Well, it’s 2:12 AM currently, and I’ve been up (I’m pretty sure) since I got up at 7:22 AM yesterday. This is not exactly voluntary, my right ear hurts – it’s plugged up with all this gunk from my sinuses… 🙁 This is really not fun at all.
Author: Steve Dougherty
Stupid Cold…
I can hardly hear anything out of my right ear at the moment.
Ultimate Paradox!
No hablo español. It translates to “I don’t speak Spanish.” The problem is that the phrase itself is in Spanish. Yay!
I Found an Awesome Studying Tool!
If you’re like me, although flash cards do work, they’re too much of a hassle to create, keep track of, and use. Quizlet takes all of that away – the hassle, the mess, and the inconvenience! It is an entirely web-based flash card substitute! Simply upload your flash cards, or enter them in the extremely polished input pages, and you’re good to go! It will even take away cards you get right, quizzing you only on what cards you need work on. It also has symbols for foreign languages, although not ¡ or ¿ for Spanish… It even gives you percentages… and mine is shooting up towards the ideal 100%… Thanks, Quizlet!
Just in closing, I know it’s online elsewhere, like where I found it, but making Spanish symbols is somewhat simple. Turn on NumLock, hold down Alt, punch in a code, and release Alt. This will allow you to create special characters. For example, 173 is ¡,168 is ¿, and so on. I found my list here.
Oh, and if anyone’s wondering why I wasn’t at school today, I’m down with a cold. It’s enough to make it hard to hear and whatnot, I don’t want to get others sick, and I’m not feeling too great, so…
EDIT: Quizlet also allows for customization of the character sets! In the “prefs” page next to username in the upper right. Mr. Andrew there seems to have either thought of and/or coded every possible helpful thing I can thing of at the moment.
Simlish!
If you like vague music or simply enjoy confusing people, try these songs! They’re performed in the language Will Wright’s Sims speak – Simlish. Rather than being a true language, Simlish is simply improvised gibberish. There’s also this video of voice actors recording some Simlish, which can be viewed here.
ACT Test!
Well, I’ve just finished the ACT test around half an hour ago. It was a doozy. I can’t remember ever being mentally tired before while my body was still chipper. It was a nice break from the routine of getting up at noon and getting straight on World of Warcraft, though. 🙂
W00t!
Got it! Turned out I needed to add some bizarre X server commands. I checked my /var/mail/steve and it was filled with complaints about the alarm not being able to find the X server. I should check the system mail more often.
Server
There’s been yet another change that you shouldn’t care about at all… I’ve changed the server from my Ubuntu installation that I severely crippled with my incorrect drivers and xorg configuration. I backed up all the stuff to a partition, which I then restored from, and had the server up and running in a matter of hours, the only snag being not having a password for the SQL database, which was easily fixedz0rz. I changed to Xubuntu, which has a less resource-heavy window manager, and I hope that will improve performance. I have negated any possible gains by beginning to have my server crunch some Seti@home workunits just for fun… Well, let me know of any problems. If all goes well I should be awakened by my server blasting “What Would Brian Boitano Do” from the South Park soundtrack at 6:30 AM. Let’s hope I configured cron correctly this time.
Amazing Ad Campaign
I’ve become yet another link in their viral chain…
Ubuntu Beta
I just installed the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 Beta. I must say it seems much better at hardware detection, and booted up with a much higher resolution. This is a huge plus because it doesn’t require users to know to open terminal and run sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to get a workable resolution. With Edgy, the previous Ubuntu release, the resolution defaulted to 800×640 on all machines I tried, small enough to make it impossible to see the entire installer window, which doesn’t seem to be that good of an idea. I hope it stops nagging me about how it’s using “Restricted Drivers,” which are closed source drivers from companies, making them harder to debug or fix. Load times for the Live CD were long, I hope that improves, and manually partitioning the drive with their partitioner was a hassle. Good thing it’s one-time-only. Link!
PS: If you’d like a dual boot, I’d suggest manually partitioning the drive. I’m not sure what guided does. I should probably find out, though. It may be easier…
EDIT: One of the things I like additionally is that Ubuntu auto-mounts your other filesystems and displays icons on the desktop. This means you can access your Windows files from Linux. If you have a recovery partition like I do, Ubuntu may add this to the bootloader and mount it as well. This can just be ignored in the GRUB menu, but if you’re like me, having a partition you won’t use on your desktop is annoying. In this case, run sudo nano /etc/fstab in terminal, and comment out the line that mounts any filesystems you don’t want. You should be careful mucking around in there, however. In my case, it’s the HDA2 mount line that I commented out.
EDIT 2: Argh. I started the Linux love flowing, and it doesn’t seem to stop. I also like the workspaces, which allows you to clear up your screen by switching desktops. Say you’re multitasking. Instead of cluttering your taskbar with all this minimized stuff, you can switch windows to another workspace. I’m having trouble explaining, but I like it anyways.