Kennon’s Space

I am sure my friends, family, co-workers, and everyone else who has had any contact with me in the last 90 days are pretty tired of hearing me say “Sorry I’m too busy” or “I am so tired” or something similar. For the past three months I have worked 60+ hours every week consistantly. I have worked almost every weekend. In the past quarter I have either installed and configured myself or assisted with a 17 TB Xiotech Storage Area Network, 26 HP Blade servers, an enterprise instant messaging platform, a Polycom video conferencing unit and MCU, a 2 server redundant test Citrix farm, upgraded our mail system to GroupWise 7.0.1, migrated our GroupWise post offices and domains from Netware 5.1 to SLES 9.0 SP2, built a Squid 3.0 http accelerator for our GroupWise webaccess and iFolder webaccess server, not to mention being one third of our production support in a 2000+ user environment. So if I have not been returning your calls lately I sincerely apologize. If I stay on this pace for the second half of 2006 I will have given myself a 50% raise in overtime. (which is the only way I’ll be getting a raise working for a stingy ass company like mine).

It is always better to be busy than bored, especially at work. But I think I am starting to get a little burnt out at this point. I keep hearing that the light is at the end of the tunnel from our management. I am not holding my breath though. I have seen the list of approved projects for next fiscal year, and I am starting to wonder if I am being set up by my corp to be a case study on the potential benefits of cloning IT staff.

So I got Galactic Civ 2: Dreadlords this weekend. It is a really great game. I don’t have a lot of time to play computer games that often anymore. And up until about 2 month ago all my free game time was being absorbed by World of Warcraft which I have been playing faithfully since closed beta in March of 2004, but lately I am really only having fun with it when I can play at the same time as my wife or my real life friends. For some reason coordinating that time lately has become tough because we are all so busy with work and other social activities. So I figured I would pick up a game I could play on my own, read some reviews and picked GC2.

Let me start by saying, one of the main reasons I choose GC2 other than the stellar reviews it has been getting is that they are using a new concept of copy protection. Basically there isn’t any. You are free to copy the game however you like. But in order to patch the game, you have to activate the patches. Unlike a lot of games these patches are not just bugfixes but there is new content added too.

So the game is a lot of fun. I would highly recommend it for anyone who is into turn based stratagies. I love games like Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic etc…so I figured this would be right up my alley and I was right. So there are a ton of game review sites who are singing this game’s praise so I won’t say much more than, it is worth the $40 I paid on Amazon for it.

Now, what a lot of the game review sites are not saying is anything negative about GC2. Now that is mainly because there really isn’t that much. But there are a few things I should point out for posterity.

The soundtrack is kind of choppy on my system. I have never had this problem with any game before. I mean granted I am rockin a not so beefy intergrated onto my mobo sound system. But I have never had this problem on any other game. Also, the game has started crashing somewhat frequently on me. At least once every 3-4 hours of gameplay it just folds like a card table. So to overcome this I have set autosave to do it’s thing every 3 rounds. The last negative quality I would like to point out is that the interface is kind of cumbersome. It was not made to be a game that you just shred the shrink wrap from and just start playing on normal difficulty level. There are a lot of intricate pieces to this game and the included documentation in the box is really light. There is a lot more depth to the stuff you can download from their site but I get annoyed when I have to burn my own toner and paper when I paid retail for a game.

Despite these problems I can see myself spending many many more hours playing Galactic Civilizations 2: Dreadlords. I highly recommend it.

*Update 6/30* Looks like patch 1.2 addessed all of my stability and hardware issues. I am still playing a couple hours per week. This is a very fun game that I highly recommend.

OK so now I have heard everything. According to this article Yahoo Inc is actively aiding the brutal dictatorship in mainland China to jail people for merely discussing topics like Democracy on the Internet. My all time favorite quote from these Silcon Valley shitheads is: “We had no choice but to comply with local laws and did not have the power to change Chinese policy.”

Yahoo has no choice….hmmm no choice….wait a minute, I have a novel fucking concept! How about don’t do business with countries whose governments put people in prison for talking about freedom on the Internet!!! Anyone who is a friend of freedom or liberty should in my opinion distance themselves from Yahoo and all of it’s products post-haste. This whole thing makes me ill. If I wasn’t already ripping off Yahoo’s instant messenger service using the GAIM client I would immediately stop using all of their services. I have cancelled my hosting of the keoseyan.com domain with their small business group. Please pass on the word, Yahoo Inc supports Human rights violations…that is all.

When I first switched from Redhat/Fedora to Suse as my desktop OS I decided to go whole hog and convert totally to KDE. Suse has always been a KDE distro, and their implementation of KDE is/was the best in my not so humble opinion. Then a while back Novell/Suse made an announcement about switching their focus from the KDE to Gnome as their primary desktop. It was really rather shocking to say the least. I read all the stories/rumors about anger in the Suse camp towards their new parent company. Then eventually Novell made another announcement, they said they would continue to support both desktop environments but would focus on developing management tools for Gnome. Which honestly is what I think they originally meant to say, but someone in PR really goofed on the translation on their whole “We’re dropping KDE and developing only for Gnome” BS.

So after almost a year to being KDE only I decided to try out the Gnome Desktop again. Not just because of the Novell announcement about Gnome, but also because I am part of the Groupwise 7.0.1 beta and I am trying to use Evolution as my primary email client. Evolution just runs better in Gnome. So I wiped my Suse 10.0 install off of my IBM Thinkpad T43p and threw the Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop beta on it.

Logging into Gnome the first time in a long time felt really good. I know that sounds pretty weird, it is after all just a desktop environment, but for a geek like me it really was a homecoming. I spend so much time at the keyboard of my computer that it really becomes a personal place for me. I used Gnome for years as a Redhat devotee since Redhat 8.0 through Fedora Core 4. So booting into Gnome for the first time in a long time was really like coming home from a long trip.

Gnome on SLED 10 is pretty awesome. For me it really makes KDE feel like a sleezy car salesman in a shiny suit. I will never argue with anyone about KDE’s features. No doubt it is 100 times more customizable and feature rich than Gnome. But for some reason to me Gnome just feels better, it is a simple, warm, and after some moderate tweaking of default settings in the gconf-editor a very functional interface. I think in their strive for simplicity they have sacrificed a lot of features, but overall the SLED implementation of Gnome 2.14 is very powerful as a business desktop. I am really looking forward to the final release.

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