the sonorous swell » Random

Of introspection

jdcantrell — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:46:14 +0000

At the beginning of the year I usually put off making resolutions or doing any real soul searching. Part of it is I am lazy and another part thinks none of it matters. This year is very different than any other I’ve known! I have a kid to whom I get to impart wisdom and character to. I began thinking about the things that are really important to me. Things that when I follow closely in my own life I am happier for, and the people around me are happier for it too. In particular things that if my daughter learns early will hopefully help her through the hardest parts of growing up and give her a happy childhood. So without further ado, here are 9 things that deeply resonate within me:

No one can help you unless you are willing to help yourself. Along with this is that no one can love you if you cannot love yourself.
You should strive to always be a net positive to other people. In all relationships strive to make the other person feel good.
You are never all alone. There is always someone out there that understands exactly what you’re going through – they probably have a web page even…
Respect is earned and you begin to earn respect for yourself by being respectful to others.
Never under any circumstance make someone feel bad about being themselves. We need the world to feel less restrained when it comes to individual expression.
It is okay to feel angry/sad/blah/other “negative” emotion – we’re made to feel these things. Sometimes it means everything is working correctly. It is not, however, okay to take these feelings out on someone else.
You should accept every apology and act as if you’ve forgotten the offense. There are many times this rule does not apply, but if this is not a repeat offender and they’re not being willfully malicious towards you: forgive and forget. In other times try to stay out of situations where the person would have to apologize to you.
There is no reason to ever stop playing, growing and making.
Seeing a problem clearly will often times present the answer. Applying this clarity of thought in other aspects of life will keep you focused and always moving forward.

These are core beliefs and guidelines for me. They are also things I feel most people would agree are true. Personally all of these have been reaffirmed with the birth of Sera. I never want her to feel weird or embarrassed because she’s just being herself. I want her to be happy and feel free to be herself especially when she is at home. Anyhow I needed to write these out. It helps me to have a clearer understanding of who I want to be. Hope everyone has had a good start to the new year.

I like birds

jdcantrell — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:19:35 +0000

It’s been another long break here in notsoevil.net land. However, this time I can happily admit that I’ve not been neglecting the place. I have been working on making this quiet place on the net a useful place to keep updated on new music. I realized earlier this year that I am very bad at keeping track of my favorite bands and their new releases. So I started to think about what could be done to fix this.

Naturally, I decided to try and make a website to take care of it for me. And I had a very simplistic mockup all done in php that actually seemed to work (for vague values of “work”). While I was goofing off on the parts I knew how to do, I started looking at frameworks to use for the site. It’s a simple site, so hopefully a framework would help greatly. Initially I looked at CakePHP, and while it looks like a great framework, I realized: I hate php syntax. It’s obnoxious at best. So I decided to go with python and Django. I’m still a long ways from being a python guru, and I have a feeling that a few places of my code are not very in sync with the “best practices” for python. However, it has been pretty easy going. I am very impressed with Django, and python is enjoyable enough I plan on doing some other projects to improve my skill with it.

Anyhow, I’m not trying to be secrative about the new site, but I don’t feel it is quite ready yet for more than just a few eyeballs looking at it. If you happen to be *really* interested, shoot me an email or IM, and I can send you to the right place. I am excited to get it done though. My goal is to get it going by the end of this month at the latest, so hopefully you’ll hear back from me soon.

ps Meet the Eels: Essential Eels 1996-2006 is a great cd!

Who-what?!

jdcantrell — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:15:42 +0000

Well look at that. It’s been a while. Hi. So guess what’s new? I bought a house and moved into it. It’s pretty sweet. I also married my girlfriend of two and a half years. We’re as happy as pie! And finally this weekend I bought a carseat and a stroller! So the supposedly three big things in life, we’re doing them all this year, house, marriage and kid(from here on called Squirt Jr.). You could say we’ve been busy and that’s true, though now things are settling down at least for a few months.

Jamie is due in November, and from what I’ve been reading the following three months will be quite difficult, but not impossible. However I am looking forward to actually have a kid. A lot of people my age that I’ve talked to have sort of loomed it over me as death sentence (Your life is ending! Have fun never doing what you want…etc). Though I see it differently. Having a kid means I get to do all the kid stuff all over again. Play with legos? Check. Watch Saturday morning cartoons? Check! Scribble wildly on papers? Check! Go to the circus? That too! And what is better, I get to do this with someone who will think I’m the greatest person ever.

I’m optimisitic to be sure. And maybe I have high hopes that while be crashed against the rocks of reality. But I don’t see the end of my life coming soon, just a new adventure. A happy unexpected twist. PS: science.notsoevil.net – my plan to have all the answers a kid could ever ask. PPS: still have to find a theme that I actually like.

Float

jdcantrell — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:06:43 +0000

I went to the Flogging Molly Concert about two weeks ago, and it was pure awesomeness. It was probably the best concert I’ve ever been too. It also helped that I was hanging out with friends I hadn’t seen/hung out with in a very long time. Since then I’ve started the process of buying a house (We have a contract in place! woo!). Which is exciting and worrisome at the same time. Other than that I’ve been enjoying some of the nice spring time weather we’ve been getting lately. I have a few plans on some projects to do, but finding time to code outside of work is difficult these days. On the other hand I no longer have cable and am saving every penny I can so maybe that time will come sooner than later

A brand new theme!

jdcantrell — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:24:19 +0000

Well I’ve been playing with my own worpress theme for quite a while, and decided tonight to finally quit goofing around and put it up. There are still a couple tweaks I want to make such as tweaking the background image and adding a latest tweet thing(http://identi.ca/keare – if you’re interested, is an identica update called a tweet still?). And I’m sure I’ll come up with one or two other changes. It is entirely likely I’ll switch the color scheme as well (not 100% about how I feel on dark themes). Life’s been good lately, though slightly stressful, we’ve adopted one more dog (total of two now). She’s a mix between an English and American bulldog. Consequently, she is stubborn, full of energy and quite a handful. Though we started obedience training today and surprisingly she acted scared of the other dogs. Still need to find some time to finish/start coding some other projects. Either way I’m sure to post again in a week or two. Music for everyone to checkout: Flogging Molly – Float(seeing them live on the 24th! YES!) and Less than Jake – GNV FLA(full album stream!).

A short update

jdcantrell — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 03:46:04 +0000

Here’s a big surprise :I’ve neglected this blog again! Anyhow here is a quick update of new things since the previous post. I’ve been to and come back from Maui. I was there for a week with my girlfriend Jamie. It was great and I’m wanting to go back for some more snorkeling and paradise. We bought a dog the first week of November, his name is Atlas and he’s a minature Daschund. He’s pretty much the man (and perfect for keeping me warm at night). I’m trying to convince Jamie we need to get him a bulldog friend. We’ll see about that though. Aside from that, Christmas was good for me I got the following games: Fallout 3, Bioshock, LittleBigPlanet, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Wipeout: Pulse, Patapon and Sonic Rivals. I guess I’ll have to start making time for all those games. I wouldn’t normally call myself a big gamer, but some of these games could change all that for me. Other than that nothing new to report. My goals post from last year is still on the front page, it’s a little dissapointing since I didn’t meet most of them (though I did significantly cut back on fast food intake). Ah well motivation to be better this coming year! We’ll see if I can post here again next week – no promises though.

In like a lion

jdcantrell — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:19:26 +0000

So, I’m looking at that nice list of goals I made in my last post and feeling a little bit disappointed with myself. I’m behind on all goals, except fast food. Though I haven’t been perfect at avoiding fast food I’ve definitely cut way back on eating out. And to be fair things haven’t been as simple as they should be. Right after I wrote my post I got sick and then a few weeks later I moved my girlfriend from San Diego to Kansas in 3 days. So there has been a lot of things going on. However it has all settled down, and now the weather is getting nice out. Yet, I’m here no where ready to run. So that means it is time to kick some lazy butt and get into gear.

Programming/Game development wise I have been somewhat sidetracked, but I do have everything setup on my linux install now so it is ready to go. Python plus pygame: check, subversion: check, music and rhythmbox: check. I must say that I am more and more amazed with Ubuntu everything “just works.” I plug in my camera, and boom it asks me if I want to import all my pictures. I put in a blank cd and bam! Do I want to make and audio cd or a data cd, and once I’ve made my choice I’m presented with a very simple interface to do whatever I chose. I have to say Serpentine is easily the best music cd creator I’ve ever used. There is absolutely no fuss or anything involved. I even was able to get my gamepad working in mame simply by plugging it in. Of course getting mame set up was a huge chore, but I don’t blame ubuntu, I blame the mismash of information and partial tutorials and the fact that I run amd64 on making nothing easy. However I’m happy to say that I did prevail and am now considering writing up a post about the steps I followed to get everything in proper order.

I have nothing more substantive to post. There are a lot of software releases coming out soon that I am excited about. The major one is Firefox 3. Somehow throughout Firefox 2′s life span I’ve solely used the windows version, though apparently the linux version of FF is terrible and an afterthought (no offense to the wonderful people who made it, I’m just repeating what I’ve read and have experienced recently). FF3 plans on fixing most of that. Also the next version Ubuntu (due in April!) looks to be completely awesome. Ars Technica did a review about all the new features. I’m mostly interested in the sound features and getting caught up on other developments that have not been backported to Gutsy yet (*couhg* new pidgin releases *cough*) Anyway, I need to catch up on some sleep if I am to get any of these goals started soon.

Sleepy

jdcantrell — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 05:33:52 +0000

So its a new year. I’m still not sure how to use my web space but I went ahead and finally started paying for it. Before I had a free promotional thing from 1 and 1, while I never had any problems with their service, Dreamhost simply has more features I’m interested in. So friends who’s sites I’ve obliterated, it wasn’t on purpose. It was time for a move, so here we are. I’m not sure what I’ll do with all the old posts and sections I had before. I’m not sure how to get them on this site anyways. But here we go. Here’s to a new year and promises of change.