this girl drives a tank

Sarah and her boyfriend have not been getting along lately, to the point of him sleeping at his buddies house. I am sort of stuck playing the sympathetic shoulder for her while at the same time trying to talk to him to help him see her point of view with their issues.

I do not really like this role, and shes all depressed which makes me depressed and he has hinted about moving out, which is terrible for her, they have been together almost four years now and I had hoped for a wedding to be honest.

I need to figure a way out to sync my home directorys accross my 3 computers. My server has all the mail and irc stuff, and all my mp3's, my desktop has all my files for work and all my photos etc, plus a copy of all my mp3's so I can play them locally, and my laptop is where I do all my "learnig C" stuff, and web surfing from.

So, I think rsync would be a hassle as I sometimes make changes to files on all 3 of the computers, at any given time, it would get confusing probably.

NFS is most likely a better idea for this but I havent really used it before and it must be slower to write files to another computer across the network. I will do some reading on it later I guess.

I havent played much bzflag this week and I will likely play even less as I get more into this book of mine, every time I turn the page, there is a mile of programs I have to type in and run, and then figure out what exactly is going on. Its not like i thought it would be easy, but its clear to me I cant have much recreation time if I am serious about learning this.

My "IT guy" is not convinced I need a new comp at work, so I will have to instead convince my boss, hopefully that wont be too hard, he has always had the "as long as you get your work done" attitude with me, and given me what ever I ask for.

I think some of my lag issues playing bzflag can be attributed to the fact that my roomate has khazza running, I just looked at his comp and it seems he is sharing some movie, its 2 parts, 298mb each, seven people downloading at roughly 60kb/s :(

I might have to lay down some admin kung-fu on his a$$....

I am not a huge fan of the Doors but a couple of their songs are pretty cool. Some interesting covers have been made of "light my fire" so I thought you might like to hear a few.

The fact that Al Green is in one of the remixes tells me maybe the Doors didnt write that song, as I am pretty sure Al predates Jim Morrison, but I havent googled that yet.

This is the Groove Armada/Al Green version.

Here is Shirley Bassey/Kenny Dope.

This is a nice and sultry Thievery Corporation cover.

And finally my favorite I think, another Shirley Bassy, this time with Twelftree.

"If I was to say to you; Girl, we couldn't get much higher.................."

Today I will attempt to upgrade nanologger to the newest stable version. I hope it works. Do not adjust your browser.

There is an online comment service pointed out to me by XTina that I have signed up for and hopefully will be able to get that working.

Last night I tried to build the cvs version of bzflag with some difficulties. It finally built after adding some xlib-mesa-glu packages but then wont run, seg faulting with the interesting error message: Fatal signal: Segmentation fault (SDL parachute deployed)

On the C front, I did manage to finish all the exersices in chapter 5 of my book with the last one being a program to add the digits of what ever number the user inputs and display the total. This time i didnt use any books or the web and wrote it from scratch, so when it finally worked, although still being a small pretty much useless program, I did allow my self some measure of satisfaction before starting the next chapter. Here it is in its glory

One thing I noticed about C is that no matter how complex the program is, it still is only made up of functions and once you learn the basic syntax, you can then take little chunks of a much larger program and start to piece together what it actually does.

This is not to say its easy, it isnt, it took me forever yesterday to write two little programs that do silly things like find the factorial number of "n!"

But, when looking at a much larger program, like the bzflag server file bzfs.cxx I can see now some things I recognize, and thats at least a small comfort.

I have tons to learn of course, like how all the files in a program relate to each other, what .h files and .o and what makefiles do, but so far, I am not put off by it as I expected I might be by now.

My hard drive that I was having prolems with on my desktop, seems to have died. I did that md5sum check on it, a filesystem check and it ran ok for a month or so. Today it wont even boot up and the bios wont recognize it at all.

That in itself isnt the problem, I can replace the drive, but I am now worried about my mp3's on my server. The desktop was basically a backup for 77gb of music. The server now has no back-up whatsoever and this makes me uncomfortable.

I shutdown my webserver and shutdown samba, then unmounted the mp3 partition, so nothing is accessing the files. This will have to do until I get a new drive in my desktop. Then I can rsync the mp3's back over to the desktop and breath a sigh of relief.

How do you back up 77gb of music? I was told never trust HD's and burn to cd's I assume there are linux apps that would keep track of a libary of cd's, but havent really looked yet. Its time to get a better solution to my back up needs.

I'm thinking 77 gmail accounts?

Apologies for not writing more often. I have actually not only been busy, but have spent a lot of time lately learning C, I have resorted to taking my C book and laptop away from my desktop to a quiet corner in the apartment where the distractions are somewhat less.

Bzflag is one of the main culprits, its so tempting to take a little break when I get stuck on something. IRC of course is a second culprit.

IRC is one of my favorite apps, as it lets me talk to old friends, meet new ones and generally hang out with a more geekier set of people than my regular circle of freinds. In fact, I dont have any friends that are really into computers. This doesnt bother me so much, but it would be nice, for example when we are out sitting having a drink, to mention "I cant wait for sarge to be released" and actually have someone know what I am talking about.

IRC also is a killer way to get a quick problem solved. I used to feel guilty about popping into a channel, and asking if someone knows how to do this or that, and im having problems configuring whatever.

If it something major, like X or kernel recompile, yes, I will take the time to read docs, try some things and then ask. But if its minor, and google doesnt immediately solve it, then I wont hesitate to ask, lifes too short to read every manual

Anyway, I have resorted to logging out of IRC, doing my work and logging back in if I have a question. I am sure I am not the first person to equate irc with "unproductivity"

Oh, my car, it seems my speaker isnt blown and it was a loose wire so I am exonerated in Dads eyes which is a relief! He returned the car to me the other day content that I was in fact looking after it.

I was presented with a stats page for my blog which finally gives me at least some idea of how many people read it. The monthly figures are interesting and also the "search" terms that led people there too.

It looks like im big in Austria, and not so popular in Sweden, I will work on that I promise.

Time to go eat something..

(Sweden is great!!)

My bzflag playing days seem to be numbered, I now lag on the Ducati server to the tune of 220ms, pretty much consistantly. Seeing as that server is the most popular for the style of game I like to play, it looks like I will have to either hang out on some less laggy but empty server or do something productive instead.

My Mom is mad at me I think, she made some chicken and leek soup, which I had always liked before, but I politely declined to eat it, and she wanted to know why. About a month and a half ago i was eating a piece of chicken and saw one of those little veins in it, I got really grossed out for some reason and have not eaten any meat since then. I still eat fish and lots of veggies of course, breads and the like, but meat just turns my stomach at the moment. Mom seems to think I need meat to be healty and I am just being ridiculously oversensitive to a little vein.

I am not in Dads good books either, he noticed a little crackling noise in one of the speakers in my car. I told him it went like that suddenly a while ago, but he is sure I have "blown" a speaker and has taken the car today to investigate.

Dad and I dont see eye to eye regarding my driving. I was on the highway with him once and although there was little or no traffic, I was changing lanes avoiding as many of the bumps as I could in the road. Dad was impressed that I was concerned about my car enough to avoid a bump, but became annoyed when I told him "the bumps make the cd skip".

We hire contracting companies to build our cell sites, so we have a bidding list, and to get on the list, you have to demonstrate that you have some knowledge of how to install the antennas, cables and radio's and you will be able to meet our specifications.

So we have about 60 different companies that usally bid on our work. This week I put together a package with 4 new sites on them, emailed all the drawings off to the contracters and arranged a "bid walk", this is where my boss goes down to each site with a rep from all the companies and walks them through all the ins and outs of what we need.

So I get the email today from one of the contractors. It was an internal email this guy had meant to send to the rest of his office but had somehow CC'd me.

It detailed how they were going to re-use material from old jobs but bill us for new stuff and mentioned some other ways he thought he could cut corners.

"....they wont know its old cable, as long as it sweeps out fine, we can use it.....lets really fsck them on this one...."

I thought omg you dumbass, and showed my boss, who then showed his, which of course resulted in that company being removed from our bidding list, permenantly. Not only that, there are only four cell phone providers in Canada, and we all know people that work for the competiton as many of them used to work for us and vice versa, so this email made the rounds of all four companies resulting in one of the other companies also dropping them off their list.

My boss said he sent an email to the contractor with some choice words but has yet to hear back. I cant belive you'd be so sensless as to not check who is being CC'd if your talking about that kind of thing, and furthermore, why would you need to send out an email to that effect? I think I would not want a record of that, if I decided to do something similar. Just pop your head in their office door...." hey, lets rip these guys off"

I took last night off from the bar and tonight also, so will try to tackle some more C after supper tonight.

Im hanging in there so far, not toatally lost but not totally getting it all either. Linixchix has a programming mailing list so I can at least post some questions there if need be, and of course my irc friends have been great, and will counted on for more help I am sure :-\

This weekend my boyfriend will be gone away so I will most likely chill out around the house and hopefully get some computer time in.

I promised I would give Gentoo a fair shake and I think I have, its been well over a month of solid use on my laptop, but I must be honest, I dont know if its much faster than Debian would be with the same kernel/hardware/software.

It probably is, but there has been no instances of "wow thats so much faster" I haven't really learned more about linux either, basically Ive learned how to do the same sysadmin stuff I did in Debian, but use gentoo commands.

I also dont feel that there is more "up to date" software in Gentoo than in Debian sid. So all those "advantages" of becoming a gentoo user have yet to really pay off for me. If it sounds like I am talking myself into going back to Debian, you might be right.

I have admittedly been neglegting to write this past week, but from Sunday until today I have been doing night time bartending + daytime office + gym, get an hour or so on my computer, then back downtown to work in the bar.

The good news is I have put a huge dent in my car payments and have avoided a ton of interest by putting all my extra cheques and tip money toward the car.

The bad news is I am a bit of a zombie at the office, usually not waking up properly until mid-morning. Yesterday I ordered some parts for one of my company's cellular transmitter sites. They cost $8500 each and I ordered 12 of them, after the order was processed, and our payment was went through, I discovered I was only supposed to order 2

You might remember my little brother, the one that totally fscked up our day when we had to move into this apartment? The one that I have to drive all over the city to get him as hes not allowed Dads car, and everytime I bring him someplace, he hits me up for 40 bucks or more.

Well anyhow he shows up at my work today, happening to be downtown, so I took him for a bite to eat and he hands me a book he brought with him, Programming in C, He mumbled something about it being "half decent". I thought it was sweet of him, as he rarely takes an interest in what im doing computer-wise, I think he is still reeling from being my "support guy" when I used to use Windows 98 with no virus protection back in my glory days of computing.

Finally one day he brought back my computer with Mandrake installed and Windows gone, and in many ways was responsible for getting me into linux.

I recieved several emails regarding my C problem yesterday and it turns out there is nothing wrong with either of those examples.

Its just a case of me not noticing that one of the while loops needs to specify conditions, which would go inside ye olde curly braces {}, so putting a semi-colon there would be silly, and the other example, the "while" is at the end of the loop, so would need a semi-colon for sure.

Little miss smarty-pants needs to read more, absorb more, question more, before throwing a hissy-fit at the authors of the tutorial.

For the record, my apoplogies to the University of Leisester.

My friend Jackie is celebrating her birthday today, so if you see "Jolly" on freenode, msg her a "Happy birthday"

I watched The Cooler last night with my bf, it has Alec Baldwin and William H Macy in it and although it looked good in the trailer, it wasnt that great for me, I did think Alec Baldwin did a good job though.

Oh, my Dell laptop has 256mb of ram, and I have since buying it, from time to time looked at Dell's website to see about the cost of buying some more ram, it didnt occur to me that it dosent have to come from Dell, and someone pointed out to me that I can get aftermarket ram from pretty much anywhere, so yesterday I ordered another stick of 512mb. Next week sometime I hope to get that, and at a far cheaper price than Dell.

As if my little life isn't chock full of enough frustrations, the tutorial I am attempting to follow has decided to further confuse me.

Consider these two examples from the document:

#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
        int count;
        count=0;
        do
        {
                ++count;
                printf("count is eqaul to %d\n", count);
        }
        while (count < 30); /* terminated with a ; */
}

That was one type of loop, a "do while" loop, so basically you tell the program "do (some stuff) while (this condition is true)

Then there is the "while" loop:

#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
        int count=0;
        while (count < 30 ) /* not terminated with a ; */
        {
        printf("count = %d\n", count);
        ++count;
        }
}

Which says, while (this condition is true) do (some stuff)

Both of these concepts are clear to me and why not? They are pretty basic and I have seen this type of loop before in bash. The problem is the syntax.

while (count < 30 )

is terminated with a ; in one example but not in the other. Both of these little programs compile without a hitch with one semi-colon terminated, the other not. Add or subtract the ; from either program will result in gcc barfing up all over the place.

So, after trying to unsuccesfully figure this out, I have simply moved on and hope that it wont be an issue down the road. I will just add the semi-colon for the time being on a "do/while" loop and cross my fingers and toes.

I really should go do night school or something, I cannot debug tutorials, figuring out gcc errors is hard enough, let alone tutorial errors.

I was in Best-buy recently with my boyfriend, while he was off drooling at the plasma televisions, I wondered over to the music section and saw a soundtract for the movie Brassed Off, one of those films that makes you laugh, feel happy and sad all in one.

There is a wonderful scene where Tara Fitzgerald attempts to convince the all male members of a brass band to let her join, of course never having had a female member they were none too happy until she stepped up and played a beautiful flugel solo called Aranjuez Con Tu Amor, after which she was promptly accepted into the band.

A friend of mine, a software engineer for Sun, emailed me yesterday, and set me straight about the added cost of a large cup of tea versus a small cup of tea.

"the only differance between a jumbo and tiny cup is hot water"

and energy.. and water has a very very high specific heat capacity (a degree of heat for water takes a lot more energy, it's why hot water is so dangerous, eg water @ 60 degrees holds a lot more energy than the same of weight of copper at the same temperature - spilling 100g of vry hot water on yourself will burn you far worse than holding 100g of a metal at same temperature.)

if the tiny cup is 100ml, the jumbo 400ml, then the difference in energy is, given that water has a SHC of 4200Jkg/C and the specific gravity of water is 1 kg/l, and water is brought to boil from initial temperature of 10C (rise of 90C):

4200*0.1*90 = 37.8 kJ

versus

4200*0.4*90 = 151.2 kJ

it took 4 times as much energy to heat the water for the jumbo cup. and even more to the point, it took more than an extra 100 kJ to do so.

A 2kW 'kettle' imparts 2kJ of energy per second, so the tiny cup takes 18s worth of the power of a 2kW kettle to heat. The jumbo cup on the other hand takes more than a minute, 75s to be precise.

<snipped for brevity>

Anyway, a kWH over here, IIRC, is about 10 cent, dont know about canada. So that tiny cup, which took 37.8kJ to heat costs (to 2 significant figures):

38/3600*10 = 0.11 cent

while the jumbo cup, which took 151kJ of energy:

151/3600*10 = 0.42 cent

a whopping 0.31 of a cent extra!

So think about that next time you have your jumbo cup.. it took a whole 3 tenths of a cent extra electricity to make!!

Heh, I was under the impression he was working away on Solaris 10, evidently they have a "dept of tea" and Paul is working there

Anyway, Im over it now, I have accepted it as the cost of living and am not going to worry about. The other option is to make my own tea in the morning and bring it with me.

At lunch today I happened to be talking with one of the guys that works in the department responsible for developing marketing strategy's for our cellular packages.

He told me about how our company has researched every aspect of how an individual uses a cellphone. And not just usage patterns, but demographic statistics are also applied. Men use mobliles in entirely different fashion than say teenage girls. Adults for example do far less texting than teenagers and age and gender statistics are gathered for "time of day" usage.

All this info is considered, along with network costs in bringing a subscriber bundle to market. My company this fall will introduce a cellphone bundle aimed specifically at teenagers, especially teenage girls.

This is all fair enough, its a buisness after all, but there are so many nasty little tricks my company uses to boost the phone bill. For example, if you call 411, for directory assistance, when the operator finds the number you are looking for, you are automaticlly connected to that number, at a fee, so you pay once to actually call 411, and a second charge is added for the automatic connection, there is no "offer" to connect to the number for a fee as is commonplace in landlines. Not only that, you are then text messaged the number so that you may add it to your phone book. This is fine if you have free texting but most subscribers have a set number of texts per month, if your already over that limit, the 411 text will go on your bill.

This is one example of the many bill boosting techniques he told me about today and it gave me a little bit of sense of dissapointment in my company's buisness practice.

Oh and this morning Canada's largest coffee and doughnut chain, Tim Hortons, named after the ledgendary hockey player, upped their prices on tea, charging me $1.40 for a cup of tea that cost me 95¢ yesterday. Ok, its not going to break me I know, but it irks me as you still only get the same tea bag, the only differance between a jumbo and tiny cup is hot water.

Updatedb is as most of you know a utility to index all the files on your computer. so that you can search them very quickly, and I mean VERY quickly. The thing is, it is pretty cpu intensive and also the hard drive is totally taken over and sits thre going "click click click" for what seems like an eternity.

The problem I have with it on my laptop is that it seems to be run via some bootup script, meaning that everytime i start my laptop, I just get down to actually doing something, and updatedb starts up. making the system slow to a crawl. My desktop and Server are both rarely powered off and I never notice updatedb running on them. I think cron it runs at night. Anyway I am pondering disabling it somehow, or even making it run as part of the shutdown process instead of bootup.

I went to the farmers market today and bought all sorts of wonderful stuff, homemade maple syrup and blue/grey oyster mushrooms which I am not entirely sure what I will do with, but they looked so pretty.

I also bought egplant and squash, peaches, apples and some lovely mango chutney and fresh leeks. The market runs from June to September, with early September being the best time to go as our growing season has peaked by then.

I have mentioned Elinks before in this blog and now use it for most of my browsing that I consider "informative", that is, pages that I have to read alot of info, I find elinks inside a urxvt terminal so much easier on the eyes, with a black background, grey text and cyan bolds/links.

Elinks also has tabbed browsing and mouse support but I find it really faster to learn the keyboard shortcuts.

I wanted to import all my mozilla bookmarks though, and to do this, I set the bookmark format to "xbel" in the elinks options (press "o") then went to Linkagogo and uploaded my mozilla bookmarks, had it do the conversion and saved the resultant file, which I then placed in ~/.elinks.

You can convert pretty much any browsers bookmarks to the format of another browser which is quite handy.

I have a slight problem on my hands, this new Netgear wireless router has an option to mail me a logfile once an hour/day/week etc.., so I said sure, why the hell not, and let it email me the logfile once a week. I get a good chunk of mail every day that demands attention so I had up until today simply deleted the logfiles without looking at them.

Today I just peeked into one to see what exactly is being logged and noticed an entry something like: counter.sextracker.com, along with some other unmentionable sites. Hmm ok, I thought, well, I am sure its not me looking at that and am pretty sure its not Sarah, so perhaps its her bf.

I dont really care so much that he'd look at pr0n, he's not my bf, but Sarah and I have known each other for eon's, shes totally one of my best friends, and part of me wants her to know he's looking at that stuff.

Of course, it might be him and her together looking at it and naturally none of my buisness in that case...I doubt it as Sarah and I share alot of personal things and our freindship is such that she'd likely say "Oh my god, I was looking at pr0n the other day and...."..

So, ive turned off logging and decided not to even mention it. I am most likely making a big deal out of nothing.

I bought a few more CD's this week, some new stuff and some old stuff. Usually, If I have all the albums by a band, I will not buy a "greatest hits" album of them too, as there is no real point. Greatest hits albumbs are great for artists whom you know you only like a few of their songs. I made an exception with Supergrass as I am such a huge fan of them and will without hesitation buy anything they put out.

Here's an example of their infectious pop-band sound.

The second greatest hits album I picked up was good old Electric Light Orchestra I have lost my other CD by them and just couldn't bear the thought of not having such songs as Sweet Talkin Woman at the ready.

The Prodigy released a great album way back in the early 90's that I had never gotten around to buying. "Music for the jilted generation" contains quite possibly my favorite Prodigy song ever.

Finally, theNEWDEAL's album "Gone Gone Gone" came out last year and I managed to find it on sale. Episode 7 is my favorite song off it so far.

My Dell laptop's battery is lasting about 2 hours, this is with X running and the cpu at its native 2ghz speed. Last night I installed Cpudyn which allows me among other things to slow the cpu speed down from 2GHZ to as low as 200MHZ, so with a fresh battery installed I simply issue the command:

 killall -USR2 cpudynd 

And the cpu slows right down to 200MHZ, this of course makes gnome run a tad slowly, but, I did gain 25 mins or so of battery time. I will try again tonight without X. I can work quite comfortably without X, now that my fonts look nice with the framebuffer.

 killall -USR1 cpudynd

will bring the cpu back up to its normal speed.

There are some hardrive tricks I can do with cpudyn but I am not entirely sure I want to mess with that, I know I can make the drive spin down when idle, but im looking for power saving when the system is in use. My goal is 3 hours

I have cut back some shifts at the bar for the time being, it has made me a zombie at the office and although the money is great, it has I believe contributed to my overall grumpyness increasing somewhat :-\ I suppose I need my sleep now more so than a few years ago.

Some time ago I fixed my building superintendent's computer, removing the virii, ad-ware and "brower enhancements" for him, I then installed firefox and set up restricted accounts for his kids, thus far he hasnt had any problems, but has now gone and told some of his neighbours about me, and two of them have called about computer problems of there own. "my latop has a worm" was what one older gentleman told me on the phone last night.

My roomate said "I bet he's totally lost it, doesn't even have a laptop, its some old pizza box he opens up each morning and uses a dried up bun as a mouse, now he's seen a worm crawling around in the box

Anyhow, he was really nice and apologized for bothering me, so I agreed tonight to at least take a look at it. Basically in situation like this, I will go for a backup of any important files, emails etc onto my server, wipe the drive, reinstall XP how I think it should be done, remove IE and install Firefox, restore his data and hand it back urging him to get some virus software.

Not really a cure but hey, what does he want for free?

Yesterday was a day off for me and most Canadians and someone asked me in Irc what the occasion was, to which i replied "I dunno". I didn't have a clue what the event was and still dont't know. Even the girls at work and my boss had no idea, one of the girls told me not to ask around either, to keep my mouth shut

So anyway I wont make any more inquiry's on the subject and just go with the flow. This website lists it as "civic" holiday as do our Government sites.

My boyfriend's car has something wrong with the passenger side window (well actually it smashed to peices now...) and he would keep telling me "Dont wind it all the way up! and I of course kept forgetting about that and when we stopped the other day, I wound it up and it shattered He wasnt mad, but looked at me shaking his head for a while. I tried to diffuse the situation by repeatingly asking him Your mad at me aint cha??" So for the time being he is one of those "plastic window" people.

In recent weeks, while playing Bzflag I have had a lot of trouble seeing the green tanks against the backdrop color of the ground, I have tried different texture levels, lighting and brightness settings but have failed to come up with a reasonable solution.

What I would like is to set the ground color myself, its not like there are no colors left to choose from, I dont see why the ground has to be the same color as one of the tank's team colors.

I managed to avoid Niagra Falls yesterday to my great relief, instead I spent the day swimming in my brother's pool with my neice and nephew, a far more relaxing afternoon than the Fall's would have been. We made a great meal with steamed mussels in wine sauce, bbq'd shrimp and fresh Tilapia baked in a mushroom and olive sauce, served on arugula. I made a nice toasted walnut, pear and brie salad.

I fixed my font problem on the Gentoo laptop, in my XF86config file, there was for some reason no font path specified that pointed to my truetype fonts.

I dont know why this happend, but its fixed now, I know I didn't overwrite that file when I upgraded X, but something changed it along the way, something strange an mysterious......

The wedding was great and I had a great time, the stress for a Bride I think peaks at the actual ceremony and once that is done, and we have left the church for the reception hall things become a lot easier. At least this was the case for Lisa.

She looked awesome and more importantly was absolutely glowing inside, so i was so happy for her. They are off to northern Ontario for a week at the cottage and will take a proper honeymoon later in the Fall.

I will be going to Niagra Falls today, its quite a magnificent sight if you have never been there, but it is also the first thing visitors want to see when the come to these parts, that and the CN tower for some reason.

The actual falls themselves, the Canadain ones, not the puny little underachieving American falls :P, never cease to amaze me, and I always try to imagine what it would have been like, years and years ago, for the first native peoples to discover the falls, to have stood at the crest and seen them in their natural state would have been mind blowing I would imagine.

Today howver it has predictably become a "tourist trap" designed to extract the maximum amount of money from its visitors. The town of Niagra has to be one of the most gaudy and ostentatious places I have ever seen, replete with wax museums and neon signs. The downtown core is like a second rate Las Vegas strip, surrounded by motel after motel....

Yesterday morning I did an "emerge world" on my gentoo laptop and it had to update gnome, now all my console fonts are jagged and seem not to be anti-aliased anymore, I started the gnome font program and enabled sub-pixel rendering which helped a little bit, but it isnt what it used to be.

As usual, no Idea how to fix this and reading linux font howto's is possibly one of the fastest ways to drive oneself insane. I did notice some fonts were not loaded and some warnings were issued in my X server log, i guess I will start there.