Last night Marie messaged me to tell me “yo you haven’t blogged in a while.” Well, here it is. And why is it that I need to be yelled at to blog again? Is it because I’ve been away from the internet? No… that’s not it. Is it because I’ve done nothing? Partly, but still not the main reason. It’s because I like to take my breaks and do nearly nothing. It is a nice change from the normal having too much to do and no time to do it.
I guess I should summarize what I’ve been up to. On Christmas Day, my parents and I went to our cousins on the other side of the city for a birthday party. We didn’t make it home until after midnight. The next few days were uneventful, although I began trying to find an alternative for the broken Xbox360 and Rockband. I found FretsOnFire and Unsigned. They both work with the console instruments and are both free. The problems are that FretsOnFire doesn’t support vocals yet, at least that I can find, and Unsigned seems to have less of a community to help. I was able to obtain all of the Rockband and Rockband 2 songs for FretsOnFire and will hopefully be able to play it on the reuse machine that I got. Yay for IAP projects.
Monday was an MIT Club of Colorado meetup for alumni and current students. It was nice to see how many alumni there were and how successful they were. Later that day, I went to see Benjamin Button. Warning: that is a 3 hour long movie. Get comfortable. It was a very … interesting movie. Especially when the old man who was 7 could definitely be seen as a pedophile going into a little fort with a little girl. My break has not consisted of much besides trying to fix OpenSUSE and its wireless problems. NetworkManager doesn’t want to work properly. And playing Pokemon with Vivian.
OpenSUSE had a festive GRUB menu for Christmas. The penguins were animated too. ^_^
Okay, now I need to get ready to go out with a Yalie and watch New Year’s fireworks.
Don’t be lazy and do nothing. Your friends will yell at you.
The MIT Chorallaries have this one amazing song that I have always wanted to find the lyrics for, but have been unable, so I will transcribe them for you!
“Our flight will take five hours. We are headed into some awful headwinds.” Our pilot told us as we were sitting at the Logan Airport about to take off. I hope my father doesn’t go to the airport too early and have to wait an extra hour. I settle into my leather chair with DirecTV and prepare for a long flight. No, I was not in first class, I was on a JetBlue flight. There is no first class and all the seats have leather. I made a good choice picking this airline. I watch a few House episodes and Mythbusters (although satellite signal sometimes died) and try to sleep a little. We finally touch down at midnight and I go to baggage claim to pick up my bag. Luckily it is the first bag out. I get picked up by my father and we go home. I immediately go to my (creaky) bed and crash.
I wake up the next morning and go to my high school. Sadly I get there after the faculty skit (I forgot about it) where they usually parody the students. All the faculty are at their White Elephant Gift Exchange and half the students are off campus getting lunch. I arrived at the worst possible time. Wandering the halls, I do find some of my friends there and eventually everyone returns. I greet everyone and EVERYONE asks how’s MIT. I try to best represent the pain and anguish the classes have caused me. At home, I try out the new OpenSUSE release.
The next day is an alum meetup. Everyone gets hugs including the short little asian senior girls. It is nice to see much of the class again and we all talk of our adventures in college. Many of them involve drunk people, naked people, and everything. We all go to the upper school to look at our class photo because rumor has it someone was cut out. We look closely at the photo, remark about how we’re all touched up so much and find our missing classmate. He was standing separate of everyone in the photo, so they decided he needed to be taken out to make the picture look better. Although it would be very awkward to have him standing alone, I still find it awful how they did that to him. We go to the Spicy Pickle for food, and had found some of our classmates leaving, going to the mall. We eat and try to join up with them, but just as we get there, they are about to leave. They only needed one thing and one of them had to go babysitting. We all head our own ways and I go visit my friend from middle school. She needs to go hang lights and I choose to fill the “management” position. That was quite fun, maybe I should think about course 15.
Today I had to ship my sister’s charger she forgot to pack. My sister and I missed each other by mere hours. She left before I got into Denver. Since it was Saturday, the post offices have shorter hours, so I searched online to try to find one that would be open. I find one in Littleton and head there to try to mail off the package. When I get there, I drive around but can’t find the post office. This is a small problem. I need to ship this off sooner than later. I go for one of my new toys, a GPS unit, (my other is a new camera), search for a post office, and head on my way. I get there and it is closed, but luckily there is a machine I can use to purchase postage. I send off the box successfully. I head to the library next to pick up some books so I can start hacking away at my booklist. I also buy some strings to get my tennis racquet restrung so I can play again in Boston.
Make friends, be social, don’t be depressed all the time, your school might disown you
I remember as I wake up for the first time in four months in my own bed that OpenSUSE finally has its new release out. I quickly head over to OpenSUSE and download the KDE4 Live CD. I let this download as I visit friends for the day. I get home and burn the ISO and commence installation. I generally accept that everything will work just as it did in 11.0 so I am looking forward to the new features. The installation finishes quickly and it pulls in most of my previous settings. I excitedly reboot for the installation to finish and it finishes doing its automatic configuration. I log into my account and am at first slightly disappointed, it did not autodetect my monitor resolution and was at an ugly 1280×768 resolution. I quickly load up Yast (where all system configuration is) and start Sax2 (X config util) to reconfigure my xorg.conf to be full 1680×1050. Okay, that was a little disappointing, just a little hiccup. In Yast I add the usual repositories and update everything and install missing software. 2 GB to install. Okay, I’m just going to let this run overnight.
I wake up and reboot the machine. The first time I booted it hung for a while. I thought it was just fsck-ing but I went from the pretty framebuffered screen to the terminal and saw it hung on something. HAL (Hardware abstraction layer) crashed somewhere and was displaying a stack trace. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with this error (should have sent a bug error), and hit ctrl+c to get out of it and try to start the system. At least it wasn’t a fatal kernel crash. My /home wasn’t mounted so none of my settings could be loaded. Ahh crap. I already broke something. I rebooted everything hoping somehow it would all be better. It was. Weird… two hiccups, I never had this before.
I boot up and everything is running smoothly. KDE4 compositing is on and everything is pretty looking. I try to get online and realize I’m not connected. I try to connect to the wireless with knetworkmanager/kde3 but nothing happens. Why doesn’t this work?! Wireless was working fine on the live cd. I eventually go into Yast again and change it so the network is not managed by networkmanager. It works. This could be a slight problem trying to connect to obscure wireless networks that I’m not familiar with. For the moment it works. I try to search around on the wiki about how it normally uses networkmanager but find nothing. After a bit of searching, I find a widget for Networkmanager and try that. I eventually get it to work after a few restarts and a few setting changes. Maybe this is a remanant of having an old ~/.kde4. Three hiccups. This is a little disappointing, but at least I was able to get past them. It is a slight disappointment how there are these small problems, but I know it will be better.
The desktop itself is very pretty. Compositing is enabled by default and my machine takes advantage of this. Transparencies and rotating cubes and more eye candy everywhere. I still love OpenSUSE even with the few problems I ran into. My only disappointment is the networkmanager widget. It is less straightforward than the kde3 version, but that version doesn’t work anymore as far as I can tell. I have yet to test the suspend to disk/ram, but they should work. Will report back when I do. I still recommend OpenSUSE to everyone who wants a good linux distro.
New releases of software will have slight problems. Work through them and everything will hopefully work.
As I was taking my shower today in my basement bathroom, it came across my mind, how does MIT have basements? If most of Texas doesn’t have basements because the water table is too high, how are there basements and sub-basements? Also, wasn’t MIT built on what used to be a swamp? And the water table has to be very high, we’re right next to the river. How does this all work? Someone want to give me an answer?
As my blogging has gone down in its volume, I felt like I needed to remedy this. After all, I have just been “studying” this entire time. A summary of how my finals have been:
I studied all of Sunday at Next on 8.01 Physics Mechanics not for Masochists. Took the test Monday morning 9-12 and did not think it was utterly and completely horrible. It began with a post-diagnostic test, which should be 26 free points, essentially. Then the real exam began. Luckily we were allowed to drop a question so I dropped the one about a gyroscope in a car. The rest, I thought were decent, and I just hope I get a passing score on the test. Then everything will be good. They STILL haven’t posted scores. The other physics have their scores already. Anyway. After the test, I found Rachel and we got ourselves some soup from the LEM (Luteran Episcopal Ministry). I went to the student center to get some more food, and found the group of 8.012 people. We got food and moped around about our physics tests. I returned to my dorm to “study” for my 3.091 exam. We calculated it and I needed only about 4% to pass the class, so I worked so very hard to understand every little bit of information that I could absorb.
I walk in to Johnson Tuesday morning and find a seat in the back. Sadoway is dressed in a tux again and he begins the test. I quickly go over what I do know, skip over all things amino acid/lipids/organic and try to maximize my points before I leave an hour early. I return home, sleep, and try to start studying for 18.01, which I know decently well enough to pass enough without studying too much. Wednesday morning, Vivian calls me to remind me to meet her early for an quick cram session before the test, so I head out to meet her. We take the test and I passed the final with a 76/120. Yay. Afterward, we go to Anna’s to grab quesadillas and head to the Coop. We find Moose (yes, Moose) and all head over to Kendall where I obtain myself a MIT umbrella. I find a little stuffed beaver and cuddle with it for a while. A while being the rest of the time we are in the store. We look at the toys and see a dreaded gyroscope. Vivian wants it so I pick one up for her. We finish shopping and I drop the beaver in Vivian’s basket. After we purchase everything, Vivian and I exchange gifts ^_^. She got a gyroscope and a magnet saying “never never never give up” and I get a stuffed beaver. I think I win this trade. After all, the beaver is SO MUCH cutercuddliersofterBETTER more stuffed than the giver of the gift. Hehe.
Vivian and I wander campus, visiting the physics department… and wandering a little in tunnels. We head back home because I need to start packing. I finally begin at around 3, finish in like 10 minutes, and decide I need to clean my desk. I do so and there is SO MUCH more room now than there was 25 minutes before. I make my bed, and my side of the room is clean and made. I just wish it could stay that way. I head out to Kendall to get to the airport. As I drag my bags along, I write a text to send to everyone.
Goodbye all! I am now leaving this dreaded place called MIT. I am going to a place where everything will be better. Goodbye. You will all be worse without me.
When I get there I find some other MITs waiting at gate C33 to Tampa. Their flight was delayed because the plane was simply circling the airport. Apparently Logan went into a ground state. They finally get on their plane, and I get onto mine a few minutes later. The flight takes longer than expected because of headwinds, and I make it to Denver around midnight. I am currently writing from my bed in Denver, it creaks a lot.
When you coddle a stuffed animal long enough in a store, eventually someone will buy it for you. Take advantage of this!
I’m sitting here on Chao’s floor listening to some Jay Chou while studying for 8.01. As you can tell, it is not going happily. Gyroscopes are still not nice and I just hope that the final goes well tomorrow. Vivian invited me over for brunch at Next at ten but I had to wait for my laundry to finish. At eleven I went over and found her sitting in the Athena cluster working on her physics. I went to steal food from Next dining and grabbed myself a full plate of pancakes, sausage, bacon, eggs, and fruit. I ate my food and returned to Vivian who was still studying. I got on my laptop and began reading my textbook trying to learn all things physics that I needed before I started looking at the practice problems. Eventually we got distracted and she began filling out survey things for her LiveJournal. Continuing our distractions, we went down to the Country Kitchen to grab some sherbet to eat. In the process of getting spoons, we found Chao who kidnapped us to his room where we have been studying since.
We all clamored onto Chao’s bed and tried to take a break from 8.01(2) and all got tired. It was becoming dark but was only 3:30. Vivian went to her room to take a nap and I kept on studying my 8.01. I slowly came to understand the material but would need a better source of learning. I stole myself a Kleppner book and read about central force things. I kept studying and eventually crashed on Chao’s bed. Chao’s yelling at me to study instead of blog, so I go return to that.
After enjoying a nice evening in Kresge watching the MIT Logs perform, I returned home and immediately became bored. I began calling my friends trying to find someone who was doing something fun. I called Cathy and she was having a LAN party. I decided to go over and visit her at east campus in 2W. Putz. I found them in the Wood lounge all playing Age of Empires II. I wanted to join in so I took out my laptop and obtained a copy of the game. First, I was recommended to not try it in linux under wine so I booted into Vista. I got to EC at 11, and worked until about 3 trying to get the game to start. It was always throwing the error “Could not initialize graphics system. Make sure that your video card and driver are compatable with DirectDraw.” I tried everything from installing DirectX9.0c to uninstalling my video driver to trying everything else. There’s even someone on a mac playing it in a virtual machine. I gave up.
After everyone was done with their game, we all went around crufting. We wandered the tunnels collecting things. Cathy got two drum lids and a wooden box. I got myself a hex wrench. We then returned to EC after collecting our things and collected in Kevin’s room all with our laptops each doing our own thing.
I wake up at 10:30 this morning eager to get to class. It’s not only because today is the last day of Tuesday/Thursday class schedule, but because I get to rip tags off. On Saturday, Chao and Vivian dragged me to the Cambridgeside Galleria and picked me out some clothes to buy. Today was going to be the first day I wear them. I hop out of bed and get ready for class, complete with new outfit. Tim compliments me as I leave (I can still never tell if he’s being sarcastic or not).
I make it to class. During my lunch break, I find Vivian in the green lounge and we go to math together. It’s review so the both of us are bored and just on our computers. By the end, Vivian was so dead she was falling asleep on her computer. Aww, Vivian, I know you’re tired, but you can work through the tiredness. I make it to my pistol class where we actually score our targets. Of 20 shots, I got a score of 174. Pretty good! Good enough to get me second place in the class. Yay!
At home, a good number of wings found their way down my throat at the dorm-wide study break. After that, Vivian and I watched (a show that shall not be named in such a public forum)(one of my least well kept secrets) and all I have to say is WAHH! I got bored and wanted to play on the Xbox, but it has been Red Ring of Deathing, so games have been a vailure recently. The Wii also needs an update to be able to play Wii Music, which I don’t want to do. I should stop writing before my writing keeps going further down the drain.
Looking nice because a girl made you is quite nice. Everyone give in to the wishes of the women in your lives. Wait… I didn’t just say that!
