irrelevancy

Ouch, you know it’s bad when you can’t remember the TLD of your own site. I’ve been busy, but not overwhelmingly so. I’ve just been so lazy the past school term. Students have been graduating and we’ve been losing valuable staff members, so it’s a little depressing.

I was excited about taking Linux Security, but I found it to be a little easy. I passed the class on the first day as the final grade depended upon getting root access to a test machine. I really think I need to get serious about getting ready for a career. Life can get too comfortable without advancement. I was stressing over writing a paper, but for no good reason. I do this every term: wait until the very last minute and make myself sick with anxiety in every previous moment. The paper earned a 100%. I need to have a little more faith in myself and just get it done!

I’ve been dying to see the new Batman movie, but I’ve been insisting on seeing it at the IMAX theater, which has proven to be very inconvenient. We drove all the way out there on Friday, but all the showings were sold out, so we caught The Mummy: Return of the Dragon Emperor Strikes Back or whatever. I can certainly understand the bad reviews. After Indy 4, I had enough of the father and son adventuring. I’ve seen parts of the first Mummy and I remember it being a little humorous, but this one was so contrived. I did like the style of the times (clothing, vehicles, etc), and I did enjoy the cinematography, particularly the gun fight during a light snowfall.

As many as I’m a part of, I was always a little wary of social networks. I use a number of them, but I’m not really involved in any of them. I love Last.fm and how easy it was to upload tracks played from Amarok. I love seeing the statistics and recommendations, but I’ve never really made an effort to connect with other people. While I couldn’t see a use for it at first, I really enjoyed using Twitter to write random thoughts. Again, I rarely try and connect with people. I thought I’d like using Jaiku as it was like Twitter, but with some location features. It was a bit cumbersome to use and most people using it didn’t use English.

I’ve found that I really like BrightKite. I’m usually not up to anything exciting, but I think it’s interesting to track where I’ve been. I think it’s useful for motivation to try new things. Using the site has been really easy, even from a cell phone. My only complaint is that it doesn’t seem to recognize a lot of businesses, particularly ones located within strip malls. It’s easy from the web, but if you’re out and about it’s a pain to send text messages back and forth to the site. I also really enjoy looking at the Universe tab. I love seeing little random things going on around the world.

I think it’d be interesting to run into other BrightKiters, but there aren’t a ton of people around my areas, conceding that the site is still in a beta version. I haven’t told anyone I know in real life as I’m too embarrassed. Not really sure why. I’ve always been very reserved and I’ve always kept all the little facets of my life separate from each other.

I upgraded to Hardy over the weekend while I was sick. For the most part it was pretty uneventful. I use the Ubuntu variant on my school notebook, so I knew about the changes, but there doesn’t seem to be as much a difference in the Kubuntu variant. I just like the packages being up-to-date.

I installed the new KDE 4.0.4 and resolved to use it for about a week. I noticed the network was extremely slow. I thought maybe it was a problem with the desktop environment, as I hadn’t noticed it after the upgrade and before switching to KDE4.

Then I found this bug, affecting rt2500pci cards like my Linksys WMP54G. The card is incorrectly set to a 1M rate, instead of 54M. A simple $ sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M█ sets it right again.

I was listening to a Loveline episode from 2005-10-19 with Criss Angel as a guest. He had male listeners think of an odd number between one and ten (I chose seven). Then he associated a word with the number (sharp). Then he listed some things and said to think of the one that matched the word (carving knife). Then he said to imagine the object, then to imagine the object falling from the sky (at which point I was a little afraid of a knife falling), then he says something like “and you should be careful because you’re thinking of a carving knife” (at which point I wet myself).

Four callers and the two engineers they asked all picked the object he said. I don’t believe in magic, but I still get a sense of child-like wonder when a trick works.

EndAll, my megalomaniacal Xbox Live identity, turned five years old on May 6th. He was created solely to download extra Splinter Cell levels, but quickly developed a zen-like penchant for murder within multi-player arenas. I proffer a moment of silence for the bereaved.

DoubleSplitter: He hasn’t forgotten the many and various grenades launched at him (while you were teammates, let’s not forget). This is why you are made to suffer mercilessly while playing Tetris.