Category: Blog

Whoops, its Late

Embarrassed by Prayer by Bombay Laughing Club
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/pm004/06-Embarrased_By_Prayer.mp3]

Whoops, I went over my bandwidth. I had planned on downloading as much as I possibly could the day before I left, so I wouldn’t have to care about the restrictions over break. But I went over by 62 MB…oh well. Guess I’ll need to find something to do for the next few days, now that my internet is worthless.

Also, its around 4am, and there are still a lot of people up. I guess its because of finals. This really isn’t anything new for me, but most folks in our hall don’t see these hours. I’m just using the lack of morning classes as an excuse to stay up even later. No complaints here. That’s not true, I have one: I become much more creative at night, but I can rarely get my ideas out fast enough to save them. And that’s provided I’m even trying to save them. I might be lying down, thinking “that’s really cool…” and do absolutely nothing about it. But tonight, for example, I tried to write some of my musings about the suburbs down. I was lying down, and started thinking, and liked where it was going, but as soon as I got up to try and write it all down, I had lost the mindset. Not sure how I’ll ever remedy that.

Still Crunch Time…but…

Shakedown Street by The Grateful Dead
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/gd87-03-30.nak.braverman.10922.sbeok.shnf/gd87-03-30d1t01_64kb.mp3]

So I’m right in the middle of crunch time, but I feel great. It is currently 0330ish, and I just finished a paper for my 0930 class, where I will have to take notes on what is going to be on the final. After that, I have to come back to my room and study for two tests I’ll be taking at 1400. Yesterday I was up until 0400 or so writing a paper for my Anthro class, before that I was working on Philosophy. And next week I have finals. But for some reason, none of that has phased me.

On Tuesday, after one philosophy class and before another, I was listening to a Grateful Dead concert (specifically, this one) and I started feeling really good. When I left to go to philosophy, I had Shakedown Street stuck in my head, and I guess that kept me feeling good. When I got back, I listened to some more good music, and I really haven’t stopped since. Maybe the music is to blame. Maybe I don’t care about school and haven’t noticed yet. Maybe I’m just happy. I don’t much care – I’ll take it.

Crunch Time

I hate crunch time. Those last couple weeks of a semester where all that work that the teachers didn’t assign or you didn’t do come knockin. Plus, right after that come finals, which are always fun. I’m putting off a 4-6 page paper right now. I don’t have much incentive to do it, because once I finish that, I get to work on another for a different subject. Not much point to this post, since I’m going to end up doing all of those things and having no fun, but I just felt like complaining for a second. That’s why I tagged this post ‘blog’.

Upgrades

Rocksteady by Houdini Roadshow
[audio:http://www.rockerblog.de/houdini-website/02_Rocksteady.mp3]

Last Thursday Fedora 8 was released, and of course, I wanted to upgrade. I was still using FC6, and I figured an upgrade over the existing OS would be ugly (in part because there is one release gap between the two, and I never really had a stable install of FC6), so I prepared for a fresh install. Thanks to Google, I didn’t have to worry about documents or the like. I’m still working on moving more of my media online (videos to Google video/YouTube, pictures to Flickr/Picasa). In the end, I only had about 12 gigs of files from my old system that I wanted to keep (not counting my external hard drive).

So I go to move those 12 gigs to the external, and something is wrong. My external is now read-only. After playing with it for a while, and figuring out that there wasn’t much I could do, I decided I’d just move the contents of the external back to my desktop, format the external, then move everything (plus the 12 gigs) back to the external. Great. While copying the 200-some-odd GBs to my desktop, the filesystem on the external corrupts. I have no idea why this happens, and after a couple attempts I find it cannot be saved. So I’m formatting the external, and that goes smoothly. I can now back up those 12 gigs, and install Fedora 8.

And I did, without any other issues. But I’m now down one very large music collection. I don’t care too much though: its happened before, I know I can rebuild. Just frustrating. So today, I wake up, and find out I went over my bandwidth. Crap.
Anyway, Fedora 8 is slick, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Linux.

Random

Don’t Ease Me In by The Grateful Dead
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/gd85-03-29.oade-schoeps.sacks.23475.sbeok.flacf/gd85-03-29oade-d1t08_64kb.mp3]

A week ago I was in the library, 5 minutes before my Philosophy class started. I was printing out the homework due that day (the printer in my room doesn’t work at the moment). I noticed another dude from my class doing the same thing. We both sent out assignments to the communal printer at about the same time, but he got to it first. The way the communal printer works, is it displays the queued documents, the user selects which they want to print, then they pay for them and the document prints. Turns out both he and I printed from Google Docs, so they were indistinguishable on the screen (just the Google Docs url). So he printed out his, and went on to class, and afterwards I did the same. I noticed on my way to class that I had his paper, so I suspected he had mine. I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t say anything to me. In fact, we never acknowledged that the mix-up ever occured. Not before, during, or after class. As we left the room once class had ended, he handed in my assignment (I checked to make sure he had in fact handed in my assignment, and he had), and I handed in his.

Maybe he never looked at his paper, and never noticed that the name on there wasn’t his, or the answer underneath that was shorter and differently formatted than his. But I doubt that. I’m pretty sure he noticed, and just went with it. I think that’s pretty cool.

MythTV

Its about damn time. Finally, my MythTV box is working. I credit KnoppMyth. I’ve tried many other distros (some of which didn’t even bundle MythTV) and none worked with my machine. Knoppix was able to do it, and the KnoppMyth distro made it so I didn’t even need to set it up.

What a weekend

Runaway Overlude by moe.
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/moe2007-09-29.flac/moe2007-09-29d1.flac/moe2007-09-29d1t03_64kb.mp3]

I had a mighty fine weekend. I think it is best explained by my Saturday. On Saturday I woke up in Bozrah, CT, which is out in the middle of no where – really beautiful country. I was at a party there the night before, and spent the night. Once everyone had woken up (11-12ish) we got working on breakfast. Well, some of us did. Not everyone has the ability to cook things other people would want to eat, but we all pitched in here and there. All to the sounds of the Beatles, which is much more fun in the morning than I would have ever expected. The vibe in that kitchen was so wonderful, it couldn’t possibly preface anything bad.

Mike was coming up to UConn later that day, and after that we’d be heading to see moe. at the Chevy Theater. Two VIP tickets had fallen into my lap Friday morning when my dad called me up and asked if I wanted them. He apparently had won them in a raffle, but had gotten the date wrong, and wouldn’t be able to go to the show. So I got back to UConn around 4ish, took a shower, shaved, and as I’m coming out of the bathroom Mike calls and says he’s here. So I go to meet him, get more food, and then we hang around the dorms a bit. At 6ish we take off for moe., whom neither of us had seen before. I’ve been listening to them for years, but I hadn’t been to a show yet. And the show was awesome. The song embedded in this post is from that show, and if you click the link above, it’ll bring you to the whole three hour show. See for yourself, it was a mighty fine time.

After the show we headed back to Middletown where we hung around for a while with some friends, and then passed out around 2 or 3. I want to do it again.