GoneWacko’s Blog

Tortoise

Aren’t I just the best LOGO programmer ever?!

I remember LOGO from back when I was a very little boy. We had a program for it under DOS on an old olivetti computer (which predated me!). Back then I never got the hang of it though (I was rather young).

While I was checking out the KDE menu I suddenly noticed KTurtle and decided to give it a go

Arch

With the holiday reaching it’s point where I was getting bored, I decided to try something new.

After getting increasingly annoyed at Ubuntu and Gnome for making way too many assumptions about how I wanted things to work, I decided to go with a new distro (to me, at least). One that was not so focussed on usability that it became the opposite of usable.

After hearing about Arch Linux a few times on chat and on the Dutch news for nerds site I frequently visit (Tweakers) I decided to give it a try. I went ahead and downloaded the base package (which is really just a CD with the bare basics of the Linux OS and some stuff to make installing it easier), because I was up for a challenge. Then I backed up my ubuntu partition (just in case I’d completely fuck up with Arch, which I was expecting) and gave it a whirl.

Click to Enlarge

I now write to you from Arch linux, running KDE (and XFCE, although I’m actually liking KDE so far). Of course having an OS that does a lot less of it’s configuring for you (like Ubuntu does) also means that more things will not work straight away. But I’ve not had any major issues thus far. It took some time to get used to it all, but I’m starting to get the hang of it now :).

Another way to kill time is working for RBTS™. The website still needs a lot of work and we recently had some new ideas. We’re going for a ’semi-web-2.0′ approach, with AJAX in some places, but not overdoing it (because we want to stay accessible!). But think FAQ search boxes with auto-complete, news messages with comments that are loaded into the page using AJAX, etc.

Furthermore, I’m still rooting for a LANd-party at Rob’s house. Basically, it’s thought of as a LAN party in some tents on the field by his house. But that’ll depend on how much free time Rob’s got :).
LAN parties at Rob’s are great fun (even though we don’t game a lot, we still have fun just doing geeky things with computers) and this time around I might even go home with a free P2 400 MHz server to play around with :).

Argh.

I have just removed a wasp from my room.

No year has gone by where there was not a wasp nest somewhere in the house. Every year there’s at least one. If it’s not in our house, it’s in the garden of the neighbours and they find a way into our house anyway.

I’m starting to hate wasps with every fiber in my body. Why can’t they stay outside? >:(

On blogging, holidays and entrepreneurship

Heh, I noticed (a long time ago) that I usually start my blog posts with the words ‘wooo’ or ‘well’ or ’so’. Or at least that’s usually one of the first things that come to mind when I decide to blog something. I actually had to refrain myself from doing so in this one.

So the holidays have now officially kicked off (after 3 or so weeks of just not having school), after receiving my foundation course diploma. Taking into account my day-night rythm during the holiday, I had to get up at the equivalent of 1:00 AM to get to school. (I usually go to bed around 4:30 AM and I had to get up at ~8:00)
So now I’m quite tired, as the following chat transcript very aptly shows:

00:27 * GoneWacko is installing re-Ubuntu
00:27 <@GoneWacko> errr
00:27 <@GoneWacko> re-installing
00:28 <@GoneWacko> And I didn’t even have any beer yet
00:28 <@GoneWacko> Don’t think I will actually

Although I do not have much planned for the holidays, I am currently considering a very spontaneous and impulsive trip to Finland, just to meet some people I know from the internet and in the process see some nice things.
I still have to consider it all very carefully though… Will I know/trust the people enough, will I have enough to do, can I (and do I want to) afford it, can I sleep over at friends to save some cash, etcetera. I’m still hoping to invest in a little PC upgrade so I’m not sure if I should even do it - depends on how much fun I can expect from going to Finland.
My family has never been very impulsive when it comes to holidays so it’ll be an interesting… variation

Also, I am finally the co-owner of a company!
Some days ago me and some friends went to the house of commerce and registered our hosting/webdesign/web-application development/website management/general ict-solutions company.

We decided to go with the corny name ‘RBTS’ which are the first letters of our first names (Rob, Bram, Tim, Stijn). We can always change it to something catchier, and RBTS (at the very least in Dutch) doesn’t sound THAT bad. The website’s not done though, plus it’s in Dutch, so don’t laugh.