Man, everything is happening so quickly lately. Wasn't it just Halloween? Now it's Christmas and I still have to do all of my Christmas shopping. It feels like everything is speeding by at breakneck speed, and I'm only accomplishing minor things at a snail's pace. Oh well, not too much I can do about it, except become more cynical and bitter at the whole world, and eventually take it out on the children that live on the same block as me when I'm old. I've decided in advance that my thing is going to be owning thousands of different shovels. Kids will be terrified of me and think that I'm burying bodies or something. AND MAYBE I WILL!!!
Anyhow.. I'm in the process now of tweaking the system I've setup. I've bought a TV Tuner card, and I'm in the process of setting my server up to also act as a Freevo station. Freevo is basically an open-source take on the Tivo system that everyone has probably now heard about. It's basically a digital recorder. It works like this - I set up my linux machine so that it is able to grab TV listings. I also have the TV Tuner card in the machine, and that allows my machine to capture the incoming video from the cable, and record that to the hard drive. Using the TV listings, I determine what I want to record, and can then set up my computer to automatically start recording at a given time. That's pretty sweet.
Naturally it's frustrating as hell trying to get all of these programs to communicate with each other, especially since the install and documentation for Freevo sucks ass. The typical answer you get when you complain about this sort of thing to a Linux user is "That's Linux. Get used to it". This is the clear sign of an asshole, and you should just go ahead and throw a bag full of cats onto his head. You'll be doing the world a favour.
The irony of all that is that I'm actually trying to get away from watching a ton of TV. Sometimes it's really nice to veg out and watch a hilarious TV show. And I enjoy watching shows like CSI now and then, but really I'd like to focus a little more on improving squash and poker. Those activites can only be improved so much in my own spare time (squash is much easier to practice with a partner, and poker really requires actually playing games to improve upon, and I don't want to start playing online poker).
There's other things I'd like to be doing more of as well. Reading books is always great, but I've had a dearth of good books at my disposal lately (bonus five points to the first person that can tell me what dearth means without using a dictionary - should be fairly obvious from the context).
If I really can't find anything else to do, I'd like to put a little more focus into improving dancing. Not so much anything extravagant, but just to take time to go back and properly learn the foudnations for the dance styles I'm into. As I discovered when I first started taking squash lessons (and pretty much every subsequent lesson thereafter), having a solid foundation is absolutely crucial in order to improve beyond a certain point, and I'm severely lacking that foundation for dancing. For a view of someone that has put the effort and time required to learn the appropriate foundation, take a look at Michi's website here.
Michi first learned about popping when he came out to a dance session with Graham and I at Beacon Hill park, back when we used to dance there. He's pretty insanely focused, and doesn't seem to mind sitting there practicing the right way to pop his chest over and over.. I guess I can understand - I don't mind hitting a squash ball against a wall for an hour in the morning, and that's really kind of the same thing.
Anyhow, now that Michi has taken classes from the founders of the funkstyles dances, I'm hoping he can give me some basic exercises to practice, and help me learn the dance properly. I've built up a ton of bad habits over the years, but you have to start somewhere.
With regards to squash, I had a minor breakthrough the other day. When I had my first session with Stuart he showed me the correct way to hold the racquet (yay, six years of bad habit and practice to break apart and relearn). Anyhow, the first day I was doing it properly, but I find that with a lot of things, I typically will do something right, then the next time I go to do it, I won't have totally solidified that technique in my head, and I'll subconciously make small changes. The end result was pretty bad, and my swing was different - closer to being correct than I originally was doing, but still bad, and kept causing me wrist pain, and to swing incorrectly. Anyhow, I only just figured out what I was doing wrong (with a bit of chastising from Stuart), and finally it feels like the puzzle has clicked one more piece into place. That means that it's slightly less frustrating to play. Then I'll start doing something else wrong, and spend the next month being frustrated all over again. That's why learning is fun.
Anyhow, I have to finish screwing around with Freebo here, whilst watching nice tepid porn from the 80s on channel 13.
Awesome Update: Bay has just pointed out, that in addition to the hideously ugly female porn-gasgiant wearing a thong, her sex-buddy is as well! Rock on 80s, rock on.
Update: Well, I decided to SCREW FREEVO. Buggiest installation ever. Very little information out there as to how you're meant to get this thing to actually compile on your system, and in addition to that, I couldn't even get the drivers for my card to install properly. It's not that I gave up without a fight either - I spent the better part of about twenty hours this weekend trying to get this thing to work before I finally decreed "Screw thee, I'm just going to use Windows". While it's decidedly less "geek-cool", I plugged the card in and IT WORKED. That's all I care about at this point. I like messing around with the scummier parts of computers, and getting my hands dirty trying to tune everything nicely, but I think there's a threshold at which you have to say "It's not worth it past this point, especially since I can just plug it in and make it work properly on that computer two feet away from me".
So now I can watch live TV, pause, fast forward and rewind while I'm watching, and record shows onto my hard drive. That's all fine and good, because I don't own a VCR anymore (or at least, if I do, it doesn't work very well and is probably hidden in a box somewhere), and I don't want to own one again. In my opinion, the age of the analog format is finally coming to a close, and there's really nothing positive I can say anymore about tape format.
VCR tapes are big, ugly, don't provide random access, and degrade very quickly over time. I love everything about digital media - you can scan through it quickly, you can make backups to take with you anywhere, it's totally portable, you can copy it easily and take it with you, and you can rapidly send it to a friend to check out if you want to.
Unfortunately, these are all reasons that media conglomerates, and recording studios/artists generally don't like about the format. We'll all just have to sit and wait and see who wins the great lawsuit war of 2010.
Lately, I've been setting out some goals for myself, in terms of the hobbies I'm currently interested in - most notably squash and poker, but also dancing and computers to a lesser extent. I've been keeping journals of my progress, thoughts, and lessons in squash and poker on my PDA, but I'm going to transfer these (and future entries) to the blog, and provide categories for them (so that people can just filter right through them if they're not interested). The reasons I'm going to do this are:
- Hopefully some people will find it interesting.
- Hopefully some people with more experience than myself will read these thoughts, and correct me where I am wrong.
- It will give me a basis for comparison between how my mindset has changed, and how I've developed.
In two years time from now, I'd like to be a B level squash player - capable of making all of the basic shots without any preventable errors, and learning to do more complex shots, like drops from the middle of the court, and better boasts. I'd also like to be able to contend with my friend Jeff on the court, have played in at least one tournament and joined a league by this time next year.
Poker is a little harder to gauge this way if I'm not willing to play online, but I'd like to have played in at least two tournaments by this time next year. Whether or not I win money is irrelevant, but I would like to observe as much as possible of the opponents I encounter, and try and figure out why I'm losing to the people that beat me.
The next two tasks I would like finished on the computer/technology end is to get Samba up and running on my Fedora Core machine, and have that and my Windows XP box networked together. I'd also like to see if I can get more functionality out of the remote that came with my tuner card - Ideally I'd like to be able to control Winamp from it, so that I can read on the couch and change songs/volume/etc. without having to get up.
Squash and poker journals should start getting updated sometime midweek.
Looking forward to the hobby journals, Adam. Did Stuart tell you about that pro gal he coached once who could knick her boasts everytime? Sweet. 'Course Stuart also says avoid boasting like the plague.
I think Stuart is trying to get me to just stick to the basics, and avoid telling me about ANYTHING complicated right now :). The start has been rough, but I can definitely tell it's worth it. I was always under the impression that the boast was a great way to cut off a bad drive made by the opponent.. I'll have to ask Stuart about that.