiku of frustration:

Google Summer Of Code
I wish I could do it, but
My ideas just suck

Okay. I pulled a McDonald's today.

I purchased coffee at a drive-through and managed to spill it on my lap not even ten minutes later, still blazing hot.

I've been to the E.R., and it looks like things are fine (fortunately, nothing more important than skin was seriously damaged; unfortunately, this means I have no chance of becoming sterile as a result of this). Fine in the sense that I brought home a shopping bag of gauze, three prescriptions, and burn cream, but that's a lot better than, say, having my face burned, or chest, or hands, or feet, or whatever else.

So, uh, I might not be sitting down by tomorrow. I was informed that I'd probably be sore as hell within ten hours, and that would be about tomorrow morning. (Not that I post in here so regularly that anybody would notice if I didn't post for a few days, but I figured I'd get it out of the way.)

I'm a little proud to report that I finally took the plunge this morning and wiped my broken Mandrake installation, replacing it with Slack. Things are good. I'm still working some kinks out -- soundwise, for example -- but that's fine. The times that I remember most fondly about my first computers were the times I spent farting around at the command prompt. It's nostalgia, all over again! :D

Getting a migraine. Need to sleep anyway. Exhausted. Going.

Based on the comments, and the fact that none of the differentiating factors are ones that are truly significant to me, it looks like I just need to spend more time with vim. I'm aware of basic features; I just have to find the tutorials I tried to go through a while back, and (of course) put my own installation of it on my thumbdrive.

And, as a backup, learn some basic emacs, or possibly try pico out. I already know PFE pretty well, but there's no upgrade path with it (which is a liability on the ever-shiftin' Windows platform) and there's no source access, so I can't modify it should I feel the need. I need a backup that's open and findable for whatever OS I'm using next week, or year, or decade...looks like vim is it, and then a little bit of some second editor.

Jeez, this is like choosing a major. :\

(I realize that there's not a poll option here, of course, so we'll just have to make do with a comment in response.)

If it won't trouble anybody too much, could you tell me...

1. what text editor you use
2. what text editor you would use instead if the one you use did not exist
3. what factor separates the two

Need to get used to CVS. I can do CVS. I can do test-driven. I have, with exactly one project, managed to do test-driven development and regular CVS commits. I need to get the hang of this.

Need to build a portfolio site, still. Damn.

Need to work on the module idea I had for a color-matching algorithm. (While I'm probably not the best person to write it, hell, I need one. I can get some people to improve it later.)

<huey-lewis-impression>I need a new editor...</huey-lewis-impression>

Need to post here more regularly. I have four years of journal entries, some of them apparently worth reading; I'm wondering if it would be a shame to let that die off.

Applied for more jobs today. Seriously considering work as a pizza delivery guy at this point. Have sent a volunteering app to the MESDA; it's not like I couldn't use the experience.

Concerta, Concerta...where have you been all my life? Fatigue, gone. Thinking, more flexible and easier to organize. I can keep a three-list item in my head over a period longer than ten minutes without writing it down.

Another nice side effect with the Concerta is that my natural memory for numbers is less unfocused, so I've found that I can actually do a lot better with remembering phone numbers and costs and such than I used to.

Need to DDR, but loaned the mat and game to an aquaintance. It'll have to wait until Monday.

Need to report good news -- I'm signed up for classes this fall. My therapist said that it was definately time to get things moving on the academic front, and so they are. Not only did I sign up in one day (unprecedented, believe me), but I have also managed to get my financial aid application in within a few days time of the class registration. Those around me have assumed that the end of days is coming, since I can now do things, even if they involve paperwork sometimes.