Actually late Tuesday night....
Armed with a quartet of Benjamins about a week before my birthday, I decided it was time to spend the windfall to update my home computer.
Now, friends, my computer wasn't blazing. The bulk of the innards had been purchased over six years ago, and the newest components (my sweet widescreen flatpanel LCD monitor that Deanna got me for Valentine's Day aside) were only a year newer than that. So encoding an mp3, for example, took a lot longer than you'd expect.
It didn't take me long to wrangle together a list of parts on NewEgg that fit my budget. It helped that NewEgg accepts PayPal as a form of payment, so the proceeds from the auction never even had to touch my bank account. Here's what I ended up with:
When I was building the system I stopped by my local Fry's Electronics to pick up a new (quieter) system fan and also scored a nifty box that gives me front-mounted USB ports!
All the parts came in just before my birthday, and so within a couple of days I backed up everything on my machine and assembled all the new hardware.
At first, things wouldn't even POST. It took me way too long to figure out it's because my pretentious RAM needed 2.0V and the motherboard was only providing 1.8V. Fortunately, the BIOS had an option to remedy this. Once my high maintenance memory was satisfied, the hardware worked wonderfully.
Then, I had troubles installing the newest Ubuntu (version 8.04, Hardy Heron). It would boot off the CD-ROM but just bomb out to a command shell shortly thereafter. Eventually I decided it was either my SCSI controller, the SCSI DVD-ROM drive (both very old), or a poorly-burned disc (courtesy of the nearly-as-old SCSI CD-R drive). So, to remove all those variables in one fell swoop (and is there any other kind?) I made an installer on a bootable flash drive instead, and the install worked the first time.
To compare the overall system performance of the old computer vs. what I now have, I ran the ubiquitous "doom3 timedemo" on both systems.
I'm pleased. I have also had a few days to import my old emails, my Firefox 3 bookmarks, etc. I also played through the demo for On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, now that I've got a machine fast enough to actually run it. It was good!
So, that's it. For my birthday, my mom essentially enabled this machine. Thanks, Mom!
Actually late Tuesday night....
My mother is a collector. She has shelves of books, DVDs, action figures, the gamut. She's no hoarder like you see on teevee, but if it's about sci-fi or vampires, you can bet she's got a collector's edition somewhere.
Someday we'll auction all that stuff off, and if inflation continues we'll be trillionaires!
Anyway, back when I was in junior high or high school, I played Dungeons and Dragons. It was a lot of fun for a detail-oriented creative guy like myself to draw up maps and plan campaigns and invent new spells and magical items, even if I never got around to gathering up folks to play.
So, when Mom saw a Dungeons and Dragons Original Collector's Edition in a local used bookstore all those years ago, she picked it up for me. It had several of the modules and was in pretty good condition. At the time, I'd enjoyed looking through it. Over the years, I also enjoyed showing it off now and again to fellow enthusiasts. But mostly it stayed in the box, packed away.
<cut to present day>
Shortly after the wedding, I was moving the last of my things into storage and noticed the collector's edition again. I hadn't looked at it myself in years and hadn't shown it to anyone else in even longer. I figured it was time to let it have a more appreciative home. I knew from searching around on eBay that there was a chance I could get a little bit of money for it, and I knew I'd have time over the summer to write it up properly.
So, armed with a digital camera, mad googling skills, and a couple of days of time, I carefully crafted a listing designed to appeal to the serious collector. Yeah, it took forever.
My diligence paid off. My auction attracted the attention of collectors in France, England and Australia. It was listed as an "Interesting Item Currently on eBay" on a Dungeons & Dragons Collecting Forum.
Ultimately, the bidding closed at $474.65. It cost me about 3% to accept the payment via PayPal, and eBay is going to take around $20 as their cut, but overall I netted well over $400.
And I owe it all to Mom's continual search for things that might someday be "worth something".
Actually late Tuesday night....
It's been a week now since my birthday, so I need to brag about how the women in my life have hooked me up with gifts.
First, I'll start with the gifts from my wife, whom I don't brag about enough. This year, almost everything she got me was from ThinkGeek
Speaking of homebrew, my first batch, a clone of Real Ale Fireman's #4 turned out very well. It was enjoyed by all. I gave away over a third of it (maybe even close to half), and I now have only one 22-ounce "bomber" remaining, which I'll probably drink sometime this week.
You can see the color of the homebrew nicely, but the head is a little underwhelming in this photo because I poured it and then took too long getting the camera ready before taking it.
I've already brewed my second batch, a Belgian White which should be ready in about a week and a half.
Back to the birthday list, my wife also made me a lemon box cake with lemon icing, a childhood favorite. And, since she'd made it a round layer cake, we got to store the leftovers in the cake stand with cover we'd been given by Chase and Charleen as a wedding gift. (They're no cheapskates; it cost quite a bit more at the time.)
So, that brings me to the other gift-bearing woman in my life, my mother.
This year, she and Dad are in the middle of moving into a smaller house, so she thought she'd just given me some cash. However, her plan for this year's gift actually began nearly two decades ago. For the rest of the story, see the next update.
If you're a longtime reader of this here blog, you might have suspected that "any day now" could mean a month or more. Pat yourself on the back or something.
So here's the super-abbreviated version: we had preordered Wii Fit, and so Amazon got it to us real soon after it was released. We've really enjoyed it. I can't say that we've been playing it very consistently lately, but it really gives a decent workout that doesn't feel like you're depriving yourself. If you've got a Wii (and by now you can probably get one if you're interested), I recommend it.
In motor car news, last month my car started overheating on the way to and from school. White smoke would also emanate from under the hood. I took to carrying several gallons of water in the trunk so I could fill the radiator before taking off, but I still had to keep the heater on and keep an eye on the temperature gauge. Eventually, the dreaded 'check engine' light came on, too. Of course, I was smarter than to push my luck for long, so I took my car to the fine folks at Midas in Georgetown, where my friend Gary is the manager. It turned out to be a crack in the radiator, and he fixed it up quickly and for quite a reasonable cost. If you've got car issues, I recommend them!
This month, I also got the timing belt and other associated belts changed. Three cheers for Midas!
Actually late Friday night....
Yesterday was the last day of classes for another year. Graduation was this morning, and Project Grad was tonight.
As per usual, I brought up a guitar and found a free room to do a little mini-concert for a dozen or two now-former students. However, this year was the first where I had as many original songs as I did covers!
For posterity, here's the setlist. Recorded versions of some of the originals might be on the Brothers Frail MySpace page. And there's a "video" of Isaac & Rebekah somewhere on YouTube.
Then, after a short break, I played a few songs from church. If you'd like to hear them, come visit us at Lakeline Church some Sunday.
It's very late, and I was up pretty early, so I just wanted to get those down before I go to sleep and forget what I had done. Stay tuned for an update about Wii Fit or one about my adventure with a cracked radiator any day now!
First things first: last week I needed to set up the Postfish on Ubuntu 7.10, the Gutsy Gibbon. I'd used it on a previous Linux distro, but had to figure it out all again. I couldn't find directions online anywhere, so now that I've done it I'm posting them here.
[mitchell@postfish]$ more postfish_svn_download.sh #!/bin/sh stamp=$( date +"%Y%m%dT%H%M" ) name=postfish-CVS-$stamp mkdir "$name" cd "$name/" wget --recursive --no-parent -nd -nv http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/postfish/ chmod a+x ./touch-version ./touch-version cd .. tar cfj "$name.tar.bz2" "$name/" #rm -Rf "$name/" [mitchell@postfish]$
That should pull the latest copy from Postfish's Subversion repository and also archive it for you.
[mitchell@postfish]$ sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev <snip> [mitchell@postfish]$ sudo apt-get install fftw3-dev
Okay, now that's out of the way I can finish the backstory.
I haven't been doing much recording at home lately; since my last move, my home studio isn't really set up for it. However, last week I needed to put together a couple of tracks to make a rehearsal mp3 for an a cappella trio we were doing at Lakeline on Sunday.
Paul was covering the melody, so he recorded it on the laptop at his house and then gave me the track on my flash drive. When I got it home and looked at it, I noticed some clipping. Postfish is pretty sweet for mixing down huge projects, but there are two things it can do that I've not seen anywhere else. If the audio is clipped, Postfish can magically reconstruct the missing data. And if there's too much reverb (say it was recorded live in a concert hall), Postfish can remove the reverb. It's spooky.
So I fixed it with Postfish, and then recorded my own harmony. I mixed the two tracks together in Audacity, and then sent the result off to our third, who learned it in less than 24 hours and nailed it Sunday morning.
For the record, the song was a three-part re-arrangement of Glad's five-part arrangement of Charles Wesley's "And Can It Be", which my brother and I have been singing since 1988 but had never done together until now.
A second problem I had was in getting readable copies of the sheet music to all the interested parties; the "original" is a handwritten score in pencil from 1996 or so, so the best we could do is scan it in and send JPGs to everyone.
So, this week when I should have been grading, I instead spent some time playing with LilyPond, which is really sweet (and programmer-friendly) music typesetting software. The learning curve isn't bad, and after not much time I've got a really attractive PDF of half of the first page. So I highly recommend looking into that.
Actually late Tuesday night....
Today (and by "today" I mean Tuesday) was a good day.
Things began last night, but it was after midnight, so I'll count it for the sake of the theme. Since my finances are more complicated now that I'm married, it's time to upgrade my financial management tool from a single spreadsheet with hand-entered transactions. After some poking around, I decided to try KMyMoney, which is probably the personal finance software best suited for home financial use on Linux.
I got in installed easily, because with Ubuntu that's fairly a given. Then, within a few minutes of poking around, I was actually able to get it to download accounts and transactions from my bank's website. And that was a pleasant surprise. Since banking protocols and open source software don't always mix, I figured it wouldn't be an option.
So after that small victory, I went to sleep and then got up in time to get to the testing site where my CS-2 students were about to take the Advanced Placement (AP) test in Computer Science. I've got sixteen kids taking it this year, which may be a record high for me. They all showed up in time and I was able to wish them well. So that's nice thing number 2.
I rushed out from there to get to school by 8:00, because we were having a special faculty meeting. I made it, and the superintendent was there to announce that our interim principal Brad Mansfield was now officially the principal. That's a very good thing; he's a solid guy and a good leader and a very good fit for our campus. Not to mention we've been waiting for that decision for nearly nine months.
The day continued well. We're covering arrays in CS-1, which are one of my favorite things in the whole first year. I also was feeling creative and came up with a couple of interesting new assignments.
The last period of the day was my conference period, and I was able to get caught up on a lot of grading. And that's also a good feeling.
Finally, today (Tuesday) is National Teacher Appreciation Day, so Chipotle was offering free burritos to anyone with a teacher ID. When I finally made it by a little after 9pm, there was literally no line (after there being 30-45 minute waits in the early evening), so I was able to get a tasty burrito and get out. Mmmmm.
There's another sense in which today is a good day, if I define today as Wednesday, May 7 -- it's my "little" brother's birthday! The other Mr. Mitchell is 31 today, though he may be spending it at home with Hayden, who I hear has pinkeye. Frowny-face-emotion.
Oh, and the beer-making continues well. I've finished both the primary and secondary fermentation stages and the clarifying, and I successfully bottled the nearly five gallons of ale into twenty-seven 24-ounce bottles Sunday evening. Now it sits and carbonates and "ages" or some such for about three weeks until it's at its awesomest.
Actually late Sunday night....
Yesterday I was on reddit reading comments about an article asserting that blueberries helped with memory loss. I ran across a recipe for a blueberry melomel, which is mead with fruit. (Mead is honey wine, as you may have already known.)
That reminded me that I'd always wanted to make my own beer. Several hours later, I read tutorials on the web, and found out that Austin Homebrew Supply is just a few miles down the road and one of the largest such stores in the nation.
So today I stopped by, picked up a fermenting bucket and a couple other odds and ends, a recipe and ingredients for a tasty ale, and came home.
Of course, I didn't get started until maybe 10pm, and like most things you try for the first time, it took longer than I expected. I finished the wort about half an hour ago and finished cleaning up about ten minutes ago.
If all goes well, there are just a couple of things left to do, and then about a month from now, I'll have five gallons of tasty beer! Hopefully bottled into 48 or so twelve ounce bottles. Which I'll have to give away a lot of; I can't drink 48 beers in any reasonable timeframe.
Austin Homebrew Supply also had ingredients for a "homebrew" cola, so I mixed up and bottled six 2-liter bottles of that. It takes a few days for the yeast(!) to carbonate it, and we're expecting it to be fairly mediocre, but it was a pretty inexpensive experiment.
Anyway, I'm due for some sleeping, I think. However, I shouldn't fail to mention that 'zymurgy' is worth twenty-five points in Scrabble.
Well, the sad tale is that I didn't make a single entry during the entire month of March. That's significant; I've never previously had a month with no posts, that I can recall.
Anyway, I'm breaking the silence to say that once again I had a severe allergic reaction to something I ate and had to go to the hospital.
Thursday night I tried a new Odwalla bar. I didn't bother to check the label, but it contained quite a bit of flax seed, and a little over an hour later, I started sneezing, having a runny nose, and swelling in the face. I took three Chlor-Trimeton tablets (the only thing I had on hand) cut band practice a little short, and drove myself home. Once home I took two Benadryl tablets and had Deanna drive me to the E.R. at Round Rock Hospital.
It didn't take long before they got me some epinephrine, though this time it was an intramuscular injection and so a lot more gentle. After an injection of Benadryl, Pepsid, and some steroids, they kept me just a bit and sent me home.
Fortunately, I had Friday off of school anyway, so I was able to sleep in two days in a row, which really helped things.
This time I actually took my mother's advice and made an appointment to see an allergist, and I today I actually went to the appointment.
Unfortunately, what I've got is called "recurring idiopathic anaphylaxis", which means "you keep having a severe allergic reaction to something, and we don't know what or why." You can't test for food allergies with a skin test (well, not reliably anyway), and although there are blood tests for dozens of food allergies, flaxseed isn't one of them. Oh, and even if confirmed, they almost never do immunotherapy ("allergy injections") for food allergies.
Since I've had flaxseed (accidentally) quite a few times since my last reaction, it's almost certain that there is some combination of factors at work. For example, one of my doctor's former patients only had symptoms when he ate chocolate on the same day he went running.
So, my command from him is just to keep my epi pen and benadryl handy, try to avoid flax seed, and pay attention to as many factors as possible in the unlikely event that it happens again. Not as specific an action plan as I'd been hoping for, but life seldom works that way, anyway.
So, in visiting my site today you'll probably immediately notice two things. First, you'll notice that I've updated the page! For the first time since mid-December! Rather than lump them into one giant update, I broke them up into chunks, with fake dates at the top of each one. So, no, you didn't miss the updates; I wrote all five updates (including this one) just now.
Secondly, you might have noticed the ads. It's not that I'm interested in profiting off of this silly blog. Actually, I'm planning to remove them after a month or so. But, I do plan to eventually put ads on Don'tBeCreepy.com, once there's more there that random people might actually want to visit.
And so I figured I'd give them a test-drive on this site first, just to see if the "payout" is worth the hassle.
If you're interested in an ad, then click on it. If you're not, then don't. And please don't just blindly click on the ads en masse; Google tries to detect such abuse, and they'll either lower my payout to compensate for "fraudulent" clicks, or, if it gets out of hand, drop my account entirely.
If you use Firefox and you don't like seeing ads on this or any other pages, I highly recommend installing the Adblock Plus add-on. It does a brilliant job of making ads just go away all over the web. I use it, which I guess means I'm blocking the ads on my own page.
Sweet.
It's that time of year again -- the 15th annual Leander ISD Continuous Improvement Conference. By popular demand, I repeated my session from last year: "Why Are My Kids Weird?".
They'd put me in a bigger room, and again the place was packed; I think there may have been as many as four hundred teachers there this time. It went really well, and I'm fortunate that there are so many people that want to hear what I have to say.
I've already been invited to travel to another school in LISD to give the talk again to just their faculty, which will give me a chance to record it.
If you're interested, you can download my speaking notes from my Don't Be Creepy site.
We took Deanna's car to get it inspected on Saturday and they gave it the once-over first, uncovering nearly $1800 worth of necessary repairs before it would be safe again. Now, the blue book value on her car, even in fair condition, is under $2000, so effectively her car was totalled.
We agonized over things for a little while, and finally decided to visit some car dealerships just to sort-of see how much a new car might cost us. After an uneventful stop at CarMax, we ended up at Classic Toyota in Round Rock, where we were taken care of by a salesman actually named Mohammed Merchant. We found a 2008 Corolla that we really liked and he gave us an amazing deal on it.
Seriously, if you're in the market for a Toyota in the Austin area, go to Classic Toyota and ask for Mohammed Merchant.
Anyway, Deanna's very pleased with the new car. She was driving a junky vehicle for way too long. Now I just need to get my car inspected....
When we got back to Austin from Pennsylvania and I was unpacking my bags, I spotted a notice in there that the TSA had searched through my suitcase because it was suspicious. I'm suspicious that the TSA was secretly just interested in the Wii that was packed in there. Draw your own conclusions.
Christmas in Pennsylvania was really relaxing. We slept a lot, saw some of the local sites, and it was good to spend some time getting to know Deanna's family a bit better.
Once we got back, we jaunted up to East Texas to ring in the New Year. It was a brief but nice visit.
Overall, my big-ticket gifts were:
Well, we're both back from Pennsylvania now and just about have control of our apartment wrested back from the cats. We're glad to be back home, even if it is colder here than it was in northern Pennsylvania when we left....
And we've been playing the heck out of Super Mario Galaxies since December 24. More on the Christmas report later; we both need some sleep.
Deanna left for Pennsylvania on an early flight this morning, and I miss her already. I'll be flying up to join her in a few days, however, so if you're in the mood to check in on four awesome cats or something, just let me know!
I've been passing the time with Project Euler, a "series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve."
I'm trying to do all the problems in Python, because it'll force me to learn the language better. So far I spent 8-9 hours on Saturday, 4-5 hours yesterday and about four more hours today working on it, and I've finished the first twelve(!) out of 172 problems.
No, sir, these are no FizzBuzz or 99 Bottles.
However, I probably spent the first eight hours on the first eleven problems combined, and all the rest of the time on Problem 12. I started out solving things in sort of the wrong way, and then learned a lot of math the last few days to try to improve things. My final version didn't actually use much in the way of new things, but it was still a gripping challenge, all in all.
Anyway, I'm jonesing to took a look at Problem 13, but I think it'd probably be better if I just went to sleep instead.
Over Thanksgiving I finally got a chance to play Portal in its entirety.
It's not a very long game, especially for more experienced gamers, but it was extremely well done. It had a solid (if uncomplicated) plot, a very neat atmosphere, and of course the puzzle-solving was excellent.
I'm not going to side with those that call it a feminist critique of the [first-person shooter] genre, mind you. It was, however, quite excellent. And my wife actually sat on the couch and watched me play the entire thing, so that should tell you something.
There's an original song that plays during the closing credits. And I've still got it stuck in my head nearly three weeks later.
If you've got a system capable of running Portal, you owe it to yourself to set aside 2-6 hours (depending on your skill level) and play the game from start to finish. It'll be more worth your time than two viewings of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, I can guarantee that.
Tonight at school we held a faculty talent show as a fund-raiser for Project Graduation. I performed a song I'd begun writing about a week ago, and I won first place!
The song is about Deanna, and it was the product of a recent songwriting contest with my brother and two other guys at church. I think the song did turn out very well, and even though I didn't have it quite memorized, I think I sang and played it pretty well, too.
I'll try to get a recording of the song somehow pretty soon. In any case, worrying about trying to get the song finished and get it ready to perform has really kept me busy the past week, so I'll be glad to catch up on some sleep.
In the past, I've written about my grading workflow and hinted at some of the software utilities I've created in order to speed up that workflow. At the end of last year, I had things honed to the point where I could grade several hundred (digital) assignments in less than an hour and get the new grades in the gradebook in literally seconds.
Well, the district's gradebook GradeSpeed has continued to improve over the years, and it's now fairly non-annoying to use. So this year I finally switched over, and am now keeping my grades in Gradespeed first and trying to get them exported from that to use in my own application (so kids can easily see which assignments they're missing, for example).
Well, I must confess that although grading over 300 assignments is still just as fast as it used to be, the putting of 300 grades in the gradebook leaves a bit to be desired.
Entering 300 new, mostly-perfect grades into my own gradebook would take, tops, ninety seconds. Entering those same grades into GradeSpeed took me more than twenty minutes. Ouch.
So you can bet that I'll be working on making myself some tools to get that bottleneck fixed in a hurry. If you're an employee from Campusware reading this, please, for the love of .NET or something, add some way to mass-import grades that are already in a digital form. Ditto for exporting them into a CSV or something similar. The lack of such has been on our campus "bugs" list for years and years now, and it keeps getting promised but never delivered.
Two more things I'd like to mention: my wife took me clothes shopping this past weekend, and now I look good. Quite a few people at church noticed the wardrobe improvement, and I could honestly tell them it's because I'm now no longer dressing myself.
Secondly: the David Crowder Band is playing tomorrow night at La Zona Rosa. We're taking a group of about fifteen. How is this concert not yet sold out in Austin?!? What is going on with the churches in this town?
Yesterday I took care of several "honey-dos" for my wife. Of course, since we're both a bit nerdy, they weren't of the typical sort.
The first was "connect your Linux machine to our wireless network using an ethernet bridge." Fry's Electronics came through with a jobbie by Buffalo. I just found out that Buffalo Technology is based in Austin, and their headquarters are only 5 miles from our apartment!
The second honey-do on the list was "get my printer and external storage working over the wireless network using a WiFi-capable print server." Again, Fry's hooked us up with a weird little device by TRENDnet.
While at Fry's I finally gave in and picked up a ($13) PCI card to give me some USB 2 ports. And then of course I needed a flash drive with more capacity to test it out, so I opted for a freakishly-tiny 2GB pqi flash drive (the i810), which is slightly longer but narrower than a US dime.
This technology-buying spree was sort-of precipitated by us finally getting to the AT&T store to get Deanna and I on a new wireless "family" plan, which should save us a fair bit. Plus she got a new phone, which is a big deal for her.
So, after accomplishing my two big honey-dos, that annoying 75-foot ethernet cable which ran through the living room is now finally gone, and Deanna can print from the kitchen table. Technology sure is sweet.
That is all.
I'd better do an update so that Mom doesn't think I've dropped off the face of the earth or anything.
Being married is really going well. I highly recommend being patient and finding an amazing spouse!
In Linux news, I finally switched from Fedora to Ubuntu. It's very slick, let me tell you. I'm having trouble getting my wireless Internet adapter to successfully get an IP address from our 2Wire wireless router, but I think that's the router's fault, actually.
Oh, and class is going pretty well so far. Most of the network issues that have been plaguing us have cleared up and my class sizes are all now back down to manageable.
So, for those not in the know, my wedding was this past weekend. Deanna and I were married in a beautiful ceremony at The Page House in Georgetown. We followed it up with two nights on the Riverwalk in San Antonio.
We're back and now moved in together (as you'd expect) and I'm back to work. I plan to eventually write up a bit more about the wedding, complete with pictures (much as I did for my Haiti trip a few years ago), but that'll have to do for now.
I've been back at teacher inservice for a few days, and am still trying to get my classroom ready for the students on Monday.
In my last update, I tried to explain why an experienced, technical user would prefer Linux over other operating systems. In this update, I'm going to explain why a non-technical end user might want to run Linux too.
Reason 1: It's cheaper.
A new copy of Windows Vista Home Premium costs $160 if you're upgrading from a recent Microsoft operating system, and it's $240 if you're not. Mac OS X v 10.4 (Tiger) is $130. Microsoft Office Standard 2007 is $400. Apple's iWork is $80.
By comparison, a copy of Ubuntu Linux is free. They'll mail you the install disks at no cost. And it comes with OpenOffice.org, a full-featured office suite that reads and writes Microsoft Office format files.
Perhaps you'll protest that you didn't have to pay anything for your copy of Windows; it came pre-installed on the last computer you purchased and was included in the cost. This is probably true. If you have never installed a new operating system on an existing computer and never plan to, then Linux probably won't save you any money.
Reason 2: It's legal.
Perhaps you built your own computer from parts and installed an illegally-copied version of Windows on there precisely to avoid having to pay so much for a legal copy. In that case, Linux can provide an equally-free but legal alternative.
Linux is software developed under the GNU General Public License, a copyright license that attempts to give you freedoms rather than take them away. In particular, the license allows you to legally make copies of GPL-licensed software, and also gives you permission to modify the software if it suits you.
This is the primary reason why Linux is high in quality; the licensing allows a single, motivated programmer to fix problems she may find with the program and then legally make those fixes available to everyone else.
I really like the moral high ground of running only legal software on my computer. I don't try to rationalize illegal copying by saying "Everyone does it."
Reason 3: Upgrade when you want.
Most computer users are on a sort of upgrade treadmill. When their workplace upgrades to a newer version of, say, Microsoft Office, they have to upgrade too to ensure compatibility of files. If I run Office 2003 at home and a coworker emails me a file saved in Office 2007 format, I can't open it. Once this happens enough times, an upgrade seems in order.
This is because Microsoft uses proprietary file formats, and changes them from time to time to force these upgrades. They are in the business of making money, after all, and if everyone kept running Word 97 forever, they'd make less of it.
OpenOffice.org, on the other hand, uses a public, open file format called Open Document Format (ODF), which has been standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The ISO is responsible for standards as varied as photographic film speed, pipe threads for pressure-tight joints, and the international standard book numbering (ISBN).
Linux vendors have no compelling reason to force you to upgrade to a newer version, so you're free to continue to use older software (with full interoperability) as long as you like.
The distribution of Linux that I run (Fedora Linux), provides free updates for the OS for a couple of years. Ubuntu does so for even longer.
Reason 4: Easy updates.
In Dan Martin's interesting post Things I can do in Linux that I can't do on Windows, this is one of his biggest. With a single, simple action, I can update every single piece of software on my system. I'm not just talking about security updates or anti-virus. In Fedora, I can type "yum update" and hit enter and get a new version of the kernel, the latest version of OpenOffice and Firefox and a security update for libpng downloaded and installed for free.
It helps keep my system stable and current to know that I'm always running the latest version of software, legally and at no cost.
Most of my readers know that I run Linux at home. But most of you probably don't really understand why. Let me try to explain.
Pretend that you enjoy working on cars; you're a real greasemonkey. Since childhood, you've tinkered with things mechanical. Taken them apart and put them together again. You used to spend weekends with your dad working on the engine of a classic car he was restoring. You even studied automotive engineering in college, and in some of your tougher classes you and a small group of friends designed real cars from scratch: from details such as computerized gear timings to wind-tunnel simulations for the chassis.
You probably couldn't actually build a real, production quality car from scratch on your own, but you basically know what all the parts do and how they fit together. You don't always change your own oil, but you know how.
Anyway, now you're an adult and you're thinking about getting a "real" car to replace the beater you've been driving (and keeping running yourself) for years. It's not that your 1985 Toyota Tercel isn't viable anymore, it's just that it would be nice to have a ride with a little less wear on it.
For the sake of the analogy, let's pretend that you have three car choices:
You're not extremely wealthy, but you could afford any of the cars if you made it a priority. Which would you choose?
Oh, and before you answer, I should add that for some strange reason, the Kia dealership will only sell you their car with the hood permanently welded shut. Any work the car needs must done at the dealership. Humor me.
Now, the Honda is a good choice, because it's the least expensive by a long shot, and because it's known to be a reliable car. You're not likely to have major problems with it, and if something does come up, odds are very good that you can grab your 1996 Honda car-repair guide and toolbox and fix it yourself.
The Infiniti would also be an acceptable choice, but for different reasons. It's an extremely nice car and very innovative. You're quite unlikely to have problems, because the car is engineered that way. In the case of trouble, you could get under the hood and take a look, but in all honesty you'd probably just prefer to pay someone else to do it. Driving it would be a real pleasure, but the rest of your lifestyle might have to take a bit of a hit to cover the payments.
The Kia, on the other hand, would be an extremely foolish choice. It costs more than the Honda, but is of questionable quality. It probably has its share of bells and whistles, and it would probably be a pretty slick ride for a while. But if things started going wrong, it would be extremely frustrating. You'd have the technical expertise to fix problems, but you wouldn't be allowed to peek under the hood. You'd be utterly dependent on the dealership for keeping your new ride running.
But enough about cars; I'm talking about operating systems.
Linux is a well-built operating system. Every aspect of the system is completely open for modification, and although sometimes things work differently than other operating systems, learning the differences isn't burdensome. And with software development expertise, it's possible to make interesting things work together that the designer never envisioned.
For example, every time I send an email to someone, the signature at the bottom of the message contains a randomly-selected quote from a folder containing a couple dozen of them. This isn't because my email program supports that; it's because I can create a little piece of software that works with my email program to make it happen.
Or, I once wrote a little utility for a friend to send him a text message on his phone whenever the dynamically-allocated IP address on his home web server changed. It took less than an hour to write and worked like a charm. That's what a little elbow grease and an open system can get you.
Microsoft Windows is not so well-built. It's not horrid or anything, and some things about Windows are actually pretty nice. I don't mind using it at work, usually. But sometimes something doesn't work and I'm not exactly sure why. I might have some suspicions, but there's no way to dig in to confirm them and no way to fix it myself, anyway.
Or when I can see a minor tweak that would be very easy to implement and which would make my life easier, it's sometimes downright frustrating to put up with. Putting up with a poorly-designed program's idiosyncracies isn't so bad if that's all you know. Ignorance is bliss, after all. But when you know there's a better way and that doing it right wouldn't have been much harder... it's just annoying.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, Windows is more expensive than Linux by a fair margin.
The final contender in this discussion is Apple's OS X ("oh ess ten"). OS X is a bit pricey in that it only runs on Apple's own hardware. Now, equivalently-equipped machines from Apple and Dell cost about the same, but it's still true that Apple computers target a more boutique market.
Apple's operating system is extremely well-designed. Again, things work differently than in Windows, but nine times out of ten the Apple way is better once you get used to it. And the Apple OS is actually surprisingly open; there's a lot of room to tinker if you're into that sort of thing. Using it from day to day is, I'm told, a pretty pleasurable experience.
All this is why I run Linux at home. Most of the time, things Just Work, and when they don't I can usually fix it. And I can make things work the way I want them to.
Furthermore, if I had the money, I'd get an Apple laptop in a heartbeat. A real luxury computing platform that I wouldn't have to worry about.
But I'm not going to go out of my way to run Windows any time soon.
My bank is better than your bank. Just face it.
Of course it's got free checking. Online bill pay. 24/7 phone access and the like. They even refund the fees that other banks' ATMs charge (and have done so for decades, unlike most banks for which this is a new idea).
Let me give a concrete example. A few weeks ago I decided that I probably wanted my limit increased on my credit card to make it easier to finance most of the expenses of the upcoming wedding. We'll probably end up having had enough cash for the wedding once everything is said and done, but sometimes cash flow is a problem.
So I visited my bank's website, and right on my credit card page there was a link for "Adjust credit limit". Sweet.
Once there, I had to enter my gross monthy income and instantaneously and without "an inquiry to [my] credit report" my limit was raised to comfortably cover all wedding, honeymoon and moving expenses in the coming months.
Then, I ordered some convenience checks online, which were promptly mailed to me. Just in case some of the wedding vendors don't take plastic, you see.
Next, I was able to -- online -- immediately transfer $1000 from my credit card into my checking account, since I'd made some recent wedding purchases through checking. And since Deanna had done the same, I was able to instantly do an ACH transfer of some funds from my bank to hers online.
So, let's recap. In the space of about five minutes of clock time and all from the comfort of home, I...
Strictly speaking, the convenience checks aren't really necessary, because I could just transfer the balance from my credit card to checking and use a regular check, but having a paper convenience check is just a bit more... um, convenient.
But the story gets even better. My bank also has a feature where you can deposit checks from home, using nothing more than a scanner and a web browser. Since we've been getting quite a few checks from friends and family for our wedding, this is a huge time-saver. You merely endorse the check, scan the front, scan the back and bam, the funds are available for use immediately. Then you void the paper check and put it in the shredder. It almost seems like I'm making this up.
Of course, all this gloating is just cruel, since you probably can't get an account with my bank. After all, they are USAA, and membership is limited to children of existing USAA members and those who serve in the military.
Oh, and did I mention that their car insurance rates are so low that when Geico called me and asked about my driving history, age and the make and model of my car to give me a quote I laughed at it?
"Really?" they asked. "What do you pay now?" I told them what I pay through USAA and they said, "Wow. That's pretty good! Well, thanks anyway for your time."
Not only that, but if in given year USAA takes in more in premiums than it pays out in claims, they send all their members a refund check at the end of the year for the difference.
Anyway, somehow all of this posturing reminds me of an excellent quote by Jeff Meyer, editor of the famous (at the time) "Moriarty Quote List". The list was a frequently updated list of interesting quotes to use as email signatures or whatever, maintained from 1981 or 1982 through about 1995. It was available via FTP, and included the following quote in the README:
The file is a ZIP compressed file. I'm sure someone you know can explain how to unpack it; if you've been using FTP, you probably laugh at ZIP, the wind in your teeth and your hair gleaming in the hard radiation.
Related is the comic about a Linux user at Best Buy. We can be an arrogant bunch.
Oh, and if things look a little easier to read here, it's because I changed the line height on these pages to 140%, giving a bit more space between lines of text.
After my last couple of updates, many of you might think that all I've been doing this summer is playing video games and geeking around with websites. Actually, I've been spending most of my time in wedding planning.
There are probably other things that should be on the list, but all in all it's been a lot of doing. I now know more than I'd like about the catering business and about fitting suits, but soon all the details will be nailed down and we can just get down to anxiously awaiting the day itself.
I'm looking forward to that.
So, dontbecreepy.com survived the onslaught of traffic from the legions of the bored. On July 20, the heaviest day, the site had 71,380 hits.
By looking at my server logs, I noticed that most of my bandwidth was consumed by people downloading either (or both) of two PowerPoint files. One was 33 MB in size, the other 15. The problem is that my presentation slides are more like Steve Jobs' and less like Bill Gates': they are rich in images and contain almost no words or anything helpful to a viewer that wasn't present for the talk in question.
Quoting from the Presentation Zen article linked above:
In the world of PowerPoint presentations, then, you do not always need to visually spell everything out. You do not need to (nor can you) pound every detail into the head of each member of your audience either visually or verbally. Instead, the combination of your words, along with the visual images you project, should motivate the viewer and arouse his imagination....
So, over 90% of my bandwidth was being siphoned away as hundreds of people downloaded multi-megabyte files that were useless to them. In fact, I'm not sure why I even had them linked there. I've taken away the links for now, and that helped immensely with my bandwidth woes.
The readership of that site is still up quite a bit. Although the link to my site is no longer on the front page of i-am-bored.com, I've still averaged over 21,000 hits per day for the last four days. For comparison, I averaged 12.5 hits per day for the first ten days of the month.
I also took the opportunity to make some slight code changes to the site while I was at it. At my current burn rate, I think I could handle up to nearly 80,000 hits a day without going over monthly my bandwidth cap, so that's good.
In other news, I've been working on quite a bit of wedding planning the last week or two. If I get the chance, I'll write up a summary soon showing what I've really been busy with lately.
Oh my. My Don't Be Creepy site is on the front page of i-am-bored.com. Normally I never break 50 hits a day, but on July 18 (for example), I had 16,401 hits. That's a 32702% increase for those keeping score at home.
Props go out to Keegan, one of my non-creepy students, who was up with the Woot-Off and emailed me at 2am last night with the heads-up.
Actually late Thursday night....
I have every heart piece on Hyrule. Talked to all the cats, herded the goats in two minutes flat. Out-slid both Yeto and Yeta. Finally tracked down every obscure shot of landscape that Fanadi could show me. And the only walkthrough help I used was to find the compass in the Fire Temple (Goron Mines) since I thought perhaps I'd missed a heart piece in there. (I hadn't.)
Thanks to a walkthrough, I also have every bug and thus a giant wallet. I got 25 points in the river game and doubled the capacity of all three of my bomb bags. I have all four bottles, and rare chu jelly in one and blue chu jelly in the other three.
Next time I play, I'm going to beat the Cave of Ordeals. When I only had 600 rupees, three bottles (one with Great Fairy's Tears and the other two with mere fairies) I beat the first 40 levels of the Cave, but knew better than to press on. Now I've got one extra bottle, a lot more life restoration per bottle, 66% more time on my Magic Armor, and 20 hearts instead of 17 in my life meter. Plus, I have since discovered that ReDead Knights are MUCH easier to kill using the Ball and Chain than the sword. Plus, I'm starting to get the hang of the Darknuts.
I "only" have 46 of the 60 Poe souls in the game. I don't think I'm going to try to get the remaining dozen.
Oh, and tonight I crossed the 80-hour mark.
All the Love in the World is also a popular song title. I think the Bee Gees used it first. The Outfield. The Corrs. And most recently Nine Inch Nails. You can probably guess whose song I was thinking of.
I am generally a good speller. I supposedly did well in or won some spelling bee when I was in second grade or whatever. When people ask me how to spell things, I'm often right. However, I always had a hard time spelling the word judgment.
I always just felt like it should have an extra 'e' in there: judgement, and I'm sure I spelled it incorrectly for years before I learned I was doing it incorrectly.
However, today, reading a random slashdot post, I suddenly became vindicated. Per Wikipedia:
The spelling judgment is found in the Authorized Version of the Bible. However, the spelling judgement (with e added) largely replaced judgment in the United Kingdom in a non-legal context, possibly because writing dg without a following e was seen as an incorrect spelling.
So, I wasn't wrong, just British.
I should update more frequently over the summer. So many things have happened since the beginning of this month!
Here's a bulleted list, in chronological order:
Deanna and I haven't been able to spend nearly as much time together as we would have liked these past few weeks. I miss her!
Anyway, I'm caught up now. Next week may actually be a bit more sedentary. Oh, and if you haven't yet purchased me anything for my birthday, you've still got a couple of days.
Speaking of customer service, Cingular got the replacement phone to me the next day after I'd called them about it. Goodness!
For those of you anxious to buy me presents for my upcoming birthday, I finally got around to updating my wish list for the first time in nearly a year. It took me over three hours to do (which is why I don't do it that often), and the page now validates as HTML 4.01 Strict. Which pleases me.
Even though I beat Super Paper Mario almost a week ago, I've still been playing it quite a bit every day. There's quite a bit of gameplay left even after the main plot is over. In fact, it took me around 25 hours to beat the main campaign, and I'm now over 43 hours total play time. I'm nearly done with that, though, and I can turn to finishing Zelda, finally.
Tonight Deanna and I have been invited to an advance showing of "Evan Almighty", which is (I think) the Noah-themed sequel to "Bruce Almighty". Should be fun.
Also, my brother Paul, his wife and their youngest son are coming down to spend a couple of days in Austin so they can check out the teacher job fair on Thursday. Which also should be fun.
I decided that I'd better update today or I'm in danger of missing the month of May entirely.
School is out. I've been "free" for nearly 24 hours now. Today I celebrated by sleeping in and finally finishing off Super Paper Mario.
I'd like to talk a little bit about good customer service.
Some of you know that when I was playing Twilight Princess, I inadvertently trigged the "broken cannon room" glitch. If you accidentally save your game and then quit in the room containing a broken cannon, when you load the game back up, the trigger you need to escape the room is no longer there. You're trapped in the room forever, and there's no way to continue that saved game.
When I hit this bug back in January, it put me off the game for months. I just didn't have the stomach to go back and replay the 22 hours of plot that I'd done since my most recent other save. However, back in April, I learned that Nintendo was offering free replacement discs for those caught by the glitch.
I wrote Nintendo, and they told me to call. I called, and they gave me an address to send my "defective" disc to. I shipped it to them, and in a couple of weeks, they'd shipped me a new disc!
However, much to my chagrin, they'd mistakenly sent me the wrong disc! They'd sent me one the still featured the bug! So I called them back up, and they sent me a pre-paid UPS shipping label to return the disc a second time. Another couple of weeks passed, and this time the new disc worked, finally fixing the bug. Now I can continue with the saved game that I haven't been able to play since mid-January. And I was only out the postage I'd paid to ship them the first defective disc.
I've also been having problems with my cell phone: a Nokia 6102i. The screen has started acting wonky; sometimes when I open the phone the screen is blank or sometimes with some sort of static on it. I can usually get the screen to start working again if I'm patient, but it takes forever and has just been getting worse.
So this afternoon I called their warranty replacement number (since the phone is less than a year old) and they told me how to back up all my numbers to the SIM card and are shipping me a replacement phone at no cost. Go Cingular (a.k.a. "the new AT&T").
Otherwise in the last six weeks I've been pretty busy with finishing out school. Deanna finished up her semester both with UT and ACC and got a new job for the summer: she's going to be working for UT on a government contract revamping WIC! Should be right up her alley.
That starts June 1, so this afternoon she went to her first meeting to discuss some of the research they're going to start with. This meeting was at another PhD's house. I asked her if they didn't meet at an office or something. No, meeting at an office "is for chumps," she clarifies. Damn straight.
Things with Deanna and I are still going very well. She's an amazing woman, and I'm very lucky to be marrying her!
news from April 2007
Older news updates (back to August 1998) can be found in the archives.
