I just finished making my final entry in my Ubuntu Experiment Journal, and once I turn my computer off tonight, the hard drive cable is getting switched over to my Windows drive so that tomorrow morning I’ll be booting into XP. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll probably play the game of updating my files in Windows with all the files I’ve backed up to a temp directory on our file server, and once I’m sure all that data is safe, it’ll probably be a reformat in store for the Ubuntu drive. I still haven’t decided on a home for it yet, so it’ll just stay in my computer until I make that decision.
A week from today I’ll be in Iowa, and high speed internet access in my hotel room plus that fact I’ll be taking my laptop means that the idea of posting from my cell phone will once again most likely be delayed. I promise that my next vlog entry will be soon, but “soon” is probably at least a couple weeks so that I have the time to solve the sound issue that has delayed this second entry to begin with. The idea of how to solve it is in my mind. but the problem lies with getting the computer to agree with that idea.
Personal - Dallas
The demo of our project today went about as flawlessly as you could expect a 3 month old project to go (everything worked, but it required a little manual coaxing), so for the next week, all that remains is tweaking and adding some additional features to the current state. This probably sounds easier than it actually will end up being, but I’d like for at least now to believe that the hardest part is over and done with. I’m not sure I want to say I’m happy with the current state of the project, but I’m more than content with it. In the case of this internship, content is all that matters.
Tomorrow is the end of July and with it the end of my Linux experiment. I’m posting my conclusions in my journal rather than in posts, so check that if you want to know my final thoughts. I will say that I do plan on returning to Windows after tomorrow night, so interpret that as you will.
Personal - Dallas
I, through some stream of consciousness I don’t really recall, went on a mission to go find HP’s football schedule for this year. With numerous years of navigating the HPISD website under my belt (quite often in search of this document) it wasn’t very hard to find, and once I did, I noticed that it was already marked as revised. This shouldn’t really surprise me as the schedule has ended up being revised before the season starts for at least the past two years also, but come on, football practice doesn’t even start for another couple weeks. If your schedule is still up in the air that much, just don’t post it to begin with.
As this is the 2nd year of the 2 year scheduling plan, all of our home games from last year are away games this year and vice versa. This gives us 6 home games and 4 away games (the Tom Landry game is always away, but this year it’s even more away than usual – Texas Stadium instead of SMU) plus our scrimmage at home. My schedule only potentially conflicts with one game (an away Thursday night game), but that would just mean I’d have to drive there myself. Last I heard, the way the student trainers were going to be distributed was that three of us (myself included, although I’m arguably becoming less and less of a “student”) would always be working the varsity games, and then one of the other student trainers would rotate in as a fourth (at least on away, maybe at home also). All of that depends on eligibility, of course, with me being the only one immune from that. A football game in which I was the only student trainer there…that would be something I’m not all that interested in trying out.
Personal - Dallas
This afternoon I realized that at the present time, I’m basically working on no fewer than 5 websites. Sure, I took web mastering in high school, but I don’t ever recall showing a great desire to be involved with web programming. The only thing I can think of is that people think since I’m good with computers, I must be good at designing web pages.
I went on a Wikipedia chain today that went from DirectX and OpenGL to Windows Vista, the new Vista fonts, and the Aero theme. I expect that I won’t upgrade to Vista for about a year, but I also don’t think there will any pressing reason to. Eventually games will solely support DX10 which will all but force most PC gamers to Vista, but I don’t see any companies making that jump in the next year. One of my friends claims that he’ll never upgrade to Vista, but I think that he probably will in a year or two also.
Personal - Dallas
When I would go a week or more at a time without posting, this achievement would have sounded near impossible. One month of consecutive daily postings? Two months? Try over three; this, ladies and gentlemen, is post #100 in my current posting streak.
This is helped by the fact that I haven’t gone on vacation anywhere (or even outside of Dallas for more than part of a day), and this one potential weakness will be tested in under two weeks. My 3 day trip to Iowa has the following characteristics: I leave the afternoon of the 7th, so no issue getting a post in early there; I come back the afternoon of the 9th, so I should be safe that day also. The kicker is the 8th – this is the day I have I’m in Iowa for the entire 24 hours and potentially no internet access (corresponding with the available time) with which to make a post. Therefore, I have two options as far as I see. First, I can let my streak break at 111 posts (assuming I keep it up through the 7th); this isn’t my option of choice. The second way is that, barring a computer I can make a post from, I enable WordPress’s “post by email” functionality and actually make a post from my cell phone. Yes, that’s just about as computer obsessed as you can get, but I think just by hosting my own blog on my own domain I’ve already reached that level. No loss of street cred for me, I don’t believe.
Personal - Dallas
The first approximately 10 hours of my day sucked. I could rant on and on about how much I hate my internship, but I’ll spare you that since it wouldn’t be that pretty. In the juxtaposition of work and home, however, my day has been awesome ever since I came home. First off, my grandmother emailed me telling me that I am now officially the owner (by proxy for the next week or so) of a Wii. I emailed my grandparents about 2 weeks ago asking them to keep an eye out for one around where they live since I was not having much luck here, and she played the daily calling game until she found one. By the time she brings it down to me on her next trip to Dallas, it’ll be approximately 9 and a half months since the launch. I never planned on it taking this long, but now that I effectively have one, I can concentrate more on the games that are coming out for it over attempting to track down a console.
After I learned about this bright spot, I went with a couple of my friends to go see Transformers. This was a movie that when it came out I passed on because I didn’t expect it to be that good, but I kept hearing awesome things about it from various people. After having seen it, I have to agree; this movie was awesome. It’s much more action driven than story driven (it’s a movie based off of action figures, how much plot do you expect?), but I don’t feel like that hurts the movie in the slightest. An absolute purchase when it comes out on DVD. My score: 8.5/10
Personal - Dallas
I’ll probably be making a trip to Gamestop this weekend in order to preorder a few things (if I can’t find a Wii, I might as well use my gift card on preordering some stuff I want). As I was looking through their website to get release dates and create a list, I stumbled across a couple games that either came out recently or are coming out in the near future which I didn’t know about. A couple of years ago these games would have been added to my list without another thought (adding about $150 to the total purchase price). However, being very aware of the size of my backlog, I opted against putting some of these games down on my list since I knew the chances of me ever playing them were fairly slim.
While that may keep the backlog from growing, work needs to be done of the other end to make it start shrinking. My schedule in the fall should be pretty conducive to me coming home and having a chance to work on my console backlogs, and then I can focus on my handhelds while I’m out at UTD. This has been the plan for the past year or two and never really worked, but I’m all for giving it another try and seeing if this attempt really is the charm.
Personal - Dallas
I did turn my computer off, but I realized within about a minute that I had forgotten to make a post. None of that almost going to sleep and having the sudden realization I forgot tonight. The only reason I forgot to post initially is because I was watching a TV show on my computer and just turned it off as soon as it was over. Distractions will probably cause the end to this streak sooner or later (97 as of this post), but I’ve done a pretty good job at avoiding them up to this point.
Our cable was out for apparently a significant portion of the day, so all the TV I watched was on DVD or on my computer. It finally came back on around 9:00 I think, and luckily it did because there’s a show which is on as I type which I wanted to record. I have plenty of forms of entertainment with which to occupy myself if one should ever not be working at a given moment, but it’s always slightly inconvenient when something doesn’t work like it should.
Personal - Dallas
Saturday night’s post was #500, and I had planned on mentioning it when I made it. Well, I forgot (obviously, or I wouldn’t be having this one-sided conversation with myself right now) and also missed it yesterday, so we’ll have to go with a post #502 celebration. Yay for 502 posts!!!
I started Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories back on Friday night actually (I wanted something to do in order to stay up later) because I just decided to give up on beating Kindgom Hearts first. Chain of Memories is interesting; it’s one of the games that diverges from the play style of the series in favor of some type of card based gameplay, and I can’t really decide if I like it or not. Unique, for sure, but maybe a little too much. Along with updating that on my game list I also took the time to “prune” it some. I use that term very loosely since the list actually grew. I hadn’t added in my Christmas games (not really sure how, almost positive I did the major prune since then), but now it even looks more depressing than it did before.
Personal - Dallas
With just 2 weeks of development time (despite what other people try to tell me) left on my internship project, I’ve started to think more and more about how exactly I plan on entertaining myself during a pair of 2 hour plane trips plus the down time at the hotel. I have my portable DVD player which I’ll absolutely be taking with a couple movies, and I’ve been thinking about getting an audio book or two to play on my iPod (it may be old, but it’s still and MP3 player and still works). The entire trip is just about 48 hours so I don’t want to fall into the trap of taking infinitely more stuff that I’d even be able to use, but on the flip side I also want to be sure that I don’t run out of any entertainment. The last thing I need is to be stuck in Iowa with nothing to do.
I spent part of the afternoon trying to solve a cabling issue in conjunction with our HTPC; I want both of the wall outlets to be connected to the digital cable source in order to avoid having to use 2 splitters and degrade the quality of the signal going to some/all of the devices. With the nest of cables out in our garage that’s something much easier said than done, however. The issue can be solved through a long series of trial and error tests, but I’d prefer to not have to play with close to 20 different cable ends in order to get the right combination to make everything work as it should.
Personal - Dallas