Brettia

My computer finally came on Thursday. Why didn’t I say something sooner, after a week of updating you after every little change in the order status? Read on to find out.

On Wednesday, I was firmly convinced that the package would come via FedEx on Friday. That was the date estimated by FedEx’s shipment tracker. However, I was surprised on Thursday morning to find that it was already on the truck and would be delivered a day early. Imagine my joy at realizing that I was only a few hours away from getting rid of my old computer forever. However, this joy was short-lived. Late Tuesday night, my Internet access worked fine; I blazed along at speeds over three megabits per second, and was happy. But on Wednesday morning, everything changed. The router was on the fritz, blinking in panic at me about the connection having been lost. I searched for a loose cable, but there were none. Something was wrong with the cable modem, or some setting had been tripped.

So I checked more router settings, restarted it, restored factory settings, etc. The Repair tool in Windows XP did nothing. Turning the cable modem on and off, unplugging it and plugging it back in, nothing worked. At this point I gave up and installed an AOL trial so that I could at least connect to the Internet, albeit at a terribly slow speed. I hunted around Cox’s website for an answer but could find nothing, so I had no choice but to call support. A few minutes of talking to Linda, the support lady that I could barely hear, and I had been redirected to Cox’s “Level 2″ support system. Which I guess meant that my problem was serious. Now this guy with an Indian accent got on the line, and I was told (in poor English) that I was the victim of some kind of terrible super virus and that I would either need to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows or figure out some way to get rid of it. Once I proved to Cox that my computer was clean, then they would reactivate my Internet access and I’d be fine.

Of course, this entire thing was a load of crap. Even the most secretive of Trojan viruses don’t escape my watchful eyes, and even if one did slip by, it would be quickly caught by either a) the firewall on my router, b) Windows’ built-in firewall, or c) a virus-scanner or spyware/adware detector. There is about a 0.01% chance that any computer that I use regularly will get a virus, and a 0.001% chance that I won’t be able to remove it. So I knew this wasn’t the case. Obviously someone at Cox noticed irregular activity coming from my IP, perhaps due to my development web server or something. They put my Internet access on hold, without telling me, and then they tried to make it seem like it was my fault that I had this “virus”. Oh, and all three people I talked to sounded like they came from completely different countries, which I don’t have a problem with, except that their accents were so thick that they were barely understandable. I won’t slam Cox even more than I have already for this because they have had such good service in the past, but I’m not going to be happy if it happens again.

So that issue was resolved, but I couldn’t reactivate my Internet access until after my new computer arrived, since it would be certainly fresh and clean. Wednesday and Thursday passed with me somehow dealing with the slowness of dial up and lots of web development work that needed doing. I didn’t do it. I should be doing it now, but I’m not. Anyway, I was feeling more and more excited as the time of delivery drew nearer, which I estimated at about 4:00 PM. It came at 3:30. The FedEx man just looked bemused as I signed his list and hefted the large green box into my house. I didn’t care at this point.

Up the stairs I went with the box on one shoulder, steadying it carefully with every available limb. I set it down on the floor in the office, where the old computer was, and just looked at it for a minute, reveling in my success. Then I attacked it with scissors, carefully cutting the tape on the top edges in all the right places so that I could just open it right up with minimal damage to the packaging. Upon getting it open, I saw the ABS binder, a huge chunky booklet with manuals, install CDs, and extra parts all stuffed into convenient, color-coded plastic envelopes. Next to come out was my free ABS t-shirt and mousepad. Then came a long rectangular box which contained the wireless keyboard and mouse, and another smaller box which the motherboard had come in. I feared for a moment that the system was not fully assembled, but breathed a sigh of relief upon finding that the box contained various cables and CDs, not the motherboard itself.

All of these boxes rested in a cardboard tray with a detailed system map in the bottom of it showing how everything plugged together. And next came the one thing that I had been waiting for for over a year, the large black monstrosity that is my new computer. Its blue lights and LED screen were dark, the fans stuck in free motion without power. But it was beautiful anyway. It could have been pink, for all I cared, but what really mattered was that I finally had it, that it was in my hands (or arms, actually), and that it was all mine. It was like having the best Christmas of my life…in July.

Now I was faced with the task of unpacking the computer itself from the foam that surrounded it. I found that the best method was to wrap my arms around it and pick the whole unit up, foam padding and all, so that it would at least be out of the box. I did this, and then I took off the form-fitted foam bricks one by one and set them aside. The unpacking was done, but the night was far from over. I now had to get everything off my old computer and get it ready to be transferred to the new one. My crappy CD burner could only burn the two backup CDs in about an hour, so I spent that time uninstalling programs and cleaning up my old system to make it ready for use later on, whenever my little brother ends up needing it.

Once the CDs were burnt, around 5:00, I was finally ready for the arduous setup process. I took apart the old system carefully and put the parts that I would no longer use (keyboard, mouse, and computer) in a corner where I wouldn’t have to look at them any more. Then I dusted off the computer desk, cleaned out all the drawers, generally put things away. Finally, around 6:00, it was time. I heaved the new computer onto the desk next to my old monitor and hooked them together. A whirlwind of cables and batteries, I set up the rest of the system in about five minutes. I’m sort of a record-holder in my family for computer set up, ever since I was eleven when I set up my aunt and uncle’s computer in about three minutes and made it ready to use after it had been collecting dust in a corner for several months. If I didn’t have to worry about damaging anything, I might be able to pull it off in two minutes, depending on desk configuration, number of peripherals, etc.

Anyway, I soon had everything hooked up and put together the way it needed to be. However, one thing was missing: the all-important master power cable. This cable plugs into the power strip as well as the back of the computer case, and it provides all electricity for components inside the PC as well as some outside it if they are connected via USB. Panic set in. I looked everywhere, high and low, in the packaging, in the large binder, in various cardboard bits that littered the floor, but it was not to be found. I had heard of the power cable being left out of the box before, so I called ABS to see if that was the case, and if so, whether they would ship it to me. To my extreme annoyance, it was 5:45, and their phone technical support hours were 9:00 to 5:30. I would have to wait perhaps two more days before I could use my system, all because a single cable was missing. My anger and frustration was almost unbearable.

I resigned myself to sullenly watching a movie with my dad and brother, pretending to stare at the TV while my mind was on other things. I kept thinking of places where it might be, but everytime I knew that it couldn’t possibly be there. My mom came home around 6:45 and asked if the computer had come yet; I told her that it had and what the problem was. For a moment she looked about as unhappy as I was, if that were possible. She suggested that we search the office again. We did; I checked every box, under furniture, and even at the back of the computer to see if it might have some how miraculously appeared and plugged itself in. I was looking around behind the computer desk when my mom bent down behind me and asked, “Is this it?”
I looked around, and there it was, wriggling in her hand, seeming to want to get away before it got electrocuted. The happiness was back, and a small bit of embarrassment; the cable was in such a spot on the floor that it was likely that I was standing on it for quite some time as I had searched for it earlier. And I had blown an entire hour and a half just because I hadn’t seen it there. But at this point all I cared about was getting the system up and running, so I jammed it into the back of the case and plugged the other end into the strip. I pressed the power button. Nothing happened. Uh-oh. I tried it another five times, to no avail. I was near to despair when my mom, who was still in the room, suggested that I check the setup manual which I, in my overconfidence, had neglected to read. My hands trembled slightly as I thumbed to the section about the first boot, but I found nothing. I checked some more sections, and came upon a small note at one side of the page: “The power supply switch may need to be flipped for the computer to function properly.”
That should be reworded to: “…for the computer to function at all.” More frustration for a moment at this stupid procedure, but I got over it, flipped the switch, and pressed the power button. I knew it was on when I was blinded by a bright blue light, six of them, actually, positioned down the sides of the case. The LED screen on the front panel flipped on, displaying a core temperature of a cool 75 degrees. The fans whirred, turned blue as well, and I could see the components working through the clear plexiglass side panel. This was the moment. This was the time when I sat down in front of my new wireless keyboard and mouse and my shiny new computer with a plexiglass-fronted case, side window, three blue fans, six blue lights, an LED screen, and two gigahertz of pumped up processing power (equivalent to 3.2 gigahertz by Intel standards), and thought to myself, This is really mine. I’ve finally got it.
The first booting went straight to Windows activation and setup. I had to enter my name, create some accounts, reactivate my Cox Internet access, etc. And in a short time, it was done. The computer booted on through to a login screen in 800×600 resolution. But I was so happy I barely even noticed that the screen looked small. I clicked on my username, entered a password, and BAM! Literally half a second later I was looking at my desktop, fully loaded and booted. I was floored. I could not have expected such speed in my wildest dreams. I had to see if this was truly how fast it performed. I began copying my backup files, installing programs, drivers, applications, uninstalling a few things, tweaking the registry, partitioning the hard drive, installing Firefox and Thunderbird, copying over some user profile data, adding my iTunes music to my hard drive, installing iTunes, etc, etc. There was so much to do, and it was done in so little time, I was amazed. Programs actually took less than fifteen minutes to install, my web browser came up immediately up on clicking the icon. Even my Internet connection seemed faster, which was probably true as this tends to be the case in the first hour or so of use on a new system.

I had expected to spend the better part of a day getting the computer up and running to my specifications, but it only took four hours. One of the first things I installed was Far Cry, a first-person shooter video game that comes free with systems with the processor that I have. The graphics were amazing. In the opening sequence, for instance, the effects and video are awesome. And once I was actually in the game and playing it, it was perfect. After so many year of having to contend with downgraded graphics, glitchy, buggy, laggy, screen movement…this was heaven. I had achieved nirvana.

That was that. It was finished, done. My computer had come, I had it, my money was gone. Time to start saving for something else, like college.

Here are some pictures:





It rocks.

Must…resist…urge…to shoot/poison/burn/infect/feed to sharks/murder…Internet Explorer Development Team….

I wrote a PHP program for a theatre awards organization. I won’t say which. It looks so pretty in Firefox. It validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. The CSS is generated by PHP and is also valid. The application has no known bugs, only some small usability problems. I open Firefox, navigate to the right page, test a few features…all is well. But I open Internet Explorer, navigate to the same page…my beautiful code has been rearranged and coughed up onto the screen in a horrible mess. The divs are out of alignment, the buttons on all the forms have too much horizontal padding, a few things, such as background images and gradients, just aren’t showing up until the user scrolls up and down the page a bit. I check another page. Same problem. Everything looks horrible.

Why am I cursed with the wretched heap of shit that is Internet Explorer? Why must the web development community contend with its lack of CSS2 support, its poor implementation of CSS1, the stupid DOCTYPE mode switch thing, and the fact that it almost seems to render pages randomly, sometimes putting something where it should be, and then putting it somewhere else at other times? Why does Microsoft taunt me so, forcing me to use its operating system (which I don’t much care for anyway), and then, when I try to at least not have to put up with its browser, it bundles it with the OS so that everyone in the world has it. Why are most computer users too stupid to realize that when they click the Internet Explorer icon, they are not “opening the Internet”, they’re contributing to the technological nightmare that all web designers must live with? Why can’t they see that there is a better alternative?

And you wonder, why do I care so much about getting people to stop using Internet Explorer? Put yourself in my shoes. You’ve just spent the last two weeks coding/designing this application. You’re not being paid for it; it’s more of a thing you put on your resume. And now, after the dozens of hours invested in the coding and design of this project, the only thing standing in the way of it being stable, successful, and ready for use is the fact that Microsoft can’t seem to figure out that their browser is the worse piece of software ever invented. I read the Internet Explorer development blog not long ago, and I was shocked to find that the devs actually like Internet Explorer! They say that it provides the best “browsing experience” out there! What the f**k? Exactly how much are they being paid to say that? And how could Microsoft think that web developers are going to be stupid and gullible enough to believe it? They act like we’re all little toddlers, hitting a keyboard with a plastic hammer to create the code for our websites. And when you view a standards-compliant site in IE, that’s what it looks like.

You would think that the IE programmers would realize, being programmers themselves, the frustration that a designer goes through upon finding that IE breaks their site. But then again, anyone who contributed to the mass of bug-ridden code that makes up IE must not be much of a programmer.

At this point, I’m just not going to try to fix the problem. It’s not worth spending an entire day just to find that, though the page finally renders correctly in IE 6, it is now broken in IE 5.5. I don’t even think hell can be worse than hacking a page to bits for IE, only to find that it still doesn’t work right. I can imagine some fiery cave, with lava all around, and Bill Gates wielding a red pitchfork and dressed in animal skins, commanding thousands of poor programmers and designers to make their pages work in IE. And because of IE’s crappiness, they just keep on working for eternity.

From now on, anyone who wants to view a page of mine in IE might as well get used to seeing either a page full of HTML-vomit or simple, unstyled content. That’s all you deserve. If you reject the evil that is IE and move to Firefox, like I’ve been telling you for the last year, you’ll make Firefox one user stronger and IE one user weaker. And someday, whether one year or ten years from now, Firefox will suddenly be the most popular browser in the world, and Microsoft will see the error of their ways, though I doubt they’ll do anything about it.

Reasons to Switch to Firefox

1. Preserve my sanity!
2. Tabbed browsing, no more trying to find the right window.
3. Skinnable, fast interface. Hundreds of themes for Firefox are available for free.
4. Extensions to change browser functionality. These included enhanced tabbed browsing, web developer toolbar, smooth scrolling…if you need Firefox to do something, there’s probably an extension for it.
5. Real popup blocking. Firefox has a much better popup-blocker than IE 6 SP2 or any of those external popup blocking programs.
6. Integrated Google support. You don’t need the Google toolbar, it’s already built in.
7. The fastest and most accurate rendering engine. Gecko renders pages faster and better than MSHTML, IEs rendering engine.
8. Large developer/user community. This means bugs are caught quickly, and releases happen often. Compare this to the 80 million bugs that IE has and the fact that it hasn’t had an update for two years, and probably won’t have one until 2006 or 2007, when Longhorn (the next version of Windows) is released.
9. Cross-platform. You can use Firefox on any version of Windows, on Linux, and on a Mac. Mozilla also has Camino, a browser built specifically for Mac OS X.
10. No fear of being hacked. Virus writers don’t write their viruses for Firefox because it has such a small user base. They would much rather target IE because of the amount of people that an IE virus would affect.

Is that not enough? Download it and try it. You can always uninstall later. And you can find a better feature listing with more accurate data, along with the link to download, at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. The latest version is 0.9.2.

Computer Update

I’m on step 4 of 8. It’s being assembled. I got really lucky because I was able to get the last Athlon 64 3200+ processor that they had in stock.

Second Computer Update

I’m on step 6 of 8: “Final Quality Control”, which I suppose means testing and stuff. Meaning that assembly and stuff is done, so it might ship tomorrow if I’m lucky.

Third Computer Update

I’m on step 8 of 8! The system has shipped via FedEx Express and should be here by Thursday or Friday! Yay!

I think that I must have been drinking a lot of caffeine before posting my last entry. I just re-read it, and I’m going, like, a mile per minute, jumping from topic to topic and back again. And there are a few typos, like “peer-to-pear” which for some reason is quite funny in context.

Er, anyway, since I’m only drinking water from now on (I’ve had about six 16-oz bottles today), I’ll hopefully be less off-the-wall. I have made my final decision on my computer. It took a long time, lots of research and debate with myself (don’t take that the wrong way, Tyler), and a small amount of time spent convincing my parents that I really do know what I want. Now, I’m not even going to think about it because I know that if I do, I’ll find something I want to change or some reason not to get the computer I’m buying.

However, I never really said why I need a new computer so badly, only that I needed one. The main reason: speed. My current computer is four years, six months old. The processor is old and slow, the motherboard bus and chipset are old and slow, the CD burner is the slowest ever made (it takes 25 minutes to burn a full CD, compared with 2 minutes on newer burners). It’s not all bad, however: I upgraded the memory about two years ago, and we got a better video card about one year ago, though the difference in gaming performance was limited by the slow processor. The hard drive has 20 GB of space, which isn’t much (even laptops have twice that), but it’s enough to store Windows (1GB), iTunes music (1GB), all my documents and invoices and emails (300 MB), everything in my htdocs folder on my dev server (500MB), and two games, along with Fedora Core 2 (Linux) using up another 6GB on another partition. Sure, I clean things out regularly, something many people don’t do, but only out of necessity.

The bottom line is, my computer isn’t as bad as it sounds. I’m a beta tester for Windows XP Service Pack 2, which is considerably faster on my PC than Service Pack 1, which most people have. The service pack will be free and is likely to be released within the next two weeks to a month. I recommend getting it not only for a small performance increase (probably not noticable on faster systems) but because of all the security updates it provides. Anyway, having SP2 (and WinXP in general), helps. This computer came with Windows 98, and I’m lucky it runs XP without problems.

So why then, do I need a new PC? Because, even though my current one is great for typing reports, coding, listening to music, browsing the Internet, or doing all at the same time, it is horrible when it comes to anything more demanding than that. This might include downloading large files, which causes my music to skip, or applying a Photoshop effect/filter, which can take a long time with a large image, or, most importantly, playing games. I’m not much of a gamer, mainly because I’ve never had a computer capable of playing much, but I’d like to at least be able to play old games borrowed from friends. And not only that, but my slow computer means that I can’t play games over the Internet because it takes so long for it to load the game. For example, Medieval Total War, a turn-based strategy game, has an online component that lets you fight a battle against a friend over the Internet. This is really fun and full of tactics and surprises. But it quickly becomes “not fun” when you have to wait five to ten minutes for the game to load the battle. And when the battle finally is loaded, the screen lags so badly that the opponent can use it to his advantage, making quick adjustments to his forces while I’m blundering around just trying to figure out what’s going on. And that sucks.

Other reasons include, but are not limited to, the fact that, because of my current computer, I cannot use some software and have not even bought it because I know that it won’t run well. This software might be Photoshop, Macromedia Studio MX, and various others. Also, I think that the time saved because of the extra speed will be considerable. Say I sit down at the computer, turn on iTunes, fire up Firefox and Thunderbird (email), and start my text editor for some coding. This takes about two minutes, including the time needed for the computer to boot and log me in. I open all my daily pages at once in Firefox, which takes another two minutes, plus page load time. At the same time, my emails are downloading in Thunderbird. My text editor loads the ten files I had open last time I used it. And iTunes is finding my favorite online Internet radio station and playing the stream.

All is good, right? Except that it takes four minutes for all of this to happen, when it could take thirty seconds, or less. Then, while I’m coding, I need to do a quick graphic in Photoshop. I run a filter on the graphic. Photoshop locks up/crashes, I have to start over again. I get the graphic done, save it as PSD, export it as JPG or PNG. Exports and saves take about 15 seconds, when they could take five. I close Photoshop, another minute passes as it does so. I switch back to my editor. Music is playing in the background. I code a bit, check back to an email. Switching to Thunderbird takes 20 seconds. Switching back to the editor takes another 15. I go to the browser. It’s sluggish because I have so many pages open at the same time. I read a few, close them. Performance improves slightly. I switch back to the editor, keep coding. Save all files, another 45 seconds gone. Close the editor, 15 seconds, close my other programs, including iTunes, another 30. All of this should happen either within five to ten seconds, or in no time at all. My computer should be an extension of me, like another organ that I can think into and it will do what I want. I’m a good typist, so that’s pretty much what happens. But brains don’t crash (unless you’re on drugs), and fingers don’t hang or lag. Everything is near-instantaneous, the only delay being the amount of time it takes me to decide what I want to do. That is why I need a new computer, because I am the most powerful of power users, and my will must be done, or else.

Technical Specifications

Before you are the final tech specs for my computer, which I should get sometime next week, or perhaps the Monday after, at the latest.

Case / Power Supply

Aspire X-Dreamer II / 350-watt power supply

Processor

AMD Athlon 64 3200+

Motherboard / Chipset

Asus K8V Deluxe / K8T800 chipset

Memory

512 MB Corsair XMS DDR SDRAM PC-3200

Graphics Card

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB AGP

Hard Drive

Seagate Barracuda SATA-150 8MB Cache 80GB

Optical Drive

Plextor PX-712A 12×4x16x DVD/CD Writer

Floppy Drive

Sony Generic Floppy Drive

Sound Card

Onboard 6.1 Channel Dolby-Digital Audio

Network Card

Marvell Gigabit Onboard Ethernet Controller

Speakers

None (I have some already)

Keyboard/Mouse

Microsoft Wireless USB Multimedia Keyboard/Mouse

Monitor

None (I have one already)

Software

Microsoft Works 7.0, IntelliMover, FarCry (video game)

Freebies

Binder with full version CDs of all included software, t-shirt, mousepad

Service/Warranty

1 Year Limited Warranty w/ 24/7 2Net support, LIFETIME ABS technical support afterward

Price

$1343

Yeah, it’s a lot of money to spend on a computer. Why can’t I just be happy with a Dell system for only $700? First of all, Dell frickin’ sucks! Their support is one of the worst in the industry, they bundle their systems with crappy monitors, printers, and trial-version software, and they use uncouth tactics to woo customers. I was almost wooed. Then I stepped back and saw the light. The glowing blue light, that is. (See above picture).

As far as comments on specific components go, I won’t say much, other than that I’ve been gearing up for this for over a year, so I know exactly what I want, as well as what is the best. The Athlon 64 processor is the fastest single processor out there, except perhaps the Apple G5. Yes, 512 MB of memory isn’t as good as a full gigabyte, but memory is easy to upgrade later. The hard drive isn’t the biggest out there (I’ve seen them as large as 500 GB for a single drive), but I don’t need much. All in all, there are certain things about it that might make some people wonder why I would choose this system, but all I can say to them is that I got the best system and the best support and the best company for the best price.

Update

I’ve finally ordered it. I’m on step 3 of 8 in the ordering/shipping process. The parts are being “prepared for assembly”.

Though Aristotle is my moniker, I haven’t put it all that much on philosophy for a while, so here it goes. As I’ve already written, my schedule next year is shaping up to be tough one. With four honors classes, one of which is independent study designed to be even harder than regular honors, I’m going to have to fight to keep my head above water. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course, but it will require some adjustment of my work ethic and habits.

Last year, I had two honors classes, and I had only five real classes because one was taken up by PE. Now, I’m taking seven classes (technically speaking), four of which are, as I said, honors classes, while one other is a regular class (but an advanced level for my grade) and the other two are technology classes (one for working on the school website, the other for an online Photoshop course I’m taking).

My first class will be Algebra 3-4 with DelGrosso, whom I’ve heard is a great teacher, but still tough. Hopefully he’s not too tough, because math has never been my best subject (I still got a 96 last year though). My second is Honors Chemistry with Mrs. Reisener. She is rumored to be a pretty nice teacher, but still strict. I’ve never met her, so I dunno. This is the only class I’m worried I won’t like, because for some strange reason, my heavily technically/logically oriented brain is aversive to science of any kind. The third class on my schedule is AP Euro History with Mr. Epstein, who is a new teacher I guess, because I’ve never heard of him. It looks like he’s replaced my social studies teacher from last year, Mr. Fogelson. This class will undoubtedly be hard, with lots of essays and stuff like that. And it’s an AP course, which means an AP test is coming in the spring. Thus end my hard classes. Mondays are really going to be great.
The fourth class on my list is the independent study English course, during which time I’ll be working on the school website and hopefully getting it up to scratch. My experience with HTML/CSS is so good at this point (nearly three years now) that this will be like sleeping, hopefully. Next will be lunch, a welcome break from a busy morning, and then will come my Photoshop class, which shouldn’t be any more strenuous than some clicking around and creative graphicking. (I don’t think “graphick” is a verb, but I declare it to be, therefore it is. That’s what’s nice about programming: if you want something to be some way, you type a line, and it comes into being. It’s control freak heaven.)

My final class is Spanish 5-6, which will be my third year of it. I’m certainly not fluent, but I can write Spanish really well using a dictionary now that I have a good grasp of the grammar and stuff. This year is supposed to be a project year with lots of culture and history, which sort of sucks, because I’d rather just learn the language and get it over with. Then there’s the fact that I’ll be in a class with lots of juniors and seniors and hardly any sophomores (spl?), since I’m a year ahead. Luckily, since CSHS only requires two years of Spanish, most of the junior idiots and jocks won’t be taking it this year because they will have already gotten their two years, so I should be with people who actually care about learning the language.

And that’s it. It’s not so bad, when I take a step back and look at it, but it won’t be easy, and it’ll certainly be harder than last year. Most kids I’ve talked to have said that sophomore year is hardest because you have lots of work and still two years until graduation. At least with junior year you’re nearing the home stretch. It was the same way in middle school, sort of: sixth grade was easy with easy teachers and assignments designed to not scare kids back into elementary school, seventh grade was a good deal harder, with semester-long electives and harder teachers, and eighth grade would have been a bit easier, except that the teachers were all trying to “prepare us for high school,” though I think they went a bit too far. There were lots of threats of burning yourself out and how teachers would be ruthless, but that really isn’t the case.

It is funny, though, how some students will get themselves on a teacher’s blacklist (I’d say hitlist, but not all teachers want to go that far) by being a general prick, and then complain to their friends how everything was unfair and that teacher was, if male, gay, and if female, a bitch. And then they would go on to say that everything else was gay, like “School is gay!” or “That kid’s gay!” or whatever. I think some people are so scared of the occasional homosexual thoughts that they have (c’mon, everyone thinks of something wrong every once in a while) that they have to make sure the entire world knows that they are vehemently straight by trying to label everything gay. And then it turns into the word everyone uses for something they don’t like, even though it usually doesn’t make sense. And if someone from somewhere else happens to hear them, that person might think, Why is that kid calling school happy? What a nerd. So it ends up being a stupid thing to say no matter how it is construed, not to mention the fact that it would be considered a severe insult if a person who really was homosexual happened to hear it. Unless the homosexual person is in denial too, in which case he’d probably agree.

It’s complicated. Kids need to find a new buzzword. I just say, “Wow, that sucks,” or “Ha!” if someone starts complaining at me about something. But if I complain at someone else, they just call it gay. I proceed to give them a confused look and leave. This look awakens deep-seated insecurities in the complainee, and thinking that I have somehow discovered their deep secret, they run off to tell someone else that I’m the gay one. Or that someone else is; it really doesn’t matter who. I should probably note that I don’t have anything against gay people, though I still think it’s a bit unnatural.

In another year or two the craze will hopefully die down, and all the laws allowing gay marriages will have been passed, so that we don’t have to be reminded about it constantly anymore. And if they keep having “homosexual” awareness parades, they should have “heterosexual” parades too. Or we could just combine them and call them “anyone who feels like parading” parades, in which case I wouldn’t attend because Phoenix is too damn hot for parading. Pool parties would work. Or better yet, pool party parades, where they dig up Central Avenue and put a pool in all the way down its length, and then the paraders swim rather than walk. The marching band wouldn’t fare well; I’ve heard a waterlogged tuba before, and it is not a good sound.

This happy, parading peace won’t last though, because then the Lobbyists will gather in Washington and try to repeal aforementioned laws, thus undoing about ten years of work. Pool party parades will cease, and Central Avenue will be filled back in, finally allowing some angry commuters the means to get home from work. After a few axe-murders (having to wait in your car for a year or so while people swim by would be pretty frustrating), we’ll be back to square one. And so it goes.

I had originally planned to write about work vs. play, and somehow I never got to it, so rather than keep that stuffed up in my large head for any longer, I’ll add that in too. You can stop reading now if you want. This makes me remember that part of the movie Babe where the farmer dude looks down at the pig after they’ve won the sheepdog competition and says, “That’ll do pig, that’ll do.” Others might recognize the line from the first Shrek, where the ogre says to Donkey after crossing a rickety bridge over boiling lava, “That’ll do donkey, that’ll do.” I think the donkey was more deservant of praise, myself.

Um, anyway…. Jim and I have already decided that this year is going to be painful for us. I don’t mean “saw me open with a rusty chainsaw” painful, but even worse, “melt into the ceiling” painful. My friend Dylan has already opted out on AP Euro, though he had planned to take it. Normally I’d try to talk him into staying with it, but I did the same thing last year with AP World History, and under the circumstances (he’s a really good golfer, and must practice a lot), I can’t blame him.

I think my time can be divided into points with eight categories: School, Friends, Sleep, Hygiene/Food Intake, Sports, Hobbies, Family, and Business. With a total of 50 points to use up, here’s how it would break down next year:
School: 18 [7-hr school day, homework, bus ride]
Friends: 2 [some nights 0, points would accumulate during week]
Sleep: 14 [this equates to about seven hours]
Hygiene/Food Intake: 4 [about one hour for meals, lunch not included; includes time spent getting ready for school/bed, going to bathroom outside of school]
Sports: 0 [not enough points left for this]
Hobbies: 4 [includes PHP, LitMag, reading, various other things; not much time for all of that]
Family: 2 [includes chores, points accumulate over week]
Business: 6 [includes all websites done for money, checking/responding to all email, etc.]
I don’t know how well I’ll do on a seven-hour sleep regimen. Eight would be better. Anyway, the fact that my time will become incredibly valuable is going to mean that concessions will have to be made in certain places. I could cut back on school, or do less business stuff, or stop doing my chores and incur the wrath of my cat, or quit tinkering with PHP and Linux and possibly lose the best skill in my arsenal. Like anything, programming must be practiced for the programmer to stay in best shape. I know grades matter, and being valedictorian or salutatorian and getting major scholarship dough would be convenient, but I just don’t know if that’s really what I want. And though I have a small college fund somewhere and my parents will probably chip in a bit, I’m going to need some kind of scholarship, a considerable amount if I’m going go to Caltech or a major technology school. However, this is completely disregarding the fact that my business is growing, and that by the end of high school, at a consistent $1,000/year, I could have about $2,500 by graduation (this is subtracting out the cost of my computer).

And $2,500 will most likely be a low estimate, since my real earnings right now amount to more like $1,600/year (though there have been upside surprises), and I’ll probably be raising my rates within the next year or so. It’d be cool if I could gather a small army of kids with my skills and unite them into one company where we all share the profits, but so far I haven’t found a single person with even the interest to learn what I know, though Jim has expressed interest in learning HTML. If he’s quick and I can drill it into him by December or so, we might be able to found our own company. Even if we weren’t incorporated or LLC-d, we could just pretend that we were, present customers with a pretty, professional company website, and we’d be set. It’s truly amazing how much business there is out there, if you have enough connections and know who to talk to.

For example, as I’ve written many times, I did a wedding website for my uncle not long ago. Now it just so happens that my uncle is a stock broker with dozens of clients and my new aunt has a big family with lots of prospective clients for me. And not only that, but my new aunt’s parents paid for a big, nice wedding, and I believe nearly 300 people attended either the wedding or the reception. My uncle used the website as his main means of notifying guests about where everything was happening, so it’s had almost 500 unique visits in about a month of being online. I slipped my name and a link to Brettia in at the bottom of the page, so those 500 visitors all saw that it was me who did the site and could click the link and find all my contact information and more information about me and my services. I had lots of people tell me that they might have work for me, and I’m already in contact with one of them.

So business is doing well, and to stop would be to get rid of what could end up being a very lucrative revenue stream for me. (In other words, my only revenue stream.) And this brings me to what I wanted to write about in the first place, the continual struggle between business/school and hobbies/friends/family, or simply work vs. play. I’ve always been a bit of a workaholic, but I’ve gotten more laid back in recent years. Whereas I used to do my homework immediately upon getting home (in 5th and 6th grade), I now do it at 8:00 at night or sometimes later. But I also have a lot more to do now than I did then: my life no longer consists of school, family, and reading. (Which was really pathetic, and I haven’t improved by much, but I’m still better than I was.)

I’m caught between the desire to do what I want and the reminder from my conscience that I need to do something else. For example, on a normal day I might arrive home and find that a new version of a major Linux distribution has come out, with all kinds of new features and an updated kernel. My first instinct is to fire up a BitTorrent client (BitTorrent is a peer-to-pear file download system for large files, necessary because Linux distros easily top two gigabytes in size) and start the download, which might be completed in two or three hours, depending on how many people are trying to download at once. Then burning it to install CDs could take another hour and a half because of my slow burner, and the installation can take from one to two hours, on my slow system. Then I might spend another hour looking at it and experiencing pure joy from all the new features and changes.

So, in total, I use up four hours of background time, where I can do something else while keeping an eye on the download or CD-burn, and two hours of direct time, where I can do nothing else at the same time. Unfortunately, these events often occur on nights when I have a lot of homework (which, next year, will be every night), so I end up with an assignment to do at 10:00 at night. You would think that I’d be smart and use the background time to do homework, but that doesn’t ever end up being the case.

Therefore, I must be a good little boy and figure out a schedule that works for me. Here’s one idea:
Average Day:
7:00 - 7:20 | Wake up, get dressed, eat something, go to bus stop.
7:20 - 7:50 | Bus ride. Catch up on assigned readings or read my own book.
7:50 - 8:10 | School, before first bell. Get stuff from locker, talk to friends/Trapani.
8:10 - 2:30 | School.
2:30 - 3:00 | Bus ride. Catch up on assigned readings or read my own book.
3:00 - 3:30 | Watch TV, cool down, get a snack.
3:30 - 4:00 | Check email, daily websites, post on Brettia.
4:00 - 5:00 | Homework Phase I: work on anything due the next day.
5:00 - 6:00 | Business stuff, if no business, tinker as per what is new for that day. Or, write on this blog.
6:00 - 6:45 | Dinner/clean up afterward.
5:45 - 6:15 | Finish any HW not done before dinner, if nothing to do, move on to Phase II below.
6:15 - 7:30 | Homework Phase II: work on longer term projects, essays, etc. Extend time to 8:00 or 8:30 if need be.
End of Phase II - 10:00 | Tinker, do whatever. Go to bed at 10:00 for nine hours of sleep, but 11:00 or 12:00 is fine some nights if HW load is heavy.

Very cluttered, but weekends would be generally free if I work hard enough on weekdays. I’ll figure something out. Right now I’m trying to come up with a good name for my web design company, so I guess I’ll finish early. Bye for now.

Check this Out

DiedOnline, a website that emails your friends and family if you die. Interesting concept.

My vacation hath ended. And, though I didn’t expect it to be, it turned out to be a good one. I left off with my tale of the whole thing about a week ago, after I’d been whitewater rafting. That was a Monday. Tuesday was an uneventful day of fishing and various other things, and Wednesday and Thursday were spent driving north to Montana, where my new aunt’s family lives. We stayed the night in Casper, Wyoming, and we drove through Grand Teton National Park on Thursday. It was pretty. I’ll post pictures later. The main part of the day, however, was spent in Yellowstone National Park, only a few miles north of Grand Teton. Though I was only there for a few hours, I got to see Old Faithful erupt. (It is not so faithful: eruptions can be 40 minutes to two hours apart from one another.)

Okay, I’m losing the will to keep going. The main thing is that I’m home now. And I will “rejoice and be glad in it,” to quote a popular congregational response from church. It did suck that there were power outages when we arrived, however. But it seems now that that has all been cleared up. So now all I have to deal with is the painful reminder that there are only 40 days before school starts, and I have lots to do still. A list:

Summer Homework

The Prince Letter to George W. Bush

Class: AP European History
Due: July 15, 2004
Painfulness Quotient: Extreme
Completion: 0%

In the Wake of the Plague Analysis and Review Paper

Class: AP European History
Due: July 29, 2004
Painfulness Quotient: Medium
Completion: 50%

Siddhartha Journal on Reflections While Reading

Class: Honors English 10
Due: August 16, 2004
Painfulness Quotient: Simple
Completion: 50%

As I Lay Dying Literary Analysis Essay

Class: Honors English 10
Due: August 16, 2004
Painfulness Quotient: Medium
Completion: 0%

Read How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Bluest Eye

Class: Honors English 10
Due: August 16, 2004
Painfulness Quotient: Medium
Completion: 0%

Update

Slight adjustments to the master stylesheet have been made. The sidebar has been cleaned up, and new styles for definition lists (like above) have been added.

Another Update

The stylesheet was tweaked for Internet Explorer compliance. I must reiterate that this website, and most others look much better in Firefox.