Again.

My new year resolution (HA HA) has been shot to hell because somehow I am right back to eating a canister of salt every 2 months.

I am somewhat worried that my end will be horrific with uncontrolled hypertension and associated kidney disease. But I am hoping I can make a deal with (e:Paul) to amputate my kidneys and heart out (with two different rusty elegant Victorian saws) at that point and die more peacefully (and in style). I also want to hire Malibu to sing some Sinatra melody during the "surgery".

I am off to get salt.

And chick peas.

And let's not forget the tomatoes.

I am really losing my patience with people who just can't seem to see the obvious or who have trouble thinking straight.

It's a sign that either I am reaching a point where I am not able to think straight myself or a point where I have no time for anything else other than my dissertation.

If it's the second, I hope I finish soon.

If I don't, I will end up as the most anti-social impatient jerk on this planet who views every second person with contempt. Seriously, the "quality-me" has been taking a nose-dive in the past week or so because everything other than finishing my dissertation seems irrelevant and every person who whines that things are more complex than what they want to make an effort to learn seems like a lazy no-gooder. I am also increasingly hating on former influences in my life who made me feel like crap at any point in the time I spent with them. I don't think I am an unreasonable person in general and I make a ton of effort to get along with people all the time. So their behaviour to me seems inexcusable now. I think I have come to a decision to put them on perennial ignore, going forwards. I cannot deal with such pettiness in my life anymore.

I know this non-humble intolerant ridiculously stupid phase has to end. I am seeing myself going from a person I am always comfortable being to a person I detest and totally not proud of. It is times such as these I wonder if 95% of intolerance in the world comes from people just being too busy with their own problems and not having any time or inclination to see anyone else's point of views. Or is it that they have finally come to a conclusion that their short lives on this planet is not worth wasting agonizing over things that seem like they are not quite right.

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Disclaimer: This is just me ranting over non-specific things mainly because I need my dissertation work to go faster and have no mindspace anymore to think patiently about things in general. You can safely ignore this post altogether because it's definitely not about you. The things and people who are annoying me definitely don't know about this blog or the fact that I whine non-specifically on it. Some of them don't even know I exist. LOL

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PS: I think the main reason behind all this intolerance is that I need to finish my dissertation. Every day that passes grates on my nerves and makes me lose one more pound to sleepless anxiety, adds one more extra dimension to my nightmares. It's not pretty.

Microsoft will buy Apple.

It's not unfathomable, considering the recent camaraderie between the companies. If their common goal is putting Google down, then the merger will possibly be their best weapon against Google now acquiring a mobile hardware manufacturing company (Motorola Mobility).

If you think about it, the two companies are pretty much the same. Mac is just a glorified expensive snobbish form of the newer Windoze operating systems (with crappy hardware to boot). Maybe the merger will result in better customer service for M$ consumers and better hardware for the Crapple consumers. It's a win-win situation.

The only thing that will possibly take a nasty hit would be the fragile egos of Apple fanboys/girls. But then who give a damn about the mental health of this minuscule bunch of self-obsessed rich (or heavily in debt) snobs anyway.

I just found that I could resize all windows by pressing Alt+Right Click and totally do away with the annoying practice of carefully hovering over window margins and waiting for the resize arrow to appear.

Sweet!

Conky's gone.
So has the upper bar with active windows.

Instead the right side panel has everything I need. The rest is via the right click menu.

I have decided to cook with fewer ingredients going forward. Not only does it make it simpler to cook, it also brings out the flavour of each component.

This fun stir-fry salad had:
-- Tofu
-- Bell peppers
-- Raw onions
-- Tomatoes

Seasoned with:
-- Dried red chillies
-- Cumin
-- Olive oil
-- Basil

So there are some amazing tools on linux for pdf manipulation and I am super glad that none of them involve Adobe's evil little tools.

If you want to cut out pages or manipulate PDFs in any way, there is no other tool as powerful as pdftk

sudo apt-get install pdftk

It's a command line-heavy utility but it does its job pretty well. I am trying to learn small pdftk commands on an as-and-when-needed basis. Desperation is truly the mother of learning.

For annotation, no utility comes even close to the Wine + PDF Xchange viewer combo.

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PS: I just found out there is a gui for pdftk called... gui_pdftk but unfortunately, I have not been successful in simply deleting a page from a PDF using the gui. Using command line at least does everything reliably.

How are you supposed to decipher something like this?!

I migrated from Fedora 15 to Crunchbang once more, and hopefully for good this time. I had to deal with one-too-many hangs and quirks and finally gave up. Having had to stare at the clock all the time, not being able to maximize over the upper panel bar, losing the use of super/windows key on several shortcut combos, being stuck with a left-sided dock and poor customizability of visual elements using GUI interfaces were complete dealbreakers.

Behold my new pimped out #!.

I am pretty relieved that I don't have to deal with the eccentricity menace of Fedora 15 now. Everything just works for me on Crunchbang just as it works for (e:Paul) on Fedora.

As (e:Paul) pointed out maybe the primary trouble is the general incompatibility of ATI graphics cards with Fedora 15. Maybe someday I will be able to rip out the internals of the laptop, replace the screen with a e-reader screen, replace the graphics cards and whatnots but that someday is definitely not today or anytime close. So for now, Crunchbang is home.

Or not.

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Some of those edit wars may sound so ridiculous, but what I really can't believe right now is I was involved in a particularly intense one not long back and almost got banned. Nopes, totally not telling which one. That identity and IP of mine are thankfully buried forever. ;-)

And I have to say, I love that term "Sublimation". Makes singledom sound way cooler. haha

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