Blog of Billy

As was noted elsewhere, this New Year's party was not the exciting bash filled with possibility and random inebriation that started off 2005 so very right. There were no random guys that no-one knew to come drive us to Denny's. Instead, there was a generally cheerful atmosphere of light chatting and mild drinking with what seemed like several very disparate groups of friends. I ended up leaving shortly after midnight, and heading to the gay bar to meet up with some friends of various shades on the gender spectrum. We had a more exuberant, if not more enjoyable time, and I got in some of the dancing that I had been missing out on since the last time I hit up 'da club. My first trip to the Edmond Denny's took place at 2:22am on January 1^st, right about right for a healthy new year. I ended the night on Avery's couch, after beating a couple of levels of old school Zelda.

The astute reader of this blog has noticed that I've been pretty busy in the last month or so. There are really three reasons:

By far the biggest consumer of my time has been at work. Hertz has updated their Terms and Conditions, and I get to make sure that the 2.35 bagillion customers that need to accept that update get their email reminders. We've never done something this large with email before, but thanks to a lot of coding and tuning of the most rockin' email system ever, it's going to work perfectly. I'd say I need a raise, but I found a way to get to go to school for free for...the rest of my life, so I'm pretty happy with them this week.

Second on the list is the debate tournament I (and esteemed associates) went to in Dallas. After repeating KCKCC's disappointing performance, I've decided to change to a "more work, less booze" kind of approach to my debating in the future. Conor and Blake, however, picked up more slack than I had to give, toppling some random first rounder and winning the tournament.

How boggling is Boggle? Enough to take up 3 weeks of Denny's time. Also enough to prove that Patrick and I differ stringently on what constitutes a proper noun.

The third time bandit has been a reawakening of my love of Linux. I realized, after comparing MS's virtual desktop implementation to the one offered by KDE, that MS just doesn't get it. VDM is alright, but there is no way to move windows to different desktops once they are open, which is especially annoying with IM windows. Whatever desktop you are looking at when it pops up is the one on which it will stay. There is also no keyboard shortcut for moving to the "next" desktop, just for each desktop by number. Also, you get 4 desktops, no more, no less. KDE, on the other hand, has options on every window bar. I also have a single place to set global keyboard shortcuts, which makes controlling music, switching to the next desktop, and anything else I can describe in Linux scriptable to a single keypress. There's also a minimum of 1 desktop and max of 16. Finally, since I can do just about anything with the position, transparency, composition, etc of the taskbars/panels I want to, I can make things easier and prettier than I have any hope to in Windows. Oh yeah, I can roll my own ridiculously fast kernel too, with support for only the stuff I'm going to use. Try that in XP.

No wonder Linus prefers KDE, even to Gnome.

Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen
Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention.