Munin's Red Hat Desktop: You Make The Call!

Presented for your consideration, three different versions of the same image.
There are significant – though in some cases subtle – between the three images.
The reason I’m posting all three is to see which one you, my loyal Threshold readers, whose judgment I trust completely (unless you disagree with me) to decide which one you like best.
The winning image will, eventually, become the desktop wallpaper on my Red Hat installation on Munin, my secondary, or “kitchen” computer.
What do you get? Nothing, beyond the satisfaction of having participated, which, considering that I’m not asking all that much of you is a pretty decent reward.
In any case, pay no attention to the differences in size, as the finished image will measure 1280x1024, so that’s not a consideration at all, as I just cropped them to make them a little more manageable for posting purposes.
As for the little “X” thingamabob in the background, that’s just there to add some life to the background, and is exactly the same on each.
So, just look at the three images and see which one you like best.
I haven’t posted them – or named them – in any particular order, so I’m not trying to manipulate you into choosing the one I like best. I genuinely don’t know which one I like best, which is why I’m asking you.
While you’re at it, you can let me know what you think of the overall general style of the images, as it is similar to things I’ve done in the past, but is a bit of a departure from my usual.
I just thought it was an appropriate style for the intended purpose of the image, as it’s evocative of the Red Hat logo and its style without being completely derivative.
In any case, without further ado, here are your choices:

Version 1




Version 2




Version 3



You can go here to see a side-by-side-by-side comparison, though some of the differences are harder to see, as I had to make it pretty small to keep the file size down.

Now that I’m finally out of class (and have a while to go before I take the next one, which will lead up to me taking – and most likely failing, as there is only a 50% pass rate the first time taking it – the Red Hat Certification test), today has essentially become my Thursday, so I will be retiring early.
The last day of class was rather frustrating, as the instructor made no effort to get us out early and the various nerds (who were startlingly dumb and slow on the uptake for nerds) didn’t help matters either with their constant questions and their slow-ass completion of the labs.
One thing that Brian and I noticed, though, is that apparently half the people in the Metro DC/NoVA area don’t go in to work on Fridays, as there was considerably less traffic today.
So much less traffic, in fact, that while we were running about ten minutes later that we had been, we actually arrived almost twenty minutes earlier.
But whatever; it’s over now, I only have two days of work ahead of me, and next week I’ll be getting a fat paycheck.

A Latter-Day Ahab Department:
In a recent entry, Michelle Collins mentioning an odd Google search that brought someone to her blog (though not quite so odd as the whole “Wendy Williams homoerotic puffy nipples” [or whatever it was] thing that brought someone here a while back, or my standard “Cro-Magnon female in a two-piece bathing suit” search that is my standard traffic driver), and I was reminded of something that I noticed yesterday morning when checking my traffic stats.
Ever since I mentioned spotting a “whale tail” on a hot young mother a while back, I’ve been getting a few hits from people searching for that particular phenomenon.
However, yesterday I noticed that one of the hits had come in at 7:35 am.
At first I didn’t think much of it, as my traffic stats thing is on Pacific time.
Then I noticed, though, that the person who’d made the search was located in California.
So that means that at 7:35 in the morning, someone was sitting at a computer doing a search on “whale tails.”
Is finding information on the riding up of her underwear above the waistline of a woman’s trouser really that much of a priority at 7:35 in the morning?

In any case, that’s going to do it for this entry.
I’ll see you all after my shorter than usual work week.

Staying Up Past My Bedtime

It seems odd to be up this “late” on a Thursday night, but since I get to “sleep in” until 7 tomorrow, and because I have an easier time staying awake on minimal amounts of sleep when I’m not at work, I figured I might as well make the most of it.
By “make the most of it” I mean simply stay up past 7:30.  I’m not saying that I’m accomplishing anything or doing anything interesting.
What have I been doing?  Working, rather pointlessly, on a picture.
It’s rather pointless because the whole purpose of the picture is to serve as the desktop wallpaper for my Red Hat installation, which I won’t be making much use of anytime real soon given that I haven’t been able to get the mouse to work properly.
Oh well, it’s an interesting experiment in different techniques if nothing else.
Class today was largely uneventful and I’m sure it will be tomorrow as well.
At least after I’m finished with the class I’ll only have to put in two days of actual work.
Brian only has to put in one, as his move to the other desk has also resulted in him moving to the new shift structure, so he now works Thursday through Saturday.
During class the instructor (Whose earrings I likened to something he might have borrowed from his mom, though I was mistaken in that regard.  Upon closer inspection they’re actually more “tribal” than anything else, punching big holes through his ears.  What I thought was a mirrored surface in the center is actually a hole all the way through.  They still look pretty fruity, though.) mentioned that someone he works with sets the computers dictionary set to UK English (the word “authorised” showed up as the correct spelling in a spell check he was doing on the screen).  Apparently he works with a woman who’s Norwegian, but who learned English in the UK and insists on setting things up to conform to the UK way of doing things.
Given the paucity of women in the class – with the exception of the fleeting glimpses of the receptionist obtained when walking to the men’s room – my mind immediately conjured up images of a hot, Nordic-looking woman who spoke with a British accent, and, in fact, kept going back to same throughout the day.
At some point a woman showed up to do some work on some of the computers.  Her accent – an interesting blend of British and Norwegian – demonstrated that she was, in fact, the woman mentioned earlier in the day, but sadly, she was decidedly not the woman I’d imagined, though she could have easily been carrying the woman I’d imagined inside of her.
In fact, she probably had room for three of the woman I imagined.
What a letdown.
Anyway, I think I’ll get back to work on the picture (Earlier as I was diligently working on it I kept thinking that I needed to stop and take a break – to have a cigarette.  WTF?  It’s been over two freakin’ years.) before it’s time for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (both of which I never get to watch on Thursdays), and then bed.

Snack Drought

So once again I've finished a lab early and am passing the time with you, my loyal Threshold readers.
On Tuesday I mentioned that we were provided with free snacks.
Well, we went through all of the snacks on Tuesday, and so far the supply hasn't been replenished.
(Still lots of soft drinks, though, of which I've had too many. Normally I only drink water, with the occasional Sprite here and there. This week I've been drinking upwards of three carbonated beverages a day, so I've been pretty belchy.)
Worse than the fact that the supplies aren't being restocked, there don't appear to be any sort of vending machines around either, which adds to the whole snack dustbowl.
Oh well, I don't really need them anyway, I guess.
To get to the men's room here you have to walk down a fairly lengthy hall that takes you past another business suite. Said business has glass doors and a very hot young receptionist.
Yesterday one of the guys (it's all guys here, by the way, which is hardly surprising) asked the instructor, "Do you know what that company does?" He then added, "Or the name of their receptionist?"
I just found it kind of sad, because the guy was talking like he had a shot with her. I mean, come on.
1, you're a total nerd studying Linux, and 2, you look like a skinny version of Ken Berry, all right? You have about as much of a shot with her as, well, I do.
(Which is to say no shot for those of you who need it spelled out.)
In any case, I guess I'll get back to my snack-free learning environment.

Uneventful

Pretty uneventful day today.
Went to class, came home, tried installing Red Hat on a partition on my secondary computer, mostly succeeded except for some hardware (mouse) issues, decided to leave that for another day, spent some time drawing nothing in particular, and now here I am.
The highlight was probably filling out this pre-class assessment thing for Kathleen for some kind of personal/business skills improvement class she's taking. She had to send the survery out to people who know her so that she could be assessed for the class.
While I answered it honestly, afterwards I sent her an e-mail saying that in filling out the assessment, the words "Pushy," "Shrill," and "Harpy" came up several times.
That made me chuckle, and the day was just that uneventful that the chuckle stands out.
Hopefully I'll have more to say tomorrow.
Oh, and subscribers should have noticed that posts are being e-mailed out once again. Looked to be a problem on the Bloglet side, as for the past couple of days I couldn't even get to Bloglet's site.
But whatever; it's fixed now. So yay, I guess.

In Search Of The "Gee" Spot

At some point in the morning I noticed that my head felt rather heavy and cotton-filled, and as the day wore on this developed into a full-on headache, the kind of headache that makes you feel listless and sick to your stomach.
So when I got home, despite the fact that it was kind of late in the day for me to do so, I crawled into bed to take a bit of a nap.
When I got back up the pain and nausea were gone (for the most part), but I still felt (and still do feel) kind of groggy.
Red Hat training, as mentioned, was largely review for me, though it was a little more interesting than the Unix intro class I took, as is this one we actually get to log into the GUI rather than just opening up a terminal emulator and connecting to a server.
(If you don’t understand any of that, it doesn’t matter.)
Still, I think Brian is pretty well bored out of his mind and most of what’s being covered is, I think, to put it into geek terms, being redirected to dev/null.
Yes, that was a pretty geeky thing for me to say, but trust me, I’ve got nothing on the other nerds in that class from the instructor, who combines a thick beard with big round earrings that look as though he borrowed them from his mom to the guy with the magenta hair.
The majority of the people there, I think, actually work for the same company as Brian and I (though there’s nobody that we know).
We all had to introduce ourselves and say where we worked at the beginning.  The last guy to speak had to show us all up by announcing that he works for NASA.
Show-off.
One good thing about the class, beyond the free snacks, soft drinks, catered lunches, and validated parking, is that we got quite a few little freebies, including the installation discs for the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a flash drive(64 MB), all of which came inside of this zippered portfolio organizer dealie (which included a pen and a notepad).
Given that I haven’t gotten any sort of response back since I e-mailed it to her, I’m guessing that once again Kathleen doesn’t like her Heroic Portrait and just doesn’t want to tell me, particularly after not liking the last one.
I suspect that I’m going to find that among whatever customers I manage to get, the women will be the hardest to please.
This isn’t based solely on the fact that in general women – especially for me – tend to be difficult to please but on some experience I’ve had in this particular area.
For example, while overall she liked it, Stacy did have a minor complaint (a too-mannish jaw) about her portrait, and in the past when I’ve done the D&D portraits for Scott and company, even though those weren’t portraits in the sense that they were representations of real people, the only complaints I had were from the female players.
And in general over the years I’ve found that women are more likely to be critical of my work and point out flaws than men.  I’m not sure why that is, but that’s definitely been my experience.
(No one, though, is quite so critical of my work as I am.  However, I do often find that women will find fault some aspect of my work that I’m either particularly pleased with or where I at least don’t see any major flaws, which can be kind of infuriating.  I mean, if you’re going to say that something of mine sucks you should at least say it sucks for the same reasons that I think it sucks.)
Certainly it’s rare for me to find a woman who looks at my work and is as impressed by it as guys tend to be.  Maybe it’s my typical subject matter.
Or maybe I just suck and most guys aren’t honest enough to tell me that.
But whatever the case, when it comes to women and my art I just don’t seem to be able to hit the “Gee” spot (as in, “Gee, that picture is awesome!”  Sorry, it was a bad pun that I couldn’t resist, especially in my weakened, groggy condition.) too often.
Of course, I could be wrong in my prediction, and I’ll have to actually start getting customers (and actually put up a working Web site) before I’ll know for sure.
Next week I’ll put some serious effort into putting the site together, I swear.
In the meantime my head is still feeling fuzzy, so I think I’m going to stop trying to think and just watch some TV.

Quick Time-Killing Entry

I'm currently in my Red Hat class where we're supposed to be engaging in a "lab."
I've already finished it, so I thought I'd pop in while I wait for everyone else to do the same and just mention that I'm in my Red Hat class.
So far it's mostly a review of stuff I learned in the Unix class I took a while back.
Based on advice from people who make the trip on a regular basis, Brian and I headed out a bit before 7 in order to get here by 9.
We got here by 7:30 and spent a significant amount of time just sitting in the parking lot listening to an XM Satellite Radio comedy channel and occassionally making fun of people we saw in the parking lot, especially the - as Brian put it - douchebag in what were essentially hot pants coming out of a gym located in one of the buildings here.
I think we'll leave a bit later tomorrow, though it will mean less time to spend on the look out for any Lt. Dangle types we might see walking through the parking lot...

Not Older And Wiser So Much As Older And Pimplier

My one day off this week has been rainy and miserable pretty much the whole time.
Since it was my only day off, thanks to Red Hat training for the rest of the week, I had to make use of it to go out into the world and accomplish what I need to accomplish for the week.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a lot that I needed to accomplish, so it didn’t take long.
Once I got home I decided to clean up a little and then catch up on some of my recorded TV.
And now here we are.
As you can see, it’s been a pretty lackluster day.  Apart from going grocery shopping the most significant events have been walking through the drizzle to get the mail (twice, as the carrier wasn’t finished delivering it the first time) only to find that I didn’t have any mail, getting a call from Kathleen (whose non-cartoony Heroic Portrait I finished earlier today, which, I suppose, serves as another “significant” event for the day), who was passing the time on her drive home a little while ago, and talking to my mother this morning.
While I was eating lunch today I was listening to some mp3s and the song “JB Witchdance” by The Masters of Reality came on.  The song has a great line that resonates with me more and more with each passing year:

When I was young I didn’t know/Summer days seemed twenty-five years long/Now I ain’t no wiser but I know that it’s a drag to be alone

Oh yeah, I also did the laundry today.
So I guess it was a more exciting day than initially reported.
On the topic of getting older without getting wiser, or at least getting older without receiving some of the perceived benefits of getting older, though, the other day Scott said, “At 30, I shouldn’t be getting pimples anymore.”
I had to agree, particularly given the two that I have by each of my eyes, which stand out in stark contrast to the gray at my temples.
Gray hair and zits are not an attractive combination.
The worst part is that pimples tend to appear in such odd places, like the one that I found just above my elbow on my right arm this morning.
Of course, there is a lot to be said about the changes that actually do come about as you get older.  It used to be extremely rare for me to get heartburn.  Now it’s a fairly regular occurrence, and it pisses me off every time.
Anyway, I should put an end to this before I start getting into a graphic exploration of  the various disturbing changes to bodily functions I undergo with each passing day, as doing so is also frequently a symptom of aging…

Off To A Great Start

First of all, to my mother, to Necessity, to the MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs), to Shaft (who, they say, is one bad mother – shut yo’ mouth!), and to any and all mothers out there, Happy Mother’s Day.
When I first started at this job there were six of us working on the desk, plus a manager who also sat at the desk with us.
Now, with Brian’s departure, there are only two of us and a manager who comes by a couple of times a day just to see how things are going.
It doesn’t exactly make one hopeful for the future.
There was some positive news over the weekend, though.
My job title is “Analyst.” The Analyst position actually has three levels: Associate, Full, and Senior (the next step after Senior is to move into the position of Specialist).
After being made to wait for far too long, I have finally been bumped up to Senior (Brian had been bumped up to Senior as well).
More than the attendant increase in pay (which was decent), I’m pleased by the fact that I’m finally getting some amount of recognition for showing up day in and day out and doing an excellent job for over three years.
Or something. Actually, it’s all about the money.
The raise comes just in time for the massive amounts of OT I’ll have on my next check thanks to my “brand” training, my bi-weekly meeting, and the Red Hat training I have starting on Tuesday, said check coming just in time to make my mortgage payment.
*Sigh*
Last weekend I decided to try to ease back into working out in the mornings, so come Friday I got up at 4:10 am.
This used to be part of my morning routine; I got up, threw on some workout clothes, put my contacts in, brushed my teeth, grabbed my gym and lunch bags, and headed out the door.
However, I’ve gotten so far away from that routine that I couldn’t remember the order in which to do things and nearly forgot a couple of them.
Still, I made it in, engaged in an extremely light workout that hurt a lot more than it should have, showered, got dressed, and was ready for work.
The next day I handled the post-waking rituals a little better and got in a better workout.
Because I was “easing back into it,” I “slept in” on Sunday and called it a miss on the workout.
The following Friday I got up early, breezed through the morning preparations, came in and got in a light workout that hurt slightly less than the previous Friday’s, showered, go dressed, and was ready for work.
Friday night, however, the lady upstairs went out for the evening, and her dog decided to wake me up to tell me all about it. In case I forgot, he chose to pipe in and remind me whenever I started to drift off, and continued to do this until about midnight.
So while I did get up at 4:10, I manage to get as far as the bathroom before saying, “Screw this” and going back to bed for another 45 minutes.
And of course, once again as Sunday rolled around I decided to call it a miss.
I decided to go one better than to just not work out, though, and stopped at a convenience store and bought over $11 worth of junk food.
So far my plan to get back into shape is off to a great start.