It is September and I only broke 40 once this past season.  And that was a 39 (+7) on a par 32, as difficult as that back-9 was, it still does not count in my book.  And, oh, I shot more than two handfuls at 40 (some were +3 on a par-37), and coupled a few of those near misses with 41′s to make for really nice rounds of 81.  But, with no legitimate rounds under 40 translates to probably another year gone by without breaking 80.

Today, I had a sound round of 86 on a par 71 at Norton Country Club.  46 on the front with another near-miss of 40 on the back.  I had 9 pars, 5 bogeys, 2 double, and 2 triple.  I made only 1 par save and 1 three-putt bogey (which occurred on the 10th hole, so if I had made good on the 2nd putt, it would have at least been that allusive 39); but it also means that I hit 9 greens in regulation.  While a 50% GIR is an acceptable ratio, it places a premium on the chipping game for the other 9 holes, heh, which clearly needs a lot of work.  And hitting 9 greens and making 0 birdies and chipping / short approaches for another 6 greens with only 1 par save means my putting did not help improve upon my score either.  And then there are the “unforced” errors (two three-putts and two lost balls), which also translated to 4-strokes I could have done without, but that typically comes to any course you play only once a year.

I am a realist.  Breaking 80 might never happen, but it is still good to have goals.  And while a goal with a plan is not a dream, it does not necessarily mean it will translate to success either.  I will continue my pursuit and I am certain I will have to continue to tweak the plan.  Golf can be self-defeating, as it is a game that you can never win at.  But you cannot achieve those personal bests without putting in the time to practice and play, so you must take each defeat as another step in the process.

Then there have been the upgrades on my personal workstation housing this web site on its own KVM virtual guest.  I opted to upgrade beyond the Fedora-supplied WordPress 2.8 to the latest 3.0.1 using WordPress automatic upgrade.  I did this mainly because I wanted to replace the software tab with downloads instead, using a new plugin to make for a spiffier files section.

I do not have a SAN for LUN live migration operations, but I accomplished the same by merely appending 10gb of filespace for this KVM guest’s disk:

dd if=/dev/zero of=newroot.img oflag=append bs=8192 count=1310720 conv=notrunc
kpartx -a newroot.img
fdisk /dev/loop0
vgscan
vgchange -a y vg_hurst
lvextend -L +10G /dev/vg_hurst/lv_root
resize2fs /dev/vg_hurst/lv_root
vgchange -a y vg_hurst
kpartx -d newroot.img

Speaking of opting away from a yum repository, for some fun, I upgraded to the latest Stella 3.2.1 over what is available in RPMFusion, because it has a lot of new enhancements and features that make this Atari 2600 emulator priceless.  And speaking of Atari, I added another Java-based emulator in JStella to my retrocomputing page.  Yep, it has been quite a full month of upgrades.

Motorola Droid X

Well, my Blackberry Storm is sitting idle in its own cradle; it’s man-genius click-screen days are all over.  It has been replaced by a smarter phone, Droid X.  I won’t bore you with all its technical details charms, but highlight only the things I find of interest.  And there are a lot of things of interest to me already, even after only a couple of hours of use.

Gad, it comes with a lot of memory.  There is 8gb internal and a 16gb removable microSD.  And you will find lots of ways to use that storage once you visit the Market app and try to weed through the apps, games, and other cool things to add-on.  Speaking of which, I already installed Adobe Reader, Labyrinth Lite, RingTone, and Touchdown Pro.  Labyrinth is the cool show-off 3D marble maze game, just because it is.  Touchdown is a (great) Microsoft Exchange client that simply works and is simpler to configure.  The built-in messaging integration to my personal IMAP and Gmail accounts take care of the rest.

While it has an HDMI output jack, I found its built-in Media Share to be a perfect companion with my Sony Playstation 3.  Droid X autoconnects to my home’s wireless router, discovers and allows for the PS3 to connect to it for streaming media (music, pictures, video) out of it for high-def viewing.  This will make the 8mp camera more friendly to use with this kind of easy integration of media files.

Overall, light to handle, touch is responsive, speech-to-text is accurate, apps are fast and intuitive, screen is large and vivid.  My phone just got a lot smarter — cool!

Cool.

Despite having some fantastic clones of classic coin-operated games, the VIC 20 has a remarkably small list of straight arcade conversions to its name, so a version of something loud and shooty like Berzerk was almost guaranteed to be popular here at Retro Gamer.  And since the developer is Robert Hurst, the man behind the excellent unexpanded Pac-Man clone Quikman 2008, we were pretty eager to get our hands on Berzerk MMX.

The VIC graphics are, unsurprisingly, chunkier than the original version’s but serve their purpose well, in-game sound effects are simple but again appropriate, and the action rapidly becomes frantic as the poor player-controlled humanoid fights for his life.  And while Berzerk MMX runs on an 8K expanded VIC 20, for the users blessed with 16K expansion there’s a second version, which ships with most of the speech from the original in place and goes even further towards replicating the arcade experience.

87%

I could not be more pleased with that — cool!

Now what to do with the 80+ cartridges I own?

gnome-shell --replace

… and the existing GNOME panel will be replaced using shell.  When done playing, simply press Ctrl-C from the terminal and you are back to your regular Metacity window manager (and then I use Compiz Fusion to reload Compiz).

Gnome Shell has a modern look & feel about it, runs smooth and stable, but it is clearly feature incomplete.  The project has it mapped to be ready by this September.  Although the feature list for Fedora 14 (Laughlin) has not yet been published, its project schedule is fairly regular and I suspect Gnome 3 and this shell will be an integral part of that release.

Speaking of Compiz and modern looks, I enabled a feature in its configuration settings manager, Login/Logout, by prefixing its Logout Window matching criteria to include:

(class=Gnome-session & type=Dialog) |

… with its fade out set to 2.0 seconds, saturation to 0.0, brightness to 75.0, and opacity to 66.6667.  That way, when I log out of my current window session, I get that “familiar” look of my session darkening and fading into the past.

A bug exists with Compiz in regards to customizing your mouse cursor theme — I prefer Oxygen_Zion myself, but Compiz insists on using the default, except when you open an application window, then the mouse renders in the custom theme until you travel outside its window — very annoying.  A workaround fix is to:

mkdir ~/.icons/default
cat > ~/.icons/default/index.theme << EOD
[Icon Theme]
Name=Oxygen_Zion
Comment=Black
Inherits=Oxygen_Zion
[Desktop Entry]
Name[en_US]=index.theme
EOD

… then logout / login to make the change persist.

The combination of the temperature and easier course slope rating was welcomed on both fronts.  And it translated favorably on the scorecard, too.  I played the South with a pair of 43s for an 86 total, with a sand-save birdie.  The West went even better with a 41-40 for 81, with a tap-in birdie and only 28 total putts.

I didn’t fare any better at TPC Myrtle Beach.  We played their back nine first, and I continued lackluster play with a 59(!), but finished the last two holes strong with two bogeys.  With the afternoon heat dissipated and an aspirin later, I found my second wind and completed the first nine with a 46 for 105.  The heat affected everyone’s play, and there were many complaints of heat rash from the excessive sweating and chaffing.  But the complimentary minty cold towels handed to us at the end of the round were most welcome — whew!