After 5 months of Slacking and basically wasting my life away feeling sorry
for myself, I’ve finally gone and got myself a job. Yet, I’m finding it a
little difficult to be happy. What’s the reason? I’m starting to feel some
negative energy flowing through me again–thoughts like ‘I can’t do it,’
‘You’re not good enough,’ and a lot of other ‘what ifs’.

I should be happy that I’m finally working in a company that I’ve always want
to–a position of Visual Effects compositor, leading a team. I should be
happy, but there’s this nagging thought that I might not be capable enough.

I can DO IT!

That’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself. It’s 4 in the morning, I’m
feeling fearful of my third Boss, who I’ve heard has a short fuse. Even though
I know him well enough, I think I have to remain calm and tell myself that
it’s nothing that I can’t handle.

“I’m good enough for the job, I am calm like the sea, I’m in control of my
feelings and I’m polite and choose not to flare up at anyone”

Never something easy when you’re starting a new job. You never know whether you’re going to be happy, whether you’re going to have trouble with your new colleagues, if your new Boss is going to hate your guts. It’s been 4-5 years since I last worked for an employer, today is the very first day.

How was it? Not too shabby, however, I find myself jealous of the attention an ex-colleague was getting–Pitiful–I know. It’s 3 in the morning and I’m tossing and turning, bothered by the fact that I’m never going to be anything good. Then it hits me: I care too much about what others think about me.

Sure, we should all have a healthy interest in what people say about us, take it with a pinch of salt and it makes living a lot easier. That’s not mentioning that my ex-colleague is someone who always like to pour ice-cold water down your back when ever you’ve achieved something of importance–truly self-centered.

It took me 6 years to realise that. It might not be too late, but I should take control of my head and emotions and just do my best in my new job–end of story.

Finding a new job is never easy for me. It’s a little tough when
you’ve been without one for the longest time. I’ve received about a
hundred phone calls from concerned friends, asking where the hell I’ve
been. It seems that everyone is more concerned about me than I am for
myself. Is it so tough for myself to care for me?

I can’t get the difficulty in finding a job. It should be easy, since
I should be able to pull in a few favours.

Anyway, this is posted from weblogger. I gotta keep moving.

Using blogpost to manage and post to your wordpress blog is not exactly intuitive. There are commands and flags used in the command line that you need to remember; on top of that, you have to learn how to use AsciiDoc and a little HTML. What’s even worse—the documentation from Blogpost official site is not exactly informative. Sure, there are helpful text to be found there, but you have to dig pretty deep and keep an eye out for important information regarding the use of blogpost.

In any case, I have some notes to share here; mostly on the commands in the terminal.

For posting: <quote> $ blogpost create [your-asciidoc-text-file.txt] </quote>

For listing your entries: <quote> $ blogpost list </quote>

For deleting: <quote> $ blogpost delete —post-id=[ID-number] </quote>

For updating with your blog file: <quote> $ blogpost update [blog-text-file.txt] </quote>

For categorising: <quote> $ blogpost cat categories=[categories-seperated-with-commas] [blog-file] </quote>

That’s about the long and short of it.

Linux command line applications suffer from a problem. The commands written into the programs are not universal. That means commands from one program to the other conflicts with what you’ve learned. Take for example Audio player X uses ‘n’ to skip a track. That’s not the case for Audio player Y—if you decide to change another music player(Maybe you just need a certain feature in Y).

That’s probably the biggest problem surrounding CLI applications—the programs are just not as intuitive to use. Other than that, not having flash, java… etc doesn’t really drive me away from CLI. Fact is, I’ve learned a lot more about concentration after using command line applications—Just using bash itself taught me quite a bit. There are minimal distraction when you’re typing a document in VI/Emacs when you’re running everything full-screen. You can argue that it can be achieved in X too.

That’s too true, but CLI uses less resource. I can run elinks, Emacs, mpg123, mutt without putting a dent on my ‘pretty old’ P4 1.7GHz with 256 RAM machine. Sure, I can use a light windows manager like fluxbox, wmii; but I’ve gotta used to the command line system.

A guy from Ubuntu forum decided to go without GUI for 30 days—that was about a month ago. Nothing but CLI applications, no GUI—at all. Little did he know that the Linux community is so intolerant of his choice of Distro.

On his 12^th day of going commando, someone from a general Linux forum started dissing him, calling him a fag.(not the exact word, but the meaning’s the same) I don’t understand the Linux Community at all. Maybe that guy just belongs to a very small group of egotistical 1337 71NuX h4×02—he’s still a douche bag. Behaving like a 10 year old on a public forum is really poor etiquette.

He doesn’t like Ubuntu. So… wtf?! It’s freedom isn’t it? The ability to run Linux on your x86 hardware is freedom. Paying nothing for your software is freedom; choosing Linux over Windows, OSX, Unix, OpenSolaris, BSD… etc. is bloody freedom, isn’t it?

It’s like dissing someone who chooses to eat banana flavored ice-cream instead of the original vanilla. That sort of behaviour is ohhh sooooo L33T! So bleeding juvenile. So what if someone decides to use Ubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, Arch Linux, Mandriva, Fedora or whatever Linux. The bottomline is this: It’s still LINUX! Even if he decides to run Windows, and decides to stick to Dos for the next 30 days, I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.

Sure, that bugger can exercise his freedom of speech, but everyone can see that he’s a dumbass. Enough said.

This is my first time using AsciiDocs to write a blog post. The irony is that I have to learn how to config and post from the command line using: Blogpost 0.9.1. Blogpost 0.9.1 was created by Stuart Rackham. After creating docs, manpage with Asciidoc, he found the need to submit a asciidoc text file to his chosen blogging platform—WordPress. That’s when he started writing Blogpost, all so that he could create a .txt file with ascii syntax and post it to his blog from the command line.

In any case, I’m just going to try out for this once.

One of the reason why I use Arch Linux is for it’s package management system–pacman. A simple to use package manager, even though it does not have a GUI. Every upgrade, installation of new packages, updates is done from the console. I’ll be showing the few commands I use when installing, updating, upgrading my system.

# pacman -Syu

This simple command, syncs with the respositories and checks for updates to your system. If there are upgrades to be had, it will prompt you after synchronizing with the remote server.

# pacman -Ss name_of_package

Searches database for package with specified string in it’s title or description. This is good if you’re searching for a package you’re not sure exists in the database.

# pacman -Sy name_of_package

This command installs a package.

# pacman -Scc

Removes the cache from your system.

# pacman -Rs name_of_package

Uninstalls package and it’s dependencies.

# pacman -Qtd

Searches for orphaned packages no longer needed. After which, it asks if user would want to uninstall the packages.

These are the very few common pacman commands I use in Arch Linux. With these few commands, you can keep your system up to date.

I get weird looks from friends when ever I boot up Arch Linux on my eee pc. The same can be said when I load up Emacs/VI to type something. After all, it’s a console application for text-editing. In the world of Windows/OSX, where word processors like Microsoft office rules, it’s akin to saying that you’re a vegetarian for ethical reasons.

I can clearly remember the first time I installed GNU/Linux on my machine. Back then, I thought that Linux was an OS reserved only for the geeks or programmers. I wasn’t too far from the truth. The path to GNU/Linux is tough and required a certain know-how, using strictly text-based application is worse. There are no cute icons to ease your soul. The only thing graphical is the blinking cursor. Some would call such endeavour masochistic. Why did I ditch the GUI? Doing more with less.

In an effort to focus on writing and nothing else, I started on a search for a text-editor that allows me to turn off all the useless tool bars, menus. I found Q10, a full-screen text-editor for Windows. It was a joy to use.

After dropping my last 500 bucks on a Asus eee pc 900, I proceed to find the Linux version of Q10 for my box only to find out–Q10 has no Linux version. That’s when I decided to find an alternative to Q10. After a search on google, I found Emacs and VI. Both text-based applications where the use of the mouse is considered sacrilegious. An affront to all things GNU.

At first, I bemoan the dead of my mouse in Emacs. After learning the key-strokes in Emacs, I found that I can do things in Emacs with relative ease and came to love the idea that my hands don’t have to leave the keyboard at all. It greatly increase my productivity, not to mention that I’m more focused on the screen than ever, since I don’t have to deal with a certain irritating paperclip asking if I needed any help every 5 minutes.

Today, I can surf the web, read my mail, write, instant message all from the console without the use of a GUI. Is it easier? For certain it’s a big NO. So why use command line applications at all? It’s all for simplicity’s sake. Do you remember the days of WordStar? Nothing but just a word processor, it’s effectively just a box with nothing but WordStar loaded. Just for word processing, a far cry from the word processors of today. Those days are far gone, but in the search for more processing power, we keep updating our software like we need the latest glitzy features, when all we need is a blinking cursor and a keyboard.

That’s good enough a reason for me to ditch the GUI and return to the world of console applications–where simplicity rules.

29 years old. 8 months ago, I was lamenting to everyone that I don’t have a carreer, house, car and financial stability. 3 months ago, I folded the business that I had started 4 years back. My partners and I split ways and I haven’t been returning calls from friends, associates, clients. It’s been 3 months now–I have to get my life back in shape. The difference is that I’m no longer chasing after boatloads of cash and a life of glamour.

That’s just not me. I’m going the opposite… life in text-mode. Just like how computers were first invented, simplicity in text and cutting the clutter out from my life.

This post serves only as a shout out to the world. I haven’t thought about where I’m bringing this journal to. One thing for sure–I’m going to stop feeling sorry for myself and–be contented with life.

Turning 30 in a year’s time. It’s scary when you don’t know where your life is headed. First thing–I have to fix my life up.