What does “aoeu.ca” mean?

The CIRA sent me an email today saying they might give me a MacBook if I submit a story about my “.ca” address. Free MacBooks interest me so I figured why not.

He’s what I submitted:

“aoeu.ca” is not my business. It’s not my family page. It’s not any organization that I run. “aoeu.ca” is my way of telling the world two important parts of who I am. It’s part of my identity.

I have always been one to tweak my environment with the intention of being as efficient as possible. I use a customizable window manager for Linux (FVWM), I use powerful text editors (Vim and Emacs), and I touch my mouse as little as possible. Despite all these attempts to be efficient I was so frequently using the computer that in the course of my school year I began feeling twangs of RSI pain in my wrists.

One summer, whilst home from university, I was browsing the internet with a lowly dial-up internet connection when I came across a new tweak: the Dvorak keymap. By rearranging the keys on my keyboard it promised to not only to help me work faster, but also to have less strain on my wrists. I had only a few hours a week of work and thus lots of free time so I printed off a copy of the keymap, downloaded a typing tutor, changed my computer settings and started typing.

The Dvorak keymap did everything it promised. I can type faster (a modest 98wpm), and I only rarely have any RSI pains. I also have a great discussion item for whoever uses my computer; they quickly get pretty confused when the keys they press produce unexpected results.

Another part of my identity which “aoeu.ca” gives insight to is my proud Canadian citizenship. At the age of 10 my family moved to the USA and I spent the next eight years as “the Canadian”. I enjoyed living there, but all along I knew that I’d eventually want to head back home to Canada. University presented the opportunity to do so and I haven’t left (except to visit old friends) since.

So now you know a bit about who I am, so when looking to put up some sort of web presence and give myself an email address which would survive ISP changes (via email forwarding) I looked for something that would represent a bit of who I am while being quick to type and easy to remember. When using the Dvorak keymap if you type the “asdf” buttons on a keyboard you get “aoeu” on the screen, and the “.ca” shows off my nationality.

You’re welcome to visit “aoeu.ca” sometime. You won’t find much content or any sort of big business, but it’s me, and it’s a bit of who I am.

ping

I figured it wouldn’t look too good if I went an entire year without an update, so here it is:

- new baby

- new home

- new job

Besides that things are pretty much the same as before.

…

Hopefully there will be more frequent updates in the future. I’m working on a few SECRET projects at the moment which I’ll be interested in announcing.

GnuCash

Last month I took an interest in keeping my finances tracked and orderly and returned to GnuCash. I stopped using it when I got a Mac because I assumed that the Mac would have something that would have something with iLife that would do finances and I wanted to do everything the “Mac Way” *tm*.

The closest thing I could find was the free installation of Quicken that came with my Mac and it was all talk and no work. It started to seamlessly import all my transactions and let me create a budget and everything but there were no useful hotkeys (meaning lots of mouse work) and in the end it was slow and didn’t present anything in a way I could use.

I got GnuCash built on my Mac and  got it up to date. I didn’t find the budgeting features did things in a way that I could use (probably due to my complete lack of budgeting experience though) and so I’ve started to look at enhancing the Scheduled Transaction (SX) engine.

Before I could do this I had to be able to be able to build GnuCash quickly, and my Mini just wasn’t cutting it. This meant back to my Debian system.

Before I could do that I had to get osx2x back up and running

Then finally I got some work done:

http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-January/019742.html 

 http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-February/019788.html

http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-February/019791.html 

http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-February/019792.html 

This stuff just added an enabled/disabled flag to the SX’s. I hope to move onto some more “love bugs” and then try to get some sort of “SX Projection Report” that will apply SX’s against any set of accounts out to an arbitrary date.

I’ve been Mac-ified

Well after trying out my brother’s iBook while he was away I got sold on OSX and when my PC’s motherboard started to be flakey I went out and got myself a MacMini.

>It. Is. Awesome.

It’s really like they say, “Everything just works *tm*”. For example, my last entry was for the “barry” utility to sync my BB from Linux. Well I spent a bunch of time trying to get that working. I even did some work with the build system and submitted a patch to them. Then I got my Mac and it 10 minutes later I’m all sync’d up and out the door.

I guess my only complaint would be that I’m not able to customize the window manager to my liking (FVWM has me spoiled), but all in all, I’m a Mac user from here on in.

Screenshot of desktop

Here’s a shot of my desktop. My .fvwm2rc is here. I use rox-filer for the icons/background, Tril’s fvwm-theme script for window decorations, wmbiff/wmbattery/wmcalclock.

Teh Cute Too

That’s right, it’s a concrete truck.