“Zero, you have been called… Show of hand please”

Today, I wandered about Dallas to get my mind off of stress from family, the office, and my hobbling financial status. It was a fun day and ended well. I would come home to my office and see 2 envelopes from Texas A&M Commerce on Suzaku’s keyboard. I was expecting bad news… especially because one of the envelopes was thick enough to kill a man.

I had expected the thin one to be my “rejection” and a message of “See the next letter as to why… because we can’t fit it in this envelope.” Then the second one to be the “here’s why you fail at life” explanation on why I was rejected. I took my favorite lockblade knife and used it as a crude letter opener. I figure may as well open the thinner of the two first to take it in stride. The thinner letter was odd… It had stated that I was able to set-up my campus e-mail with the online account management. I was a bit weirded out thinking “Why would they tell me that..? What’s the bloody status on my acceptance?!” So wild frenzy told me to gut open the bombshell in an envelope… On opening it, I saw the strain I was looking for:

Congratulations! We’re pleased to inform you that your application to Texas A&M University – Commerce for the Fall 2008 semester has been reviewed and accepted. We take great pride in welcoming you as a new member of an outstanding student body whose accomplishments and contributions to society are many.

My family was asleep so I couldn’t rouse them from my sleep… but earlier in the day, I had bought a 200ml flask of Jagermeister to keep on hand for when there was a time I needed it. After seeing that letter… there was only one thing to do.


It’s a celebration, bitches” – Rick James

A shot for my hard efforts finally going somewhere and then another shot to celebrate that my life is finally turning around for the better. The savory herbs with a hint of sweet caramel flavors in the liquor made it quite a good aperitif from the great dinner I had. Life is great again and I hope that it may only get better!

Project Thoughts: Revival of Project Fireseal

I apologize in advance if this came out as nonsensical ranting and raving from sleep deprivation.

Many of my readers know that I am a very passionate fan of cars and modifying things. As odd as it is… I do miss my first car: A 1990 Acura Integra GS sedan in white. The car was a good car, but when it got up in the years… all sorts of things fell apart on it. While it fell apart, I still remember asking my father to help wrench with me to get things back in working order. I still remember the broken promises of my family titling the car to me when I lived under their roof so I could give my car a second chance… I was going to overhaul the car with a new engine, a 5-speed manual transmission, new wheels, a custom suspension set-up, and most of all… a brand new repaint to a bright and pearly white. But after a few catastrophes happened… My car became a zombie and was sold off to market. This sacrifice would give me a small offering to get my current MX-5 Miata. I love my Miata, but with it’s category… it does have some drawbacks.

Over this past Christmas holiday, I was actually partly to blame as a “killjoy” to my family for not owning a 4-door car because they had wanted to fly out to Orlando, Florida to attend the wedding of my cousin out there. They did not trust me to drive their cars as I am not insured under their policy. There have been times where I have wished I could have dragged friends along, but well, a 2-seater roadster can only hold one other human. There are times I have wanted to take Sol and my friends around… but well… I end up having to give first priority to Sol.

I have also had times where I have had to buy groceries for family and that ends up very poorly. Why? I end up playing Tetris when I have to cart up an entire month worth of groceries for my family when I do a 1-man run for my mother. I have had the “pleasure” of playing the game, but well… I am not a fan. Moving crap home in my roadster was both comical and a pain in the ass… When you make 8 trips from a 20 minute stretch, it becomes a failure. With the possibility of going to Texas A&M Commerce, hauling my initial move-in gear with my MX-5 is a bad move.

So I have considered a very reasonable plan… Picking up a spare sedan as a people and/or supply hauler. Which cars are on my “roster”? Just two simple and great used cars. A third generation Acura Integra GS-R sedan or first generation Lexus IS300. Reasons? Small, nimble, and agile but gas sippy to boot. The charms of these cars are that they are sharp in a timeless classical sort of way. I know, the Integra GS-R is “the wrong drive wheels” but front wheel drive can be a godsend for bad weather days in Dallas… like rainy days. The IS300 would be more ideal as it would keep me locked into the rules of rear wheel drive. Either choices would be great as they would be plenty reliable. Let’s shoot them out though…

Acura Integra GS-R Sedan (Circa 1999 – 2001)
My first Integra from 1990 proved to be plenty reliable when everything was in working order. The worthy B18A1 engine was a plenty throaty scream at 7,000 RPM but I never got much chance to play with the “sweet spot” of my engine from one crutch: the god-forsaken 4-speed automatic transmission that was a useless void of slushy gears. The lunky 14″ aluminum wheels provided a less than adequate traction patch and really left more to be desired. I got once chance to drive a stock GS-R sedan from 1996 and I almost fell in love with the refined experience. It was basically the experience that my car was SUPPOSED to be. The difference from 130 HP versus 170 HP with a far more refined gearbox and suspension proved how much more of a refinement the experience was. To get one would be a a fun ride, though the modification bug may bite me and then there will probably be thoughts of dropping in a bolt-on GReddy turbo kit with a TD06 turbo and push 220 HP to the wheels. With how the automotive market looks like… I could easily find one of these for cheap.

Lexus IS300 (Circa 1998 – 2005)
The first run of the IS300 has always charmed me. The slick chronograph dials for the essential functions and then the matter of its nimble handling have struck me as a fan. I was almost edging to get one until the “luxury” moniker made my young, accident ridden insurance record go beyond my means… The experience in the IS300 is not a raw, visceral, and untamed power like the Integra GS-R sedan, rather, it’s a more polished and posh driving experience without carrying an expensive German name badge. The IS300 holds its value rather well, but with how well the new and current generation is faring… the market resale value may have dropped on the car. The only issue is I want a 5-speed manual edition so that I can keep honing my driving skills rather than get sloppy from automatic driving, but the used market is flooded with overpriced “tuner” projects where the builder is trying to recoup their losses or too many automatic versions.

With those points mentioned… What are my “terms” for picking up something for Project Fireseal?

  • Cheap price – To prevent me from “needing” to loan money from my family
  • Manual transmission – So I do not get lazy and fool myself that I can multi-task and drive
  • “Quiet” Colors – This will prevent my purchase from attracting the attention of law enforcement or thieves.

The main purpose of Fireseal is to primarily be just a beater car with the ability to haul things. Later, I may seek to improve performance, but it is not a priority. If anything, it is more of a tribute to my first car. If anyone has suggestions of great, reliable 4 door cars that are great to drive and can be found for cheap with manual transmissions, feel free to comment. The Integra and IS300 are the only ones I know of that appeal to me.

“I, for one, welcome our new Robot Overlords” – The Intarw3b 0wnZ j00

Privacy, a hallmark thing that Americans do value. In many other nations, the right to privacy is pretty much null and void. In an era where people fear information leaks (like the TJ Maxx incident with its aftermath), privacy online has become an issue that is pretty serious. Google co-founder Larry Page tried to keep his wedding details a secret from Google’s indexing but that ended up being a bust. Initially, no one really took mind to the internet storing our information… but with how the times are changing, there are companies who make a buck off of caching as much information as they can about anyone. Check out sites like Spock if you want to understand what I mean.

People are lacking confidence in the internet with stories like our own national government losing laptops making headlines. It doesn’t help that companies like ABC and CBS have made documentaries  showing that there is an illegal underground trade for “identities” online from internet forums and such. Couple how easy it is to obtain personal information with tools like Google and it becomes like a modern day version of “Big Brother is watching you”.

When you have the government pushing the idea of:

You give out plenty of information to us, what’s the harm of letting companies making a buck off of harvesting that information?

It almost parallels why people are not comfortable with the concept that if you are currently under the age of 50, you must get a mandatory national ID that has embedded technology. These national ID cards would be used (for example) to check in at a bar and keep a record of your tab of what you had consumed.

I personally feel that unethical law enforcement officers could potentially abuse that information for entrapment purposes. Nothing like having 2 beers, 7 shots of liquor and maybe a round of whiskey on the rocks but to stay and sober up… then on driving 2 miles away from the restaurant (sober), a cop stops you and decides to entrap you for a DUI or DWI.

There’s another side to this issue… If this national ID card has wireless technologies, an identity thief with a laptop and signal scanner could just read every person’s information until they find the perfect “replacement identity”. Add the ability of Google’s indexing and the identity thief can create the perfect alibi.

Google’s ambiguous privacy policy does not lend itself very well to the end user. The short story of it: “We can hold on to your information as long as we want. You can’t really do much about it.” This has not been received well in nations Europe where they have required that Google must comply to their laws and clearly state a defined period that they intend to hold onto records of what a European user does on Google. Sadly, the concern for privacy has not hit the minds of American users. We’re worried over rising gas prices or why the fast food joint’s value menu has less good and edible food rather than our digital civil liberties being encroached on.

I would dare to say that if Thomas Jefferson were alive and saw how we’ve given up our rights just from fear… He’d probably put a 9mm bullet in his head. When a nation has allowed it’s leaders to trespass on our rights, then we have forgotten the meaning of “Old Glory”.  This is not the nation that our forefathers died for.

Workout Log 01/17/2008

I took it easy on myself today. A short run on the stride machine, then a brisk set of strength training and that was it. I had did work on my arms, chest and lower back today to give my upper back and abs a break from Tuesday’s routine. Today wrung me out pretty good from the stride machine as my average heart rate is now about 165 beats a minute. It seems I am slowly strengthening my heart with my workouts and the higher rate of oxygen intake is definitely a big help. Proper breathing can do such wonders if used properly.

Stride Machine

  • Duration: 25 minutes + 5 minute cool down
  • Resistance Level 6
  • 321 Calories
  • 2.72 miles

Incline Press Machine

  • 35 lbs
  • 2 sets
  • 12 reps each

Arm Curls

  • 40 lbs
  • 2 sets
  • 11 reps each

Back Extensions

  • 2 sets
  • 5 reps each

Thank You Everyone for Your Support!

When I launched ZeroXR 13mg, I did not expect it to grow much. I figured that it’d just be a work space for me to just develop my work. After having my application to a tech blog get rejected from lack of a writer’s resume, I wanted to get some quality work generated on here. Amazingly enough, just from linking a few of my friends… I seem to have traffic coming in from friends who have returned me the favor of linking back to me. This has actually gotten me RSS subscribers as well as regular readers!

I have loved the feedback I have gotten from my friends, cousin Sol, and the members of Ubuntu Dallas. Casual readers who have stumbled on my site from me dropping a link, your comments have been inspiring as well. My personal posts seem to have inspired some of you who have wanted a pearl of advice. That is probably the thing that makes me smile knowing that I have helped you find guidance in your own lives.

As for the site, I just need some help in designing a logo for the site, a business card logo, and a business card design. If there’s anyone good with CSS that can design a slick looking header for my WordPress, feel free to let me know. Anyone who’s available to help me do some logo design would be great!

I am in debt to the readers of my site, keep me inspired! I am looking forward to this year already!

Workout Log 01/15/2008

Total Body Crossramp

  • 30 minutes + 5 minute cool down
  • Crossramp Level 6
  • Resistance Level 8
  • Cool down resistance Level 6
  • 378 Calories
  • 3.19 miles

Ab Crunches

  • 3 sets
  • 15 reps a set
  • 45 total reps

Rowing Machine

  • 45 lbs resistance
  • 2 sets
  • 12 reps a set
  • 24 total rep

I am really impressed with tonight’s progress. It was a quick 1 hour session but it worked me through the ringer. I was glad to have taken in about 38 grams of protein from a Clif Builders Bar and a protein shake made with soy milk for snacks for today. Tore up my biceps, abs, and legs tonight so I feel great. Stretching before doing my routine has been great despite the “macho myth” that it does nothing… It just helps me unlock my blood flow and gets the blood a little warmed up before I do my run. My average heart rate is going up apparently… I was averaging at 170 beats per minute during my run after 5 minutes of warming up on the total body crossramp machine. That’s really amazing for me, considering that on the intense portions of my work out I was topping out at 177 beats per minute. I think I am finally reaching the stage of where I wish to be at and damn does it feel great!

Change of Pace – Staggering my Workout until I am 100%

My leg is still acting up, but it is recovering nicely. Today, I could feel some pain from walking or running, almost as if it felt like it was dislocated. So I just need to back off and let my body heal properly. My body is slowly returning to how I was at age 19, but with much more strength from properly feeding myself rather than the undernourishment business I was doing to myself. It’s amazing what proper eating and rest can do. Tomorrow, I should be hitting it the gym with another session. It should be more running for me, provided things go right with work at the office letting me out on a timely fashion.

Workout Log 01/12/2008

Crossramp Machine

  • Duration: 30 minutes + 5 minute cool down
  • Crossramp Level 6
  • Resistance Level 8
  • Cool down resistance – Level 6
  • 358 calories
  • 3.05 miles

Today’s regimen was more of a recovery set as my leg has not felt well for the past few days. It felt like I had dislocated my leg and it made the one essential maneuver for driving a painful experience. This session was brisk but powering to boot. Though the good bit of progress is that my body fat percentage is going down, meaning that there is muscle growth happening. I imagine that the majority of my muscular growth is from my legs due to how cardio centric my workout is. My heart rate is averaging at 160 beats per minute after the warm up phase of my running. That’s a good sign as the workouts are putting me at my ideal heart rate to strengthen the heart muscle tissue.

Injecting New Life into KDE with Oxygen and Plasma, KDE 4 Quick Review

I have been a silent fan of KDE though I use Gnome on a daily basis for my laptop, Suzaku. I love great KDE set-ups on desktops, though for some reason I can’t like it for laptops. Though after today… I will definitely keep my eyes out on KDE 4’s development. The trial didn’t last too long, due to somethings needing a refined polish, but my impressions on it were great.

Disclaimer: Due to the nature of me just installing the KDE 4 core, rather than using the Kubuntu Desktop install and then stacking the KDE 4 install, I didn’t get to experience all the new items of KDE 4 on a completely integrated scale. The openSUSE KDE 4 Live CD didn’t quite play too nice with me either… Keep in mind I was playing with the CORE technologies of KDE 4. I will leave my Gnome bias at the door and focus on the mindset of a KDE 3.5.7 user.

KDE has come a long way since I even remembered my first experience with it when I had tried out SUSE 9.0 Professional back in 2001 or 2002. Back then, it just seemed so coarse and uncut rather than the ignorance I had from Windows XP. I had not used Gnome yet and I didn’t delve much into Linux until much later in 2007. When I just jumped over to Linux back in February, I remembered missing the comfort of the Windows XP Start Menu configuration. I installed Kubuntu on top of Ubuntu on my desktop and the experience just didn’t do it for me. The eye candy just didn’t work well as it did in Gnome… But when I had set up a full Kubuntu set-up for my family, I rather liked the simplistic experience.

KDE 4 was touted as a complete revamp from under the hood for the KDE experience. I can still remember the baren placeholder pages for the Oxygen art team and the Plasma interface. It looked really promising. There was speculation on the next Kubuntu release (Gutsy) sporting KDE 4 by this past October, but the KDE team had pushed back the release date to make sure that the 4.0 release would be truly ready. So it was a push to late December, around Christmas and many people were once again met with disappointment to see it being pushed back to January of this year. It wouldn’t be until last night at 12am that a news bulletin hit Digg basically saying “KDE 4.0 is LIVE! Get the Live CD NOW!”

On booting into KDE, you’re taken to a wonderful black backdrop and a set of icons on a small window showing all the procedure calls being started for things like network initialization, hard drives, etc. From there, a tranquil chime lets you know you have entered KDE. The desktop is just dead on pretty. It’s a lot better than the bland entrance from KDE 3.5 and just has a great wow factor. I like the bottom panel bar being a nice black as it just seems to polish up the theme that much more.

KDE 4 Desktop

A new thing is the fact that KDE can do on-board compositing, with no need for things like Compiz Fusion. This is good as the common user is not going to want to muck about with something that could break their workspace. If anyone remembers my rant about how Compiz Fusion shattered on me, then they know what I mean. The compositing is all from KWin powering it all and most of the “eye candy” is more on the side of refining the experience and to increase productivity, rather than trying to do pretty things. The compositing also allows for widgets to be used in conjunction to the desktop. In the above screen shot, you’ll see that there’s a computer icon with a box above for “recently connected devices”. That’s for any hot-swapping USB items and it will associate them with their appropriate programs. For those who want to know more about the eye candy, KDE 4 does do the “widget space” like how the OS X folks have theirs for Mac. Definitely something for the silent productivity fan.

The improvements for the experience are finally showing. The KRunner app is very nice and can definitely help narrow things down if you’re trying to run a command for a program that you can’t quite remember. While you type, KRunner index searches the system for any matching commands and has them in a list below the search. You can see what the command does in addition to that. The geek factor is that you can also use KRunner as a quick calculator should that need arise.

The Kicker Panel is like the K Menu on steroids, with regards to finding app launchers faster. The novice is able to search for programs by using the search function, while the system indexes all the programs to facilitate an expedited process. In addition, the large icons make it easy to narrow down what you want to do. This makes for a much pleasant experience, nothing like the confusing muck-about seen in most Windows machines. The favorites tab is nice as you can add programs that you use all the time there and just make it a one stop shop for any programs you wish to use.

The Dolphin File Manager really impressed me. I never personally liked using Konqueror for file management and felt it just did a sloppy job. I liked how clean and simple it was able to display files with options to change how you wanted to display them. I loved the split view to be able to view 2 directories at the same time. That could easily be something useful for things like doing redundant memory card back-ups or anything that is similar. Dolphin is just balls out simple, functional, and quick. The traits that a good graphical file manager should have, no exceptions.

Here’s a screen with the split-view mode

Konqueror, I can’t really say too much as I use Firefox for my day to day uses. They have picked up on making the experience much more polished and I can say that there is much more improvement than how I have seen it running on KDE 3.5. Konqueror seems to run much faster now… I don’t know if that is due to some new changes in Konqueror or if it’s from the zippy performance of KDE 4 and KWin. It’s definitely something I could be happy with as a casual user. In the Oxygen skinning theme, it does make Konqueror look almost like Apple’s Safari browser.

My only gripe with KDE 4 is the lack of ability to change the size of the bottom panel. In KDE 3.5, you can change it to a single line set-up rather than a double in the KSysGuard menus… but in KDE 4, there’s no option for that. I am sure that when the final touches are done, the experience should be much cleaner and this minor issue would be fixed. Other than that minor gripe… I am definitely in love with KDE 4. It’s great and I am looking forward to the changes due to come for the future versions of KDE. I just wish Canonical would give the Kubuntu 8.04 release the LTS status with KDE 4 on it, instead of giving it second class priority.

Another Angle to my KDE 4 Test: Installing KDE 4 Core to Suzaku

I decided I gotta be a little nutty just to have some fun… So I was curious if there was a way to install the KDE 4 core packages to get an internet experience with KDE 4 on my laptop, Suzaku. Sure enough, the process to install it for Gutsy was detailed here: Kubuntu.org – Be Free with KDE 4.0. Unfortunately with my family’s ADSL connection, it may take me a while to install the packages. The boredom of slow downloads is pretty painful or in Bender’s words from the movie “Bender’s Big Score”:

Suicide Booth, Gimme your best shot! Electrocution please, a side order of poison! Helloooo… Kill me, you stupid machine!!! What the..? Local calls 50 cents?! It’s a street corner telephone parlor!

Though I imagine that when the downloads finish installing and provided everything functions… I will probably feel like saying another one of Bender’s great quotes from the same movie:

People will call me a failure! Others however will call me the world’s sexiest killing machine, who’s fun at parties!

Welp, time to wait for the download or even possibly prep for the gym.

Update: 11:20am – Seems it finished… Time to reboot my X session and kick into KDE 4