I’ve disabled access to my development web server for outsiders. It was kind of annoying because it was running on port 8008, and it was rarely turned on anyway. I’m working on Langosta, but it won’t be ready for quite a while now.
I think my extreme love for Google is going to cause me to hyperventilate. There are just so many reasons why it is the best technology company ever. First, there was GMail. My foot tapped for its Ajaxy prettiness, but I didn’t use it for my primary email address. Then, there was Google Suggest. My foot tapped more, but I use the integrated Firefox search box way more often than the traditional Google home page, so it wasn’t that useful to me. Then, along came Google Maps. I could now gleefully find stuff for my parents. (They sometimes call when they’re out running errands and ask me to find a nearby post office or Starbucks, and all I have to do is type in their location and the service into the box.) There was a pretty long delay after that. I figured that Google was probably waiting a bit before the next big thing (probably to keep me from having a joy-induced heart attack). But suddenly, a “Satellite” link appeared on Google Maps. And lo! I could view purtineer-good satellite imagery of the entire United States, and eventually the whole world. But they didn’t stop there. Google Earth, released this week, looked at first to be nothing more than a nicer front-end to Google Maps’ satellite imagery. Then I checked the box for 3D Buildings, shot over to Chicago, and tugged on the Tilt slider. Holy. Shit. Try it out, it really is that cool. Now, after all that, they’ve decided to give the gift that keeps on giving (and gives back) by releasing API documentation for Google Maps and allowing developers to integrate Google’s mapping functionality into their own applications. Rather than quash neat services that show you where not to go in Chicago and find cheap gas for you, they’ve decided to let them flourish. Yay for Google, the only company that I would welcome as the new Internet overlord. Except maybe Yahoo, which has been doing some cool stuff too.
I forgot about the Summer of Code, sponsored by Google, which has resulted in lots of neat new things that will be added to KDE and other open source projects.
And while all this is happening at Google, Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying to buy a hated ad-ware company. Hmm.
NextFest really was cool. There were lots of geeks and geeky toys, but I didn’t feel embarrassed to be there because compared to some of those people, I’m relatively normal. Some of the stuff was kind of stupid or unrealistic, like a family SUV that swims in water like a dolphin or an electric car that’s barely big enough for a child to drive. But there were other exhibits that really seemed like they would make a difference in the future, such as General Electric’s gigantic wind turbine generators that can power 1,000 homes for a year. Overall, it was definitely worth the tiny ticket price, and I’ll probably try to go again next year if it’s in a city near me.
One thing I notice though, while looking around at the booths and pavilions, was that out of hundreds of Windows laptops, I only saw one or two Macs. I was kind of surprised at this, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Maybe it’s only the news-making geeks, the designers and programmers and other creative professionals, that actually use Macs or Linux PCs. Maybe real geeks use Windows 2000 Professional. I dunno. It is kind of funny, though, that people would prefer to use six-year-old Windows 2000 over four-year-old Windows XP. I think this shows that Windows has nothng to offer anymore except a uniform platform that everyone uses and writes software for. No one buys Windows for the pretty graphics or the multimedia support. People buy Windows so that they can install their own software to handle these demands and forget about Windows lurking underneath.
Take my own system, for example. Right now I’m running Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2, but I’ve turned off Windows Firewall and disabled the Security Center service, two components that were supposed to be part of the huge changes in SP2. Unfortunately, I need neither. I have a hardware firewall, and I don’t need a balloon tip popping up every time my anti-virus software definitions are out of date. Service Pack 2 was also supposed to be great because it finally added popup blocking to Internet Explorer. However, the IE popup blocker was too little, too late. The Google toolbar add-on blocks them all for me. I don’t even use Internet Explorer anymore for anything other than Windows Update (an ActiveX application); once I started using Firefox around version 0.2, I never looked back. SP2 also patched a few vulnerabilities in Outlook Express, except I don’t need that either. I have Thunderbird for email, and even if I wasn’t using Thunderbird, I could use Outlook 2003 instead. Windows Media Player 10 was supposed to be a major advancement, but I’ve opened it about twice since it was upgraded by Windows Update. ITunes does everything I need for music, and QuickTime is fine for video. Firefox is smart enough to figure out which player it needs to use when it encounters embedded video streams on the Internet, so I really don’t care if I’m watching a WMV, an AVI, or an MPEG.
I don’t even run Windows with the default Fisher Price theme - my current desktop uses a clone of the Clearlooks GTK engine for Gnome 2.10. I’m not a huge fan of Gnome, but Clearlooks is pretty, much prettier than Luna. I don’t use any of Windows’ other features that Microsoft is so proud of, like Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (Photoshop/Picasa are way better), the CD Burning Wizard (I have an OEM version of Roxio’s Easy CD/DVD Creator), the built-in zip folders (I use 7-Zip, which opens gunzipped tarballs and other archives too), or any of the crap in the Accessories program folder (Notepad, Paint, Calculator, Windows Movie Maker, etc.). Now that I think about it, the only Microsoft programs that I use anymore are Windows Explorer, the Office suite (which doesn’t come with Windows and normally costs $500 unless you have connections that can get it for $20, like me), and the Command Prompt. That’s it. Why does everyone hate Microsoft so much? Because they lump a bunch of annoying (a la Clippy) extras and bloatware into their operating system, and then they act like that justifies an upgrade price of $99 and a full version price of $199. They seem to think that adding something to the OS will make it more useful, when all people need is a stable, fast system that will run the programs that they need it to run. Windows XP is stable enough, but it could be faster and less of a resource hog. Microsoft needs to realize that no matter how many extra applications they bundle with Windows, none of it will make any difference if every bell and whistle is a half-assed attempt to copy someone else.
When Longhorn finally is released in 2006 (or maybe 2007?), it’s going to be a disappointment. Microsoft has a chance to strip away the bloat, to rewrite everything from the ground up. People don’t need flapping windows or three-dimensional desktops. Those are nice extras, but that’s not why people buy Windows. Platforms like Mac OS X and Linux are fast becoming comprehensive operating systems, meaning that they include a solid OS with plenty of good applications for users so that they don’t have to go to the trouble of finding them themselves. With Mac OS X, you have a great mail client, web browser, office suite (with iWork), file manager, and multimedia tools, right out of the box. With Windows, you have nothing. Sure, Mac OS X isn’t perfect. Some power users aren’t going to be satisfied with iMovie when there are professional alternatives like Adobe Premiere Pro. But at least Apple provides users with software that meets and sometimes exceeds their basic expectations. Windows users have learned over the years to expect nothing from Microsoft, and Longhorn is Microsoft’s chance to change that.
If Longhorn comes out with a decent mail client capable of competing with Thunderbird and even Outlook, a web browser that can compete with Firefox by supporting the latest standards and being easily extendable without risking security, a media player that is easy to use, plays any format, and can connect to a music store seamlessly, a file manager and search mechanism that helps users better organize themselves, and a default theme that looks good and is ergonomic without being too glitzy, all included with the operating system, then Microsoft will stand a chance against the onslaught of competition it has been fighting off in recent years. Other extras would be nice too, like an office suite (a crippled version of Office like Works would be better than nothing), an unzipper that can handle any archive format, including those used more often on UNIX-based platforms, an S/FTP client embedded into Windows Explorer, basic image editing capabilities like those found in free photo managers such as Picasa, an instant messaging client that is compatible with more services than just MSN, a CD/DVD burner that can save CDs as projects as well as burn ISO images…the list goes on and on.
However, even if Microsoft is able to put all this together in 18 months, there will still be one problem: I have all this already. What reason do I have to upgrade to Longhorn if I already have programs that do the same thing as its bundled apps will? Windows XP has a large enough user base that it’s going to be around for a long time, so I don’t have to worry about being excluded from running some software because it is Longhorn-only. It will be five years before that happens. It seems to me that, by the time 2006 (or 2007?) rolls around and Microsoft starts throwing launch parties, people are going to look at the euphoric programmers partying at Times Square and wonder why they wasted five years developing a product that doesn’t do anything more for end-users than its predecessor.
This is what I think Microsoft should do: stop trying to do by themselves what other companies are already doing better. Concentrate on making Longhorn lean and mean, a computing platform for the next-generation that offers nothing more than a few basic tools, such as a desktop, taskbar, window manager, web browser, and file manager. Throw in desktop search, theme enhancements, and some other niceties to attract attention. Throw out Outlook Express, unhook Windows Media Player (and make it a free download like iTunes), and decouple Internet Explorer (so that it can be uninstalled if a user doesn’t want it). Chuck Notepad, Calculator (or replace it with the excellent Calculator PowerToy), the Character Map, and all the other useless “accessories”. Then, work toward making it easier to develop Windows applications. This already seems to be happening with XAML and the other new development technologies in Longhorn, but we need more. We need a general-purpose programming language like Perl or Python, a competent Command Prompt with auto-completion and other Bash-like extras. We need tools like Microsoft Visual Studio available for free download so that anyone can create a basic program if they want to.
Once all this is done, Microsoft needs to open itself up to the world. They can provide the platform, the world will provide the software. Is Microsoft losing any money by attracting more developers to its cause? No. If anything, this will help to make Windows even more dominant. If Ballmer is feeling really bold, Microsoft could even set up a repository like SourceForge for Windows software and connect it to Longhorn in the same way that Linspire has CNR. Users can browse the repository and install the software they really want with a click of a button. For free software, this is immediate. For proprietary sofware, installation is just as easy, but there will be a slight delay while the software manager accesses the user’s credit card information and authorizes a payment to the software company. On each payment, Microsoft takes a standard retailer transaction fee and makes a profit just like Best Buy or CompUSA would. Suddenly, generic users like Mom and Pop and Joe Six-pack can use open-source software right alongside the familiar closed-source applications and games.
Maybe the next computing revolution won’t be a single killer app like email or online music stores. Maybe it will be the capability for a killer app to go from an idea to a product in a matter of weeks. Maybe this will spawn a huge number of killer apps, ideas that were just waiting around in people’s heads, waiting to be implemented and distributed to the masses. Microsoft has the dominance it needs; now it’s time to leverage that dominance to make Windows the One True Operating System.
But that’ll never happen.
I’m done with my tangent/rant now. Back to NextFest and my weekend. The only other memorable thing about NextFest was a booth where some start-up or another was hyping its wireless music system, which can hook into a router and broadcast a user’s music around the house. I asked the guy who was showing it off which formats the system would play, and he listed a number of types that I’ve heard of, along with some I didn’t know existed. When he mentioned
That wiped the grin off his face. “Er…well, Apple doesn’t play nice with its format, you know, and…it can play anything you rip from a CD….”
I just waited for the “No,” but it never came. He instead turned to someone else and ignored me. I think every product has a fatal flaw like this. Wow, yay, look at this, I can play music anywhere in my house! Except all my music is from
So that was NextFest. It was three hours of goodness. But somehow we were lucky, for there was more goodness to come. By some stroke of luck, Taste of Chicago was going on on Saturday as well. For those who haven’t been, Taste of Chicago is a huge festival where all the Chicago restaurants set up tents in Grant Park and cook up lots of food for visitors to buy with special tickets. There was pizza, beef sandwiches, jerk chicken, frozen grapes, ice cream, goat meat, and cheesecake, along with all the stuff I didn’t try. Chicago really is a cool city, much better than Los Angeles, and right near the top of my top ten list of cities that I’ve been to.
Eggs are the bane of my existence.
Wired Magazine is having a neat little convention/exhibit called NextFest at Navy Pier in Chicago. Being so close to Chicago is one of the benefits of living in the Milwaukee area: you can leech off of the cool stuff happening there without having to deal with the crime and traffic of living in such a huge city. NextFest is all about future technology, with demonstrations of robots and submarines and all sorts of next-generation toys. One thing that I’m looking forward to seeing is the new Segway Centaur, which is like a four-wheel drive version of the original Segway that can rear up to get over obstacles. For a good description of the highlights of the exposition, read the article that appeared in the June issue of Wired. I haven’t subscribed to Wired yet, but I always end up getting a copy when I’m about to fly or drive somewhere. It’s the first magazine that I’ve found that is so engrossing that I read every single article. Normally I start to get bored at one point or another and start skimming a bit, but Wired hold my attention all the way through. The newstand price ($5) isn’t really cheap compared to the subscriber price ($1), but at least I always get my money’s worth. It’s definitely worth reading if you like science and technology but don’t like to read about the technical inner workings of everything. If something new and cool is invented or discovered, Wired gives a brief description on how it works, then focuses on its viability and potential impact on regular people. I like this approach much better than that of Discover or other similar magazines that lose readers with technical jargon. It’s kind of like Slashdot without dupes and annoying commenters.
I said I didn’t care about the presents, but I still got some good stuff anyway: a couple of T-shirts, money, some DVDs, money, a pair of sandals, and…money. Yay for money! I’ve been kind of broke for awhile now, so finding that I have an extra $200 to burn is kind of nice. The hard part is figuring out exactly what I want to spend it on. I’m currently torn between Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional (cheap education edition), an iPod Mini, some nice surround sound headphones for my computer (probably from Sennheiser), or an extra 512 MB of RAM. Or I could just wait and get something better after I get some more cash from various website jobs and such. If you know of anything cool that I should think about, post a comment. If you don’t, check out this site for some interesting Internet radio shows (podcasts). I’m really new to the podcasting movement, but Odeo make it sound pretty neat. And I have to admire the AJAX in use on their site (a la Flickr, Gmail, Google Suggest, Google Maps, Basecamp, etc.).
Now that the queen of England has an iPod Mini, maybe I should just give in to desire and get one….
At 7:09 tonight, I will officially have turned sixteen. Woo. I guess birthdays have kind of started to lose significance with me, especially now that I have other ways of getting things I want. I can remember looking forward to my birthday months in advance and making up long lists of things that I wanted. Now…it’s just another day.
I know that I’m by no means old or anything, but turning sixteen still makes me feel a lot older than I was just yesterday. Suddenly, I’m only two years away from college. Suddenly, I’m halfway through adolescence. For some reason I find myself wondering why I haven’t rebelled yet. I thought I was supposed to have turned into some kind of a drug-using, partying, careless, disrespectful, selfish brat by now. I can see it developing in my little brother already. I think that due to some flaw in my DNA, my pituitary gland allowed me to skip right from childhood to adulthood with no gap in between. That theory would explain a lot. It would explain why I take things so much more seriously than most kids, why I’m so responsible and forward-thinking, why I sometimes feel embarrassed by my own generation.
I have no idea what kind of presents I’ll get this year. I didn’t really ask for anything or drop hints about stuff I kind of wanted. I’m not sure that I really care that much - at this point, I’m happy enough with what I’ve got that anything new will just be a pleasant surprise. I did get one present early this year: my official report card from OHS. Everything was just as I had predicted, so I don’t see a need to brag about it again. There was one thing on my report card that took me by surprise, though. My GPA moved up a lot more than I had expected. OHS uses two different GPA systems for some reason, a standard one that uses a normal four-point scale and an honors one that uses a five-point scale. According to the standard GPA scale, I have a 4.003. This is probably the one that matters most since it’s the one that gets sent to colleges. According to the honors GPA scale, I have a 4.534. This one means nothing, but it’s used to calculate the class ranking because it gives more weighting to honors classes. What was weird was that my standard GPA went up by about a tenth of a point, but my honors one went down by about the same amount. Strange.
Unlike CSHS, OHS prints a student’s rank in their graduating class alongside the GPAs and letter grades. I don’t know how a CSHS student is supposed to know if they’re in the running for valedictorian or not unless they ask a counselor. After third quarter, my rank was 18th out of 355. At the end of the semester, I’ve moved up four slots to 14th. I was really surprised that I could move up that much in just a quarter. And this is without factoring in the extra boost that I should get from my independent AP European History class, which had honors weighting. There must have been a lot of kids who slacked off this semester.
Now that I’ve spent all this time rambling about GPAs, I have to remind myself of how utterly meaningless they are. So much depends on luck (getting the right teachers, being able to get into honors classes before they fill up, etc.) that I wonder why schools even bother to rank their students that way. Seeing myself move up in the ranking is nice, but at the end of the day I know that there’s really no way to measure someone’s intelligence or performance in school - there are just too many deciding factors. I think educators need to focus more on figuring out how kids think and identifying ways in which some children think differently than others rather than waste time developing standardized tests like AIMS that are set up to fail from the start.
The past week has been…eventful. I know I haven’t blogged for over a week now, and I’m sorry. Right now I barely feel like writing anything at all, but I know that if I wait another day, that day will become another week, which will become another month, and by the end of the summer I will have forgotten that I even have a blog. Okay, that probably won’t happen, but since this blog is one of the things that I have stuck to the longest in my life, I’m feeling a need to ensure that I keep it going. Anyway, the reason why this week has been kind of crappy as far as first weeks of summer go is that I am afflicted with some kind of plague. Now you have to keep reading.
Let’s rewind back to May 23rd, Memorial Day. After driving 600 miles to see family in Missouri, I discovered that I was violently allergic to the state, which was kind of strange since I was born there. I got pretty much all the symptoms: itchy, bloodshot eyes, runny nose, sore throat, etc. It was annoying, but not so bad that I couldn’t deal with it. The next two weeks were okay, and I thought I was getting better by about Monday of the last week of school. Then there was some kind of relapse and I became the wondrous human mucus fountain. (Don’t get too close, kids!) Somehow I managed to concentrate on finals, but I was still uncomfortable.
Then school was out, and I was elated, and everything was suddenly good in the world once more. I started to feel a little bit better, but I was still cramming down the meds like some kind of drug addict with only two days left to live. I kind of lost track of what I was taking…I just took whatever my mom gave me and downed it with some water and pretended that it was helping somehow. I might have recovered over the weekend, but then we took a trip to Iowa to see other family members and help out with a little pavilion at one of those leukemia races. Normally I would have been kind of unhappy with driving 300 miles just to man a booth for four hours, but I need service hours for my IB Diploma, so I didn’t complain.
When we finished with the race thing, we returned to my great-grandma’s house to sleep, and it was then that I began to feel sick again. This time, it was sinus-related, with lots of phlegm and other good fun stuff. I also developed a bit of a cough, but it wasn’t too bad. In the morning we drove back, and by then I was beginning to recover once more.
Things were looking better on Monday, and on Tuesday I was actually feeling pretty good, though I was getting a lot of headaches. But the saga isn’t over yet. On Wednesday I started feeling stopped-up and coughy again, and the headaches continued. I literally couldn’t stand up without feeling like a stupid six-year-old had mistaken me for a tee and hit my head with the bat instead. I started to feel better by the end of the day, and for some reason in my delusional state I felt that this would be a good time to back up all my files and perform the yearly reformatting ritual that is the responsibility of every Windows user. I knew that it needed doing: my Registry was cluttered with keys stored by programs that I had uninstalled long ago, and things were feeling a bit sluggish and unhappy. I opted to wipe the entire hard drive because Windows doesn’t play well with other operating systems like Gentoo Linux installed on other partitions. I backed up my home directory and my etc directory from Gentoo so that I can rebuild it with minimal effort when I feel like it.
Then, once everything was backed up onto DVDs or uploaded to a directory on brettia.com, I popped in the recovery CD that came with my computer and navigated to the Windows installer. I could have just restored everything from an image of the way my hard drive was on the day I bought the computer, but I wanted my new installation to be fresh and clean. I watched excitedly (coughing periodically) as the installer loaded the various drivers it needed, and I happily pressed Enter when it asked me to do so to begin the installation process. The installer thought for a second and then presented me with a great big error message saying that no hard drive had been found. No problem, I thought. I must need to load a driver from the floppy the manufacturer gave me. This made sense because my computer has a Serial ATA drive, and Serial ATA wasn’t out when Windows XP was released in October 2001 (I can’t believe it’s been that long).
So I put in the SATA driver floppy disk (this is the reason why computers still need floppy drives, by the way) and pressed F6 when the installer began loading drivers to load the special driver for my hard drive. But when the installer reached the “Press Enter” stage, it still couldn’t find my hard drive. Feeling the panic set in, I tried to boot the computer normally, just to make sure nothing was wrong. But something was wrong: I was getting a Stop Error (Microsoft’s nicer name for the dreaded BSOD) before the OS even got to a point where it showed the Windows logo. Even worse, the error message was cryptic and gave no information as to what was wrong. Now I was really afraid that something had gone seriously wrong. I kept trying to boot Windows, using modes like Safe Mode (where it loads basic, default drivers that supposedly are guaranteed to work) and “Last Known Good Configuration,” which I believe reverts the user back to a version of the Registry that booted successfully recently. Nothing was working.
Finally I stepped back and took stock of the situation. If my Windows installation was shot, there was no reason to panic because I had already backed everything up. However, my computer was useless if I couldn’t get it to install, so one option was to call ABS and have them figure it out. They would probably diagnose the problem as being a hard drive issue and try to replace the drive, but I wasn’t so sure that that was what was wrong. The fact that I was seeing my GRUB boot loader screen upon turning the computer on meant that the hard drive was accessible because GRUB lives in the MBR and pulls its configuration files from one of my Linux partitions. I booted Gentoo just to make sure that this was the case, and it worked just fine. So there was no problem with the drive, just with Windows (surprise, surprise).
Then I realized that there might have been an update to the SATA driver since my floppy disk was made. At this point I had no other ideas, so I went to VIA’s driver website using Crampy (*shudder*) and made a new floppy using the version of the hard disk driver that was offered there. I repeated the process of loading it when the installer asked me to press F6 to load third-party drivers, pressed Enter at the end of the driver-loading process, and…it worked! In my ten years of using computers, I have never been so happy to see an EULA.
After that the install process was cake. I had to enter my name and click a few times and press a button or two, but it really was easy compared to installing Linux (especially Gentoo…). I suppose it should be easy for me since I’m the self-proclaimed uber-Windows-user-wunderboy, and I’ve done it at least five times on other computers. As far as speed goes, however, it could have been faster. I can install the i386 version of Fedora Core 3 on this computer in less than 15 minutes, and it includes nice things like a terminal that works, a complete office suite, and a competent web browser (Firefox) that doesn’t flop over and die like some kind of fainting goat every time it sees a web page that was written after 2001. Installing Windows took about 45 minutes (without counting the hours spent trying to figure out why it couldn’t find my hard drive), and getting all my files restored to their rightful places while reinstalling all my applications took another four hours or so on Thursday (this is why I waited to do this until I was out of school). I think the amount of work involved could be compared to rebuilding a nation after a civil war.
Don’t forget that I’m feeling like crap while all this is happening. I kept telling myself to let it go and figure it out when I was feeling better, but I don’t like it when my computer isn’t up and running normally - it makes me feel unprepared for those times when I really need to use it. I finally got everything working like it was supposed to, but I still need to work on my development environment. That can wait, for now.
On Friday night, I got some industrial-strength allergy medication from my doctor that was supposed to cure me. However, I wasn’t really sure that what I had was caused by allergies because so far I haven’t been allergic to anything in Wisconsin. I took it anyway like the good little snot-spurting sheep-that-hacks-like-a-chain-smoker that I am, hoping that I would feel better in the morning, when we would take yet another family trip. The destination: Iowa, again! Yup, another 300-mile drive, this time for my dad’s 20-year high school reunion barbecue at a small park.
I doubt I would have had fun even if I wasn’t sick. All the kids there were about five years younger than me, and the ones that were closer to my age were scary-looking hick children that I didn’t really feel like talking to. So I listened a bit to the stories and jokes that the adults were telling, but I mainly just sat around feeling bored and miserable. Three hours later, it was time to go. My dad gave us a quick tour of his hometown, which was neat but would have been much neater if I hadn’t been feeling as if I was about to cough out an internal organ. After the tour we went north to Fort Dodge (also called “Fat Dog” by the locals for some strange reason) and ate at a hotel restaurant with the people who had been at the park and a few others. Luckily, there were no other children there, so I felt that given my current condition it wouldn’t be that impolite to pull out a book and try to forget about my illness.
I ate something, too, which I felt was progress because I hadn’t really felt like eating anything for the whole day prior to that dinner. I think the crap that I had been swallowing for the past few days was beginning to make me nauseous, and I figured that adding some grilled chicken and rice to the bile in my stomach would at least make for some more interesting vomit later, even if it didn’t help settle my roiling belly that much. I never ended up vomiting, though I really wanted to because it seemed like doing so would make everything better. Instead, my cough got worse and became a grating-hacking-sucking sound. I spent most of last night trying to breathe and attempting to suppress the coughing. I was beginning to get sore in my chest from doing it so much, and every time I coughed once, at least three had to follow in some kind of strange reflexive action. It sucked.
Today was the drive home, and even though I hit my low point early this morning, I was feeling better by about noon. Even so, I still cough a lot, and it hurts a lot more now that most of my upper body is sore from it. I seem to be coming out of it, though.
I’m sure you enjoyed reading about my run-in with the plague, since everyone likes to hear about death and suffering and destruction like I do (right?). I probably wouldn’t have even mentioned it if it hadn’t been this long-lasting (almost a month now). Also, the last time I was sick like this was in 7th grade, and I had almost identical symptoms. But since then I really haven’t been sick at all. I guess spending one month incapacitated in return for four years of peaceful existence isn’t that bad of a trade.
Now all I feel is exhausted. I’m tired of being sick, and I’m tired of driving. You know, I’ve crossed the Mississippi six times in less than a month. All three trips combined total about 2400 miles. I guess I should feel lucky since so many people don’t ever make it out of their home state. I really have been to a lot more places that most people. Except I don’t feel lucky or grateful, I just feel irritated. Waah.
Excuse me, I’m busy breeding boneless, free-range kittens.
–An Anonymous Illinois Radio Announcer
(This was so random that I couldn’t help but guffaw at its utter randomness.)
I don’t really know how to put into words the emotions that I’m feeling right now. I’ve been smiling pretty much all day, without even meaning to. I guess I just didn’t expect a school year that has been so exhausting to end as well as this one did. I suppose I should elaborate:
Yesterday morning, I was truly afraid that the good grades that I had worked so hard to earn over the past semester were in jeopardy. I felt like, at the last second, everything was collapsing around me. Over the past two weeks, I’ve barely finished some homework assignments in time, and for the first time since I can remember, I’ve turned things in incomplete. There was a broken record in my head that had nothing on it except “What the hell is wrong with you?” in a loud drill-sergeant voice. I felt like I had finally reached my limit, like I had been pushed as far as I could go. And yet I knew that in only one-and-a-half more days, I would be free. I knew that I could not fail when I was so close to success.
Then the results began pouring in. I had already taken my algebra final on Tuesday and Wednesday, and though I knew I’d gotten a 94% on the regular portion of the test, I was worried that I hadn’t done that well on the second half, which was all word problems. When the teacher handed me my test, I almost didn’t want to look at it. But I knew I would find out eventually anyway, so I turned it over. 120%. Five perfect problems and two extra credit ones. This buoyed me up a bit, mainly because it meant that I would get an A+ in the class (good for a weighted GPA score of 5.3) rather than the usual A. I think my final grade was a 100.7%.
Even though I was happy about my algebra grade, I still needed to give a presentation in English at the beginning of the next period. I was originally supposed to give it on Wednesday, but I had some technical problems. Gmail decided to be slow, making a ten-slide PowerPoint a ten-minute download. There were lots of people waiting for me to go, so I just canceled the download and said I’d go Thursday. I clicked the Shutdown menu item in the Novell window so that I could log off, but I accidentally hit the Enter key before changing the option in the window to “Log Off” from the default of “Turn Off the Computer.” I felt sort of stupid after that because here I was, teh l33t hax0r, and I couldn’t even log off correctly. Having my mistake broadcast to the class via a projector only made it worse. Whoever decided that shutting down the computer should be the default option was a dumbass. Anyway, I got to wait by the computer in shame while it shut itself off so that I could boot it back up, and then I slunk dejectedly back to my seat.
Presenting on Thursday rather than Wednesday turned out to be a good thing after all. I prepared a bit more Wednesday night and made sure that I was as prepared as I could be, and then I uploaded it to a directory on this website so that I could download it in the morning at school. I dunno why Gmail was so slow on Wednesday because the presentation was in my home directory in about 45 seconds when I downloaded it from my server. When I got to English after the eventful math class, I was barely able to be nervous because I had somehow contracted a cold. For me, a little bit of nausea before a big presentation is normal, but the nausea I was experiencing after swallowing down about a gallon of phlegm pretty much masked it. At that point, I just wanted to get it over with so that I could curl up in a corner with a box of Kleenex.
Right before I logged onto the computer to pull up my presentation, my teacher called some of us over so that we could see what our grades were before we presented (the presentation is our final exam, and is therefore worth 20% of the semester grade). When I noticed that I had an 87%, I was a bit confused. Since I had gotten all As on the papers and tests that we had done in the class, I thought I must have forgotten to turn something in. At the same moment that I had that thought, my teacher, Mr. Craite, mentioned that students who hadn’t presented yet had lower grades because the presentation grade was a zero until the presentations were done. So somehow, even if I had just decided to skip class and not do a presentation, I would have had a B in the class. That was what really made me feel better about the whole thing - I suddenly had this realization that none of this really mattered, that I was getting caught up in the end-of-year stress that everyone else was feeling. But unlike a lot of the students in that English class, I had no reason to fear for my grade. After that, I stood up, got my notes together, and presented my information as best I could. It probably could have been better, but my cold was a problem that only got worse as I talked. Oh well.
This might be unbelievable after reading about my English presentation, but I was actually more worried about something else that occurred Thursday: my chemistry final. I think I’ve mentioned before that chemistry is by far my worst class. Yes, my grade wasn’t bad (93%), but I was teetering on the edge of an A-, so a good final exam grade was necessary to keep an A. I studied as much as I could the night before, but I was kind of at a disadvantage from the start because I had only begun taking the class this quarter, the halfway point for the other students. The reason for this was that I had taken a semester of chemistry already in Arizona, but that class only met for 55 minutes each day, which only counted for half a credit. The curriculum for the Arizona class was elementary school level compared to the class here, and it was hard for me to adjust at the beginning. There’s still a lot of stuff that I don’t understand, like what the heck a mole is (certainly nothing furry), and lots of things about gases and pressure.
I had already resigned myself to getting a 50% or lower on the chemistry exam. There was just no possible way that I could do better than that, given the circumstances. When I took it, I was doing it with almost no seriousness at all. I just kind of guessed on most of the questions. The ones that I did know, those that were from topics covered this quarter, were fairly simple. But for most I just tried to reverse engineer a formula as best I could. I knew that most of the time I’d be wrong, but at that point I just didn’t care all that much (there’s a bit of a pattern here…). I had asked the teacher on Tuesday if he was going to give me a different version of the final that only had questions pertaining to 4th quarter stuff, but he just shook his head and told me to do my best on the test and he would take care of me. So I went with that, knowing that even if he curved my score hugely I’d still get a horrible grade.
Last night was my first night without homework in a long, long time. I would have been pretty happy about that, but I was still suffering from a cold (or perhaps dying of plague). I went to bed at 11:00, which is actually kind of early compared to some of the late nights I had back in March or April (3 AM, sometimes). This morning, I woke up at 5:30. Sunlight was already shining through my bedroom window, so I just laid there for an hour or so. The bus ride to school was normal, but today I actually responded to the driver’s courteous “Good morning” when I got on. I used to always say good morning when the driver greeted me, even on days when the morning was far from good. One driver in Arizona, a nice guy named Mel, even told me later that I was the only person who infallibly said good morning every single day. I didn’t really take it as a compliment; I just thought it would be rude not to say anything. It was only then that I realized that no one else cared enough to say hello to the poor guy who drove them to and from school 180 days per year.
After moving to Wisconsin, no morning was good enough to merit a polite greeting for my new bus driver. Most of the time I was still in a sleepy trance, having woken up only a half hour before getting picked up. But today was happy. Today was the end. And so I smiled, and I cheerfully said, “Good morning!” And I kept smiling for another ten minutes until the bus reached school. I think the driver must have thought I was on drugs or something because he gave me a strange look as I got off, but I didn’t care.
When second period rolled around, I received my presentation grade: A. I was kind of surprised, but I didn’t care enough to be happy about it. Block C, my chemistry period, was the only one that mattered at that point. The day of reckoning had come, and it was time for me to be judged and found unworthy. The teacher passed out our exam results immediately after the bell rang, and I grimaced in pain as he handed mine to me, imagining that I would see a great big F in red ink staring back at me from the paper. As it turned out, the ink wasn’t red, nor did I get an F. It was green, and the letter was a B. Somehow, even though I didn’t know the material and was answering randomly on some questions, I had done better than half the class (an 80% was the average score). I was amazed, to say the least.
On Tuesday I had told the kid in front of me, Justin, about how badly prepared I was for the final, and he was nice enough to let me copy some of his notes to use on the note card that each of us was allowed to use on the test. He turned around and showed me his score (he had done much better than he had thought he would too), and he was equally amazed. He said something to the effect of, “Wow, I could never have done that well if I were you,” which made me feel even better.
Even with my 80% score on the final, my grade in the class would still probably drop to a A- or a B+. I wasn’t all that happy about that, but it didn’t matter because we were making ice cream. Mine turned out really runny and way too sweet, but it was a fun thing to do on the last day anyway. The teacher said that he had made it using liquid nitrogen to cool it the year before, but unfortunately we had to do it the old fashioned way (with ice) this time around. At the end of the period, just as I was about to leave, the teacher came over to me and told me that he had been shocked to see that I had done so well on the exam. Then he proceeded to say that there was no need to worry about it anyway because he was just going to use my previous grade (93%) as my final semester grade. That was the icing on the cake, I guess, or the ice cream with the cake, since we had cake with the ice cream that we made.
So many things could have gone wrong this semester. So many things could have been so much worse. And yet, they weren’t. I had escaped the end of the year exams battered, beaten, tired - but unscathed. And as I walked home, drenched in sweat from a combination of 90-degree temperatures and high humidity, I couldn’t help but yell to the world, “FIN!!!!!!!!”
For some reason my Internet connection speed has dropped by half in the past week or so. I’ve notice choppiness in streaming videos, slow downloads, long wait times when loading pages, etc. Charter will be getting an earful. I don’t know why this is happening. My cable Internet access is supposed to be 3 Mbps. Half the speed is still not bad…but it sure feels slower. I used to have a wonderful 5 Mbps connection from Cox Communications in Arizona, and losing those 2 Mbps was bad enough (especially for downloading ISO images / syncing my Portage tree / downloading source tarballs). I’m about ten feet out of TimeWarner’s region, otherwise I’d get that and enjoy service similar to what I used to have in Arizona. I really wish that multiple cable providers could compete for one area so that there’d be some competition. That was kind of fragmented. Urf.
TWO AND A HALF DAYS LEFT!!!
For those who haven’t heard yet, Debian finally released version 3.1 of its Linux distribution, codenamed “Sarge”. Unfortunately, it’s been almost three years since the last release, and yet my Gentoo system is more up-to-date. Someone please flame me back and tell me why Debian is worth using anymore…maybe as a server OS, but that’s it. Oh, and it comes on 29 CDs, including both binary and source packages. You could also get it on two DVDs, or you could just download the packages over the Internet like normal people. Ugh.
This was a little harsh. I’m sure a lot of work goes into maintaining twelve-thousand packages (this is what I read somewhere, I might be wrong). I just think the Debian people spend too much time on adding packages to the distro and too little time actually maintaining a distro. This is why projects like Ubuntu and Mepis have sprung up, offering a nicer desktop with up-to-date applications. If Debian wants to become a server-only open-source operating system, they should just do it rather than waffle around releasing stuff with KDE 3.3 and Gnome 2.8 (both were released last year).