I recently got to purchase a Mac Mini for work because it’s about 1000% easier to do rails work in OSX than it is in Windows. I’m sure someone has a guide to prove me wrong, but I tried for a few days when I first started working at my new job to get around having to work on anything but windows.

Sadly I couldn’t, so I turned to some of the many OSX on PC part ISO’s that are floating around on the internet. I thought I had them working well as most everything seemed to work except for some sleep issues. Another issue was that the HD I installed OSX on was only a meager 20gb and after installing the OS and some programs I was fast running out of room.

I decided to reinstall OSX on a bigger drive and that’s where things went sour. So much so that after almost a week of re-installing OSX over and over again I went and bought a Mac Mini at the local Apple store.

All was well and good when I got it home and hooked it up to my 2nd monitor. A coworker had already pointed out that using a Mini with Synergy and a PC was something I should look into.

I did and was surprised that the PC installer was a lot better functioning than the OSX one. I would’ve thought the program was really geared towards OSX/Unix people and not Windows.

Nonetheless I seemed to get things setup ok and I was happy, except for the fact I couldn’t get it to start when I logged into OSX.

I followed the guide here and yet nothing worked. I could see things would error out at boot-up but still it wouldn’t connect to my server on the PC.

I noticed that for some reason I could connect to my machine by using

$ synergyc -f 192.168.1.1

Which would keep the program running in the foreground and supposedly once you were done testing you could remove the -f flag to run in the background. [You too can use synergyc after putting the file in your /usr/bin/ folder]

Except mine would never stay connected.

In the end I used Lingon to make a custom startup event. All I did was create a custom agent by clicking on the + symbol.

For your name I just used

com.scud.SynergyLogon

For #2 and the “What” section just follow the directions and put in

synergy -f 

And then in section #3 check the “Run it when it is loaded by the system (at startup or login), that way it’ll start when you log in, and thankfully even if you close down your Synergy server on the other machine it’ll reconnect as soon as it’s back up and running.

Hope this reaches people searching on google because I know I had a helluva time trying to get the server setup.

I’m pretty sure everyone else who is a videogamer is writing about how good GTA4 is today. And I have to agree, after having put in a lot of time into it today it’s one of the better games I’ve played in a long long time.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the best game I’ve ever played, because there are parts that are annoying as piss. But overall it’s an amazing game, most amazing to me are some fo the little things that they put in but didn’t have to. The biggest one is the GSM interferance noise you get while driving your car and getting a call on your cell. Just like in real life right before the call comes through you get a weird buzzing noise in your speakers and then the phone rings. The first time I heard it I thought my own phone was ringing and instantly looked around to find it.

It’s small, not really necessary in any way, yet makes the game all that more awesome because of it’s inclusion. There’s a lot more things like that so if you like videogames at all you owe it to yourself to at least rent it and play the game that everyone is going to be talking about for months.

And multiplayer is fucking hilarious. Often times in completely unintended fashion, but hilarious nonetheless.

Well this time it’s updated to the very latest Wordpress version. So if you upgraded your blog to WP 2.5, and really you should’ve already, then head over to the Girls-Suck Theme page and download v5.3 of the theme. It’ll give you the new gravatar style comment images, tag-cloud on the sidebar and some other fixes I found.

As usual if you find something wrong with it, or find that it’s awesome, say so here. Especially if something’s broken because I checked it on my install here, but mine isn’t necessarily the same as yours. So if you see anything odd at all, let me know, otherwise I’ll never be able to fix it.

It’s April Fool’s and looks like the WP devs decided to be smart and release 2.5 a few days before now. Otherwise I’m pretty sure people would’ve thought it was a joke since it was delayed.

The upgrade went pretty smoothly here, and my slightly modified Girls-Suck theme seems to be doing ok, I’ll give the ’stock’ version a go sometime tomorrow evening and fix up any bugs that may have cropped up, but the fact that this one works without any modifications is a good sign.

If you’re a user who currently has Girls-Suck installed and has a problem, comment here and I’ll keep it as a list as I go through and make fixes.

I feel it’s my duty to inform people about the happenings of peacocks. Why?

Because not everyone can come into their workplace and see a whole flock of peacocks outside their office. Can you?

Didn’t think so, but I can. And let me tell you they’re not the brightest of animals. They seem to love walking up the out-ramp of a 2nd story parking garage instead of going towards a lake for a drink. I feel sort of sorry for the one peacock who was smart enough to not go up the ramp. I bet he wondered where his buddies ran way to.

Peacocks also make some of the weirdest sounding calls you can imagine. Try to picture a child’s cry slightly distorted and it’s a bit closer to how they sound.

That all aside they are fucking pretty.

And I’m going to miss them when I stop working here at Sapient. Yeah I did just sneak that into this post about me getting a new job. I put in my two weeks yesterday and in 2 weeks I’ll be starting for a small start-up based out of Vancouver. No that doesn’t mean I’m going to be staying down here forever. It simply means if all goes well then in a few months Jamie and I will head up there and see if what everyone says about Vancouver is true.

Today is the first day during this trip where we’re not traveling.

Ok maybe Sunday was but that didn’t really count as it was our first full day in London and we took the opportunity to sleep to a sane hour and then try to figure out just what we were going to do for the rest of the week.

Monday however was a day full of travel and fun. We were going to initially take a train to Wales to visit a friend of mine and see the Welsh country-side since neither of us had been. We would’ve done that had we not tried to price the train and seen that it comes out to about £106 per person, or the equilivent of $212 per person per leg, so for us to travel on the train it would’ve been nearly $800.

I nearly shit my pants because I wasn’t expecting it at all. A friend had told me about the trains in the first place, and they were cheap then. I didn’t realize they were akin to airline tickets you had to book months in advance otherwise the price skyrocketed. After asking around again someone put us onto buses, or coaches here, and we gave them a try. At £62 for both of us it was a helluva lot cheaper.

So we went to Victoria station trying to find where the buses were, but again our trip of near misses and inability to read signage continued and we back-tracked into the train station because we thought we had missed where the bus station was. Turns out we hadn’t gone far enough this time.

Then after attempting to buy tickets we were told we had missed the 11:30 and had to wait an hour. We figured since we’ve got an hour I’m going to grab something to eat because I was starving and starting to become a dick, and also attempt to get my phone figured out.

Turns out I shouldn’t have even bothered with trying to get my unlock code from my US carrier as it didn’t do shit. Instead I should’ve taken it to the dodgy mobile shop near Victoria station paid them 10 quid to unlock it and all would’ve been done.

So in the end I didn’t waste much money as I used a Vodafone sim-card since I had already bought some top-up minutes earlier.

Having that settled meant I could actually call my friend in Wales and tell her what was going on. She understood our problem but mentioned because of the coach ride there wouldn’t be much daylight to see some sights. We understood but not like there was much we could do.

After doing the 3 hour coach ride to Wales we arrived and were immediately greeted by my friend Llinos, who I also found out I had been saying her name wrong entirely. But that’s because I had only heard it said by English people who also got it all wrong. We put our bags in our shit hotel and proceeded to be led all around the Welsh country. We got to see Penarth a pretty town on the water-front, got taken around Cardiff to see both where the Millennium Stadium was, and some of the other newer buildings there. And then went to where Llinos’ home and home-pub were at. It was great fun to sit there, have some good fish and chips and then drink a few pints while watching shit football.

We were brought back to our hotel and again slept like nobodies business because we were exhausted from traveling again and then cramming more sight-seeing into a day. When we woke up however we went shopping in and around downtown Cardiff which I have to say was great. Jamie found some good rugby shops, I got some Christmas shopping done and I managed to pick up the new Arsenal kit I needed for yesterday’s game. Then right before we had to catch our return bus we went up in the Cardiff Winter Wonderland ferris wheel which was fucking massive. I mean this thing was huge but we decided we were going to go in it, even if it was slightly drizzling and overcast.

We paid our £10 total for us and got to be the only people on it, course it probably helped that it was only 12pm and raining out. But we went probably at least 6 stories up and we were both scared shitless from the height. I’m ok in a building and usually have been ok with heights in rides, but this was bad because I happened to look out at the ground and that’s what kept fucking me up.

Jamie proceeded to take a lot of pictures, which will be uploaded soon and I’ll link to them. And then started to try to stand up and move around in our little cabin. I might have laughed at her when we were getting into it and she kept saying she was scared but I definitely said “Oh no you don’t” as she started to get up because I didn’t want the thing to rock.

Yes, yes I am a giant sissy.

After we got off it was right back to the bus station to catch our bus back to London. Oh wait, except that I had left our return tickets in my Arsenal magazine which I had left on the train when we got to Wales. Great now we were going to have to re-buy the damned things. Except Jamie reminded the ticket agent we had purchased them with a credit-card and he simply looked up our information and then wrote a number down on a piece of paper which we used to get 2 boarding passes.

It worked out in the end, but proved that apparently the only thing I’m good at doing when I come to the UK is drinking in pubs, and watching football matches.

Anyway we were able to catch the coach ok and got back to London around 5:15. Which was good as we were due to meet up with a gentleman who was friends with Jamie’s dad for dinner at 7pm. Now an hour and 45 minutes should be good enough to get to our flat, change and make it over but really it wasn’t. We had to get there with the mob of people during rush-hour, then iron our clothes and change because we were still wearing mostly dirty things from Wales and then travel back from where we had just come.

In the end we met him at 7:30 and all was well. We had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant called BANK, and then went out for a pint or two at the pub ’round the corner. All in all it was a great evening and some fun conversations but i have to say I’m looking forward to today and the fact we don’t have to be anywhere at any time, and we can simply go shopping when we want and for however long we want.

Sometimes I think I only update when something major’s happened. Or I take a trip to London.

In this case it’s because I’m taking a trip to London, only this time I’m a] not going alone and b] not going for only 3 days. Jamie and I are headed to London for an entire week to see an Arsenal game, tour Wales, get wasted in foreign lands, and also see some of her father’s work associates.

Needless to say I’m so fucking excited it’s scary. Mostly because it’ll be my first trip to the new stadium and I think it’ll be good to show Jamie just why I’m so fucking passionate about a team that’s so far away from me.

Because I actually have a non-shit job we rented a flat in London for the week and I may actually be able to update mid-week without having to pay through the nose for some shit Orange Internet cafe.

Now it just needs to be 8pm so we can already be in NY and getting on the plane bound for London.

Though Jamie just reminded me that she’d rather it be 8am so we’re already in London, which as usual is correct.

I should’ve probably updated this weeks ago when it first happened, but then I got busy and forgot to update. My bad.

I quit my job at Alienware about a month and a half ago now and as of Oct 1st I’ve been working at Sapient for their interactive agency branch doing front-end developement.

It was most definitely shocking to go from the corporate environment at Alienware to the one at Sapient. Instead of being so stuffy it really is a lot more open and friendly. I know last year when Halloween rolled around at Alienware maybe 10-15 people dressed up. I think about 3/4ths of the entire people in our office dressed up. And a lot of the costumes were actually pretty fucking good.

So obviously things are good there, I’m excited about my upcoming trip to London. We leave the day after Thanksgiving and are over there for a full week. It’ll be odd because I’m not used to having that much time to spend exploring. Normally it’s get in, see two games, get drunk a lot and fly home. Now it’ll be get in, see a game and get drunk, then go around London, visit Wales, go back to London and keep sight-seeing. But I won’t be lonely at all because Jamie is coming with me and it should be awesome. I’m excited because it’s her first time going out of the country and if there’s one place I love going it’s London.

Sure the shit dollar will kill my spending money, but it’s worth it I think.

And I managed to order a new computer and my last part comes in tomorrow. It’ll be nice being able to finally upgrade from my piece of shit Area-51 that still has AGP graphics.

Yay I’m unemployed! As of yesterday evening I no longer work for Alienware. I handed in my resignation 2 weeks ago and I couldn’t be happier.

If you’re quick you’ll realize the only reason I’m happy about quitting my job is because I got a new better one. You would be correct! I’m going to start working on Monday morning for Sapient in their Miami office as a senior front-end developer. It should be a lot more interesting than the AW job.

It still hasn’t really hit me yet, and I guess it won’t until maybe Monday afternoon when I would normally get up from my desk and go pester my friend Eddy or when, instead of going to our photography studio for lunch to play some Guitar Hero, I’ll instead have to go to a normal restaurant or the cafeteria in order to eat my food.

So yeah major changes have happened and hopefully they’ll be for the better.

Now to go looking at updating this thing to 2.3 since apparently it’s not as painless as before.

edit: Holy hell the 2.3 update fixed my issue I had with permalinks. Somehow at some point during an upgrade the permalink url’s broke for any of my static pages. Which was a fucking pain in the ass considering that’s how most people found the Girls-Suck theme. Now they’re working and all is well!

Recently my Xbox 360 bit the dust. Jamie’s going out of town this weekend so I figure I can at least play some PS3 games, and maybe watch a movie or two.

That almost didn’t happen as I turned on my TV last night only to get a nice picture, but no sound. Tried switching inputs, still no dice. Turn it off, then on repeatedly and still nothing. Looked online and tried their suggestion if you don’t hear sound. Unplug the unit from the AC plug for a few minutes then plug it back in. Still nothing.

Finally I decided maybe it’s time to get some support. I bought an extended warranty for the thing since it was a refurb just in case it broke. Though I wasn’t sure if it was really needed but went looking all around the house for my receipt since the warranty stuff said proof of purchase might be required.

That took a good 15 minutes and was fruitless. Great I’m thinking, not only did my 360 break, but now my TV did, I don’t have a way to get it repaired, and to top it all off Jamie’s going out of town so I really won’t have anything to do.

I decided to bite the bullet and called the Vizio tech support, registered my unit and the woman suggested I do the factory-reset option in the menu. I figure there’s no way it’ll work but whatever I’ll humor her.

Sure enough as soon as I did that everything went back to normal. I’ve no fucking clue why the speakers stopped working, but whatever I can at least continue watching TV and playing videogames while Jamie is out of town.