Tag Archive for 'Personal'

Full time job = no time blog

For the first summer ever, I have managed to actually get a full-time job. I honestly don’t know what was going on the past couple summers when I tried applying to every business in my home town, but this year I’m working for the county’s parks and recreation department. Not my ideal job, but it’s steady income.

As a result of my new 40-hour week, I haven’t had much time to get on my blog and post stuff. This is unfortunate, but it’s happened before. Everyone hits a slump now and again. I figure I’m just too beat to get properly irritated at world events. Or maybe I’ve become jaded enough that I simply can’t get properly irritated? That would be disturbing.

For lack of anything better, here’s a video. It involves SCIENCE. Kind of.

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This space for rent

Finally got the new Internet connection all hooked up. Definitely a lot nicer than the old satellite connection, but I’m kind of iffy about having Comcast as an ISP. Their strange stances on things like peer-to-peer and net neutrality make me worry. They may say on their website that they don’t throttle BitTorrent traffic (there are legitimate uses for it, you know), but I don’t really trust them.

Anyways, everything is going swimmingly with that, so I’m happy for now. So happy that I can’t get properly incensed about the topic I was planning to rant about, which makes this a bit of a useless post. Ah well.

Wrong

Someone is WRONG on the Internet

This is my life philosophy.

News flash: iPhone found lacking

This is probably a no-brainer, but the iPhone doesn’t do everything. I mean, it doesn’t even double as a flying car. How disappointing is that? In all seriousness, during my love affair with my phone, I’ve discovered a few things that I assumed it would have but didn’t. First off: a video camera. Nearly every modern cell phone has a camera built in. More expensive models go one step further and have a video camera. The iPhone…does not. No, the camera is just a regular still camera. For $400, the least they could have done was put in a video camera. I know, not that big of a deal, but I’ve always wanted to film people with my camera. It’s a geek thing.

The other major thing I noticed today is that the iPhone’s Bluetooth capability is limited to headsets and the like. While other phones (especially smart phones) have the ability to connect to a computer and transfer files via Bluetooth (my dad’s Samsung Sync can do that), the iPhone can only pair up with a Bluetooth headset or similar device, and even then it takes forever to realize that the headset is on and sitting right next to it. Again, it’s not really that big of a deal, since my laptop doesn’t have a Bluetooth card, but honestly, I expected the iPhone to be a lot more advanced than this.

Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone is the best phone I’ve ever used. The touch-screen interface works better than I ever expected, and it does just what I want. But there are a few things that just seem…missing. Hopefully, at least some of these will be fixed in the upcoming firmware update for the iPhone, but I get the feeling I’m going to feel gypped when Apple comes out with the second generation iPhone that has everything I’m missing in my current iPhone. Apple is like that sometimes. Or all the time.

Ubuntu 8.04

Following my computer problems of a few days ago, I decided to go ahead and make room to install a distro of Linux on my laptop alongside XP and Vista. I have to say, it was a lot easier than the last time I triple-booted. I installed XP first, then Vista, and finally Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu’s bootloader to it’s own partition, which allowed me to use Vista’s bootloader to load up everything (configured with EasyBCD). It all works perfectly.

I took the chance to try out the latest beta version of Ubuntu, which is due to be released in about 8 days (as you can see by the nifty counter in the sidebar). Compared to past versions of Ubuntu I’ve used, 8.04 is amazing. Sure, the actual interface doesn’t look or act much different (it’s a little shinier, perhaps, and the new search function is pretty cool), but the main difference I noticed is that I didn’t get a debilitating error upon start up. See, with older versions of Ubuntu installed on my Dell laptop, the wireless and graphics cards would not work, and the alternate drivers Ubuntu tried to use would break the system, forcing me to drop into a command line interface to install a special script. But with 8.04, everything actually worked upon start up, displayed in my native resolution of 1280×800 (instead of a rather blurry 1024×768). I had to do some minor configuration to enable the non-free graphics and wireless drivers so I could use my graphics and wireless cards to their full extent, but it was much less work than before.

I’m definitely pleased with this version of Ubuntu. I still doubt that I’ll like it enough to abandon Windows, but at least I haven’t needed to wrestle with it just to make it work right. Hopefully it’ll just get better once it’s out of beta next week.

May 2013
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