Henry S.
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Henry S." journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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10:09 pm
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More Stuff and Things
Haven't posted in a loong while, been very busy with work.
Lets see:
1. - I quit WoW in February... the aspects I enjoyed of the game were different than what everyone else seems to like about it (id est: Raiding was more painful than any work I've ever had to do, including hoisting satellite dishes to a roof 5 stories up in freezing rain using the "3 men and a rope method").
2. - I made a YouTube channel for my train videos. Not quite as popular as my housemate's Portrait channel.
III - I picked up a slight interest in learning Lingua Latina [wikipedia.org]. Ever try googling for resources for learning Latin? Or songs sung in Latin [wikipedia.org]? Search for "Latin Music" and feel my frustration :). It's awesome though that there are forums where people post only Latin [yle.fi] (except for the occasional spambot). I also never knew that the & was originally shorthand for et. Why we didn't just use et as our conjunction word instead of 'and' is beyond me...
四つ目 - Still on track with Learning Japanese, albeit a bit more slowly due to an unexpected increase in workload. It is interesting to try and learn two completely unrelated languages at once. One bit of advice I found was to try using resources in one foreign language to learn the other. Since there are no Japanese books for Latin speakers, I'll have to make do with the reverse :).
5. - Work gave me a nice trip to Texas and we ate at The Salt Lick. Too awesome to describe in a journal post.
Btw, I refuse to call this a blog, and LJ predates the term.
I might post once or twice more, then return to obscurity for another few months.
Valete, omnes!
Tags: japanese, latin, status, youtube
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06:18 am
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Dusting off the old LJ
So, I just had a moment of remembering this site exists.
Over the past few months though I came up with a neat way to work if you have a job with a lot of downtime. It goes something like:
-Consolidate all of your free time.
-When things come up that detract from your free time, analyze everything you do to determine how much of that can be automated (streamlined if it isn't technologically related).
-Use next bout of free time to automate as much of the interrupting event as you can.
By doing this, it creates an upward spiral, such that you have more and more free time with the same workload.
The next step is finding things to do, and then automating the additional work that you have generated. The pinnacle of course is automating the finding of things to do. Like, having the Half-Life voice announce when networking equipment is failing / flaky / potentially in a hazardous temperature situation, and where it is. Why vocally announce? So you can be asleep with your computer logged off and yet still be 100% on top of things. Especially useful for overnights, nipping a problem that developed at 1AM by 1:05AM is pretty awesome for the students who would have been affected (even if they never realize how bad things could have been).
Adjust the amount of additional work with how much you think you are worth. If you feel lazy, go for more. If you feel underpaid/unappreciated, simply maintain the status quo. Regardless, never fully automate anything; don't want to accidentally replace yourself with a well written perl script...
Oh, an update to the issue I mentioned July 15th. I have since updated my Debian to Lenny, which broke VLC. It then became easier to try and fix mplayer than bother with VLC. Wouldn't ya know, "Open in Terminal" and "Keep Terminal Window Open" both needed to be checked. Of course when done with the video I need to close the terminal window, but eh, that's not too annoying. Better than having to open a terminal and type the command with filename each time...
Though, a combination of a bug in Wine and the new patch of WoW make it unplayable in Linux. There's a fix out but I am too lazy to apply it, ah well... productivity++, time wasted--.
-HS
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03:28 am
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Why does heroes suck?
I watched Heroes today, and after thinking about it, I realized something... it sucks. I can't really explain why. If I were to break it down, I would say 5 minutes I would classify as "good", 5 minutes as un-rateable as it is set-up, 15 minutes as "watchable", and 20 minutes as "superfluous/trivial". Usually, for this show around 20 minutes is "good" and nothing ever ends up in the "trivial" category.
If I were to rank my TV shows this season, thus far it would be:
Prison Break - amazing today, nothing trivial
Terminator - trippy, good outweighs trivial, bonus points for less than 10 seconds of religious references [ordinarily my big peeve of this show, they usually can't seem to honor the whole "Judgment Day" thing without being awkward]
Smallville [Thursday] - No Lex, No Lana, No Kara, only slightly varied from the freak of the week pattern and STILL more enjoyable as a whole than Heroes...
Heroes - Level five was hyped up way more than it should have been. Those guys reminded me of the bunch the Joker knocks off during the first 5 minutes of The Dark Knight. Also, loses points for having more religious reference than Terminator.
I don't mind religion, but there's certain shows it just shouldn't be in. It's akin to watching a comedy that suddenly turns depressing. Or, a romance, and suddenly unexplained Sci-Fi battles start appearing, in a random episode 3 seasons in.
Though compared to the most recent Naruto / Bleach filler all of this is gold...
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03:36 pm
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NYC Subway Riders appear to have lost their balls...
This morning on my way back to Albany from Queens I had the wonderful opportunity to ride in an unairconditioned car. As it was the second car of the train, the only other options were the first and third car, both of which had so little free space it was hard to imagine why those people would assume the total comfort level there was actually any better.
At any rate, I had an idea and was somewhat surprised at how no one else had considered it... I slid open the door to the first car and held it open with my foot. Not sure how effective this was for the rest of the car, but for myself the breeze was quite refreshing. I *did* get a few "nice one" approving looks and comments from the old timers near my location, but the younger folk seemed... apprehensive? Either they were concerned of their hearing (with the door open the decibel level in the immediate area is noticeably higher) or themselves/possessions falling out somehow. Yet, 6 years ago there were still cars running with no a/c at all, and those cars had door props to hold the doors open to improve airflow.
I also realized that the "new" (since I lived there) rule that imposes a $50 fine for passing between cars is not actually violated by only holding the door open. Though once the first car emptied out a bit I momentarily forgot and crossed anyway.
Tags: nyc, subway
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02:37 am
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Surprise Work
So I have to go install some wireless in Rhode Island tomorrow. Whee. Not sure if I've ranted about it before but my only experience with Rhode Island so far has been that it seems to be the state that never ends when you're trying to go between Massachusetts and NYC. When going to MA, after the fairly large Connecticut, Rhode Island seems like it should be a short final leg of the journey. Yet, every time the trains stops or you pass a road sign you think "You mean we're still not done with Rhode Island!?" Conversely, when you're going to NYC, you've just started the trip and are thinking "Man almost to Connecticut, we'll be halfway there by then... wait, we're still not through Rhode Island!?"
Hopefully I can get around decently without a car... since I've still never gotten a license or operated a vehicle larger than a golf cart.
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02:26 am
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Boredom feeds Linux
I hadn't paid much attention to the Linux partition on my home desktop (or the work one for that matter) so I updated it, and finally fixed some of the issues that were plaguing my video playback. In doing so I discovered a strange problem: I have a copy of gmplayer installed and I have no idea where it came from. Since it is not in any of the repositories I currently use (or even the ones I recently commented out) I can't seem to apt-get remove it. I would just ignore it, except it butts in when I try to run mplayer from the gui (by double-clicking a file and typing "mplayer" into open with - I even tried the full path to mplayer). So now after browsing to a directory with videos, I've taken to hitting the hotkey for "open terminal" and typing in "mplayer filename". I'm sure there is a way to fix this, but I'm not really all that motivated to try and find a solution. Someday I may copy-paste this entry into a tech forum somewhere, but for now I just felt like venting it to no one in particular.
Oh, and I wore the shirt bearing the NY Central logo in this user icon today (err-yesterday).
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02:28 pm
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Writer's Block: LJ Comments
I would say I'm not too much on either side. I try to make comments when I can, but I often find I don't have anything to add other than "yup!" Combine this with months of not visiting and yeah, I think I'm more of a receiver than anything else.
Tags: comments, livejournal, writer's block
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02:03 pm
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All Nighter
Damn it, being in a house full of geeks (with geek friends visiting) with no morning obligations has its drawbacks. My housemates:
1 full time work from home employee with insomnia (as in, the actual medical condition)
1 student with a 2x a week 6PM-9PM class
1 grad student who works nights
1 student with a standard 9-5 internship (jokingly called the party pooper)
me - option to work from home most of the time, but there happened to be a reason for me to be in at 11AM today
We had a few friends over last night, too:
1 state employee with a 7PM-3AM schedule
1 unemployed
This resulted in all of us staying up until 7AM playing Rock Band, Smash Bros, and Starcraft while eating homemade tacos.
Fixed the problem that needed immedate attention, and now I'm off to sleep again. I have a lot of work to catch up on over the weekend, but it'll be far more efficient than if I struggle to do something now just to look like I worked towards some long-term goals today.
Current Mood:  sleepy
Tags: morework
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03:23 am
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Learning 日本語
Well, I've gone and done what the stereotypical anime fan tends to do... attempt to learn Japanese. It started with a boring office hours session where I thought... "should I play video games or attempt to learn something". Unlike the stereotypical anime fan, though, I'm not going to enroll into classes or suddenly start quoting phrases from shows horribly out of context (see this humorous essay for a good laugh).
Of all the Asian languages it seems easiest, plus this will have some interesting benefits to my employment:
1. Working on computers with Japanese (and possibly Chinese) Windows on it will be much less annoying. There are generally 200-300 international students from Asian countries here. While I got used to XP and can probably do 90% of my troubleshooting relying solely on icons and button positioning, Vista is a nightmare. Most students still had XP last year, but this year's new batch more than likely has newer computers. Mac is... well thankfully the terminal is in a predictable location and useful (unlike command prompt in Vista, which requires clicking on things to switch to admin mode).
2. Learning another communication language is similar to learning new computer languages, so skills such as pattern recognition can be further developed and applied to both tasks. How much is to be determined...
3. Labeling cables with Chinese vertical numbers takes the guesswork out of "is it 669 or 996?" or "Why is this cable numbered 000??" It also keeps people who shouldn't be screwing around in the closets from identifying cables, thus making it take longer to tamper with (ie: people trying to activate their own jacks).
Recreational benefits:
1. Noticing that the cool-looking character on someone's neck is actually a katakana character, which is kinda like having the letter D tattooed on you, in that by itself it means absolutely nothing. Especially while they're trying to say it means something profound (like "dream", 夢) or something.
2. Reading menus in Japanese restaurants, and knowing exactly how the word is supposed to be pronounced when ordering. Also being able to determine if the staff are actually Japanese.
3. Being able to look at things other than the screen while watching anime
4. Other anime/manga enjoyment benefits (knowing what they're really saying versus someone's interpretation, pool of media other than what fansubbers deem interesting, no waiting for subs...).
I'll see what becomes of this, I tend to go through phases and eventually I'll get bored of it. I'm hoping I get at least tourist level knowledge before that happens...
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07:01 pm
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Hot
$90 Air Conditioners rock. None of that fancy remote control or timer or digital thermostat crap; just a plain mechanical on-off switch. Also nice, is getting approval to work from home as my office has no AC.
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10:41 pm
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Extremely long time since my last post
Recent events have reminded me that I have this thing, so I figured I'd give a brief update on my life:
Since my last post a few things have changed:
Employment: I have left my HelpDesk Analyst position with UAlbany and joined Apogee Telecom, a small but extremely well run Austin-based internet service provider. How did I join a company from Texas? Easy, they took over the internet at UAlbany. So effectively, I have a job similar to my old one, though with higher responsibility. Technically while I did perform many ResNet administrative tasks for UAlbany, it was other people's job to do them [and in fact UUP has rules against going outside your job description] so as such any screwups would not have been my fault. No screwups anyway, as I'm just that awesome.
Residence: I have also moved away from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) darkhalcyon727 and have not spoken with her since, oddly enough not due to bad experiences or anything but more because... what would I say? Over time we just had less and less in common... it'd be nice to hang out with her again but I as have no pretext, I can't open the conversation. I've reverted to being shy with her again.
In any case I now share a house with my former co-workers from ITS.
We've all graduated (or close enough) but found living in Albany preferable to going home. Kindred I suppose.
Hobbies: I've taken to learning things. Different things for different purposes. I still enjoy transportation but rarely care to photograph or study it; I now prefer to devote extra thought cycles to things that may actually have a use in real life (even if they stem from recreational activities). Not that transportation didn't, but as I can already find my way around a strange city within minutes of picking up a transport map, the skills have already been learned.
Now that the noble changes have been mentioned, the dark side of all this is... I have joined the masses who play World of Warcraft. Its actually not all that addicting either, especially if you don't do anything that involves others expecting your presence (like join a guild). After the initial "this is cool" 30 hours a week phase, I'm down to about 5/week.
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06:37 pm
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Stupidtester.com
Go take it. And post it somewhere. And comment where you posted it.
Current Location: shed
Current Mood:  accomplished
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12:31 pm
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Free Wendy's!
Right now I'm standing on line for free Wendy's at UAlbany's campus center. Yesterday and today are staff training days for our new Wendy's, thus the occasion.
So far, It's just as good as the real thing!
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01:49 pm
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New Year's Resolution
Hello LJ, long time no see. I hope to post more now, as it has become easier to do so. Anyway, here are my new resolutions:
- I have decided that holiday (Xmas, Mother's Day. Father's Day, Arbor Day, etc) greeting cards are a waste of time, thus I will not bother with them. I will still buy cards for people (Birthday, graduation, funeral, etc) but not generic events.
- I will be more patient with some people
- I will be less patient with others
- More church
- Secure employment
Anyway, happy New Year to all, and hope to post again soon.
-Regards,
Henry S.
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10:48 pm
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Pay attention and drive carefully
While getting a ride home today, I had to watch this scene:
eastbound right lane (ours): stops in time
eastbound left lane: stops just in time
westbound left lane: hits it and keeps going
car behind the one above: also hits it and keeps going
So, the car with the most warning as to the fact that this dog was running
across, ended up hitting it. And didn't even stop to see if it was ok, so
the car behind ended up hitting it as well. There is no way the first car
was paying attention or driving the speed limit, since our lanes (with
less warning) were able to stop in time (and even put on flashers). It
could just as easily have been a child rather than this puppy (looked
about 9 months).
No, it didn't survive... the way it looked after getting hit by 2 cars, I
wouldn't have wanted it to. Fairly affluent area (for Albany - cars on
sidestreet it ran out from included a Benz) so it probably wasn't a
stray. Since it was dead by the time animal control showed up, it just
gets discarded as trash, with no effort made to track down owner.
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10:34 am
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Semi-Friends Only
Some of my formerly public posts are now friends-only, and future ones of
the same tract will be as well.
If you'd like to be added, add a comment here or send an email to my lj
username at livejournal.com.
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09:47 pm
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LIME GREEN
Ah well, it genuinely could have been worse...
Glad it's not:
Brown (nice color, but horrible for the bathroom)
Tan (euuuu)
Yellow (yellow = limegreen²)
Fuschia
Would have preferred:
Maroon
Dark Purple
Blue (any shade)
Forest Green
Would have been neutral about:
Pink
Orange
Gray
Black
P.S. - This is a bathmat for a room with a (white primary blue secondary) floor.
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07:36 pm
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Birthdays!
Two birthdays today, happy birthday slai, and also happy birthday Charles in Queens!!
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12:20 pm
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Internet-less IT Helpdesk
This morning, for about 2 hours we had no Internet while they upgraded the switches for our office. The humorous point occurred when they couldn't get the Colonial Quad vlan port to work... after about a half hour of trial and error, one guy from the back says "hey, I still don't have internet. It's weird though, I can get on campus websites, and have a 10.226 IP." Well, looks like we found where the port went! Moved a few cables, and all was right in the world.
For those eagerly awaiting part III, I will be delaying it for a bit longer.
Oh btw, those of you who remember the UAlbany ResNet ethics quiz (the one with 10 random questions, that if you get even one wrong you have to answer 10 new random questions, until you finally are granted Internet access)... I have been tasked with improving the questions and answers. There's a pool of about 80, and the interface to edit is very... lacking (i.e. have to delete and recreate an answer in order to edit it). Any question suggestions :) ?
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05:58 pm
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Long Time No See - Part 1
Well, this is the first time I've logged into LJ in ages... hi all. Here's a quick recap:
In late January, got into major fight w/Jenn (darkhalcyon727) which resulted in several months of awkward silence.
In April, she offers me celery, and all is right in the world... for almost a month.
In May, Karen just stops going to work, and eventually leaves. She fully moved out on June 3rd (we should have charged her June rent).
We now live w/Cait (ash_rose), fun stuff. I re-signed my lease, so Jen and I have our fates intertwined for another year. I'll have to tell Xiaonan the bad news that I will not be a roommate. That's about it for house wise. Part 2 will be coming shortly, please be patient :).
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