21 December 2008 | Jason
“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
21 December 2008 | Jason
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.
21 December 2008 | Jason
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?