Markdown is gone (the PHP version seems buggy) and live comment preview is truly live once more. It’s now done without any Ajax (it doesn’t send any data back to my server for processing) so there is no longer a delay when updating. Comment and yell at me if you have any problems with it.
As summer draws to a close, I have something new to look forward to: NFL football. My dad is a huge NFL fan, and he does a lot of fantasy leagues with various groups of co-workers and friends. This year, he’s in three different leagues, so he gave one of his teams to me to manage. Our draft was last night, and through some really lucky breaks, we ended up with this roster:
There are six other members of our team, but they don’t matter that much since they’ll only be active when other players have a bye week (or, God forbid, get injured). Priest Holmes, the NFL’s best running back, was an easy one to get because my team had the second pick (Peyton Manning went first, of course). My dad and I thought we were really lucky when our next pick came around (23rd) and both Terrell Owens and Marvin Harrison (arguably the NFL’s two best wide receivers) were still available. It was hard to decide who was better, but we went with Owens for that pick. Our next pick was the 26th (the pick order reverses after every round), and the dumbass who got to go on picks #24 and #25 didn’t go for Harrison (I think he picked up the Bills’ defense, which definitely wasn’t worth passing over Harrison), so we got him too.
On the next pick, we were hoping to get Brett Farve as our quarterback, but he was taken, so Tom Brady was the next best one. Even though the Patriots’ offense doesn’t exactly compare to that of the Chiefs or the Colts, Brady wasn’t such a bad choice. However, the Patriots’ defense is probably second-best in the league, so getting that on the next pick worked out nicely. Our final important picks were Vanderjagt (second-best kicker after Vinatieri), and Jerome Bettis, who is usually used by the Steelers in the red zone to score touchdowns, which is what we get the most points for in the fantasy league. You get points for things like interceptions and sacks too, but they don’t add up to a whole lot.
Now that I feel ready to pwn with my fantasy team, I can turn my attention to my favorite real-life team, the Kansas City Chiefs. This year is looking better than last, though they haven’t been they great in the preseason games. Then again, you can’t really predict anything from the results of preseason matchups because they’re never played like real ones (coaches try new plays, put in rookies and backups, etc.). I’m hoping for a record as good as two years ago (13-3), but everything depends on whether or not the defense can do better than it has historically.
I can’t wait for September 8th. Not only will the regular season start, but I’ll get to see the Chiefs’ archrival, the Oakland Raiders, get crushed to within an inch of their lives by the Patriots. Woo!
I’ve passed the ultimate geek test: Kenny lives! The new office computer has been dubbed Kenny, after the death-prone South Park character. This is not because Kenny crashes often, but because the character is always miraculously resurrected after every episode, and Kenny is a resurrection of Crampy. I really don’t watch South Park that much anymore (I’ve moved on to Family Guy), but since I was using that as a theme I thought I might as well stay with it.
The build went rather well. All the parts had arrived by Tuesday afternoon, but I still needed an antistatic wristband and an 80-millimeter fan for the rear of the case. I got those later on Tuesday night at CompUSA, which, by the way, has an amazing selection of computer parts. I always thought of CompUSA as a clone of Circuit City or Best Buy, but it’s really more of a Fry’s Electronics (a superstore of tech toys that had a few Phoenix locations).
When I got home at about 8:00 PM, I started unpacking parts and setting them on their electrostatic packaging. I also found a small plate to put all my screws on so that they didn’t roll off the desk I was using as a worktable. After that, the first step was to install the processor, in this case an AMD Sempron 2600+, into its socket on the motherboard, a Gigabyte Socket A board. This was very easy; I simply figured out which direction it should sit by looking at the corners and set it in place. After locking the processor down, the heatsink needed to be mounted atop it. My heatsink was an AMD stock heatsink (the Sempron was a retail boxed version, not an OEM version, which comes without a heatsink or a warranty) that already had a thermal pad on the bottom. The thermal pad was a stroke of luck for me, as I had forgotten to buy some Arctic Silver. I set the heatsink atop the processor, lining the clip through the center up with its tabs on either side of the processor socket. One end of the clip was easy to hook around its tabs, but the other end was a different story. The clip was bent up at a 45-degree angle so that it would create some tension on the clip when it was locked down completely. The bent end has a little slot for a flathead screwdriver so that you can press on it to push it around the tabs that will hold it and into place. I began pressing on my screwdriver, harder and harder, until I felt that there was no possible way that the motherboard would stand up to this kind of force. I relieved the pressure on the clip and ran upstairs to my own computer to check AMD’s website for detailed instructions to make sure I hadn’t done anything wrong. It took a while to find it, but in a PDF guide, AMD states that it can take 12 to 24 pounds of pressure to press the clip into place. Amazed that the components were designed to stand up to this kind of force, I went back downstairs and pressed down on the clip as hard as I could, this time without trying to limit my strength to keep from breaking something. Finally, I was able to get the clip down and locked onto its tabs, and amazingly nothing had snapped.
Once this was done, I put the motherboard standoffs into the case and set the motherboard atop them inside it. After trying several screws, I finally found the right ones to screw into the standoffs, anchoring the motherboard into place. Then I installed the memory (finally, something I’ve done before), connected the wires for the power button, reset button, and front LED activity lights to the motherboard, connected the motherboard to the power supply, plugged the computer into the wall, and turned it on. I was afraid as I touched the button, knowing that this was the moment of truth that would tell me if I had done everything right so far. The button depressed, the power LED came on, and the CPU fan whirred to life. Everything was running normally.
Flush with excitement after this victory, I turned the computer off again, unplugged it (it’s usually not a good idea to work on electronic devices while they’re plugged in…) and began installing the drives. The floppy drive came first, and then the hard drive, and finally the DVD writer. I screwed them all in, and then I connected them to the motherboard and then to the power supply. So far, so good.
The final components that needed to be added were the old PCI video card from Crampy (it’s a 256 MB Nvidia GeForce FX 5200, not too shabby for a budget box), and a D-Link DWL-520 802.11a/b/g wireless PCI card so that the office computer can connect to the Internet through the wireless router in my room. Both of these installed without a hitch. The final tasks were to install the 80-millimeter case fan and the extra USB ports in the back. The USB ports went into a PCI slot, and the fan had to be screwed in and connected to both the power supply and the motherboard. This was the only time throughout the entire build process that I had any help: my brother held the fan in place to keep it from moving around while I screwed into it.
At this point I was nearly done; all I needed to do was check that I had wired everything correctly, set a few jumpers (for those who have never set a jumper before, like me pre-Kenny, you have to open or close a connection between two pins on the motherboard by putting on or taking off a little black thingy [not sure what it’s called]), and plug everything in. I powered it on, and, amazingly enough, it worked on the first try. I was half-expecting something to go wrong, but nothing did. I went into the BIOS setup area to check the temperature and found it to be normal (25°C case and 40°C processor). This is a bit warmer than Marklar, but Marklar has three fans rather than just one.
I finished my work near midnight, though it was interrupted a few times when I was looking things up online and trying to help my dad figure out how to join a team on the CBS Sportsline fantasy football site. I’d say it took about three hours when you take all of that out. If I built another one tomorrow, I bet I could do it in about half that time since I was taking a lot more time to do things slowly and carefully than I really needed to.
Today was the day for installing the software on the new computer. As I mentioned before, it will run Linux. I installed Ubuntu, but found it too unwieldy and underpowered when compared to the uber-customizable Gentoo. I wiped the hard drive clean and started over with Gentoo Linux 2005.1 this morning. A lot of people complain about how long it takes to install Gentoo, but many of those who complain have multiple computers that they can use while Gentoo is compiling. Every time I installed it on Marklar (more times than I can remember), I had no computer to use while it was compiling. I think the complaints about the installation time are overblown when you consider what you’re getting out of it (a purely source-based no-frills-unless-you-want-them OS compiled for your exact architecture instead of one that came about fifteen years ago like i386). Compiling updates to packages really isn’t that big of a deal either. There are only a few monolithic packages, such as Mozilla Firefox, Xorg (which is currently being modularized so it won’t be quite as bad), and OpenOffice.org. In the case of Firefox and OpenOffice, you can just download the binary version of the ebuilds rather than compile from source to save yourself some time. The fact that those packages take so long to compile is not Gentoo’s fault - the problem lies with the upstream maintainers who seem to like bloating their software rather than splitting it up into separate, smaller projects that are later assembled to form a coherent whole. For example, in the case of Firefox, there’s really no need to have to recompile the Gecko rendering engine every single time that Firefox is updated. (Or at least it doesn’t make sense from this clueless outsider’s point of view.) If Gecko were a library, it would only need updating when it had actually been changed, and Gecko changes wouldn’t have to be synced with Firefox releases. It would also allow other applications that use Gecko to simply use the library instead of requiring people to install Firefox just to compile a program that’s not related to web browsing at all.
Once Gentoo was installed (the base system, at least), I began working on getting the kernel configuration correct, especially in the case of my wireless card. Luckily, I had researched carefully beforehand to find a card that would work with Linux, and so far my D-Link DWL-520 has worked perfectly with no dropped connections or speed decreases. For anyone trying to get one installed, I used the Madwifi drivers. Read the instructions on the website carefully as you install them, and keep in mind that they only work with cards based on the Atheros chipset. With Gentoo, installation is as simple as emerging wireless-tools and sharutils, installing the Madwifi driver using the instructions in the INSTALL file in the package, and using the following command to load the module:
# modprobe ath_pci
Add the module to etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 to make sure it gets loaded automatically, and then edit /etc/conf.d/net or /etc/conf.d/wireless and add ath0 as a new wireless card. My card is using no authentication (the router filters by MAC address, which I know can be spoofed, but it’s good enough for me), so I set ath0 to use dhcp. The final thing to do to make sure that the card is detected and initialized at startup is to run the following commands to add it to the default runlevel:
# cp /etc/init.d/net.eth0 /etc/init.d/net.ath0
# rc-update add net.ath0 default
Beyond that, Kenny required no other major configuration work (except for the normal Gentoo installation stuff, of course). Besides the packages that are installed in the usual installation procedure, I will be installing KDE for my parents to use. That is nearly finished compiling right now, but more packages will have to be done overnight. This isn’t a problem because I’ve switched to issuing commands over SSH using PuTTY, so I can monitor the progress from Marklar.
Having Kenny run Linux should make a big difference for me because it will be radically easier to maintain, primarily because I can do it from afar and also because Linux doesn’t require anti-virus software and spyware removers like Windows does. I’ll also finally be able to have the best of both worlds: Linux and Windows running at once. I can use VNC or NoMachine to access my Linux desktop and my Windows one at the same time, even while my parents are using Kenny. I can drop files into the Windows share on my computer and access them using Linux through Samba. I can design websites on Marklar using the combined power of Photoshop and Illustrator while testing and programming them on Kenny because of the increased functionality PHP on Linux offers. Yay! All the work will definitely pay off.
The only major question is whether or not my parents will like using Linux instead of Windows XP. Neither of them have used Linux before, but since they only used Crampy to check email, view websites, and type Word documents, I don’t think there’ll be any problems. The only possible issue that I can foresee is that they might save a document in OpenOffice.org Writer, email it to someone using Windows, and get complaints that their document “looks weird” because of lost formatting due to the conversion from OpenOffice Writer format to Word format. Hopefully that won’t happen.
Here ends one of my more geeky posts. Expect some kind of emotion-fueled uber-post about how terrible school is once I go back on the first of September. Now that I’m myself again, though, I’m expecting this year to be much better than the second semester of my sophomore year was. However, I think I’d be off to a better start if I did my summer homework for IB English, so the next week is going to be a frantic rush to get it done. Damn you, Jim, for turning me into the procrastinator that I am!
I think I’m going to remove Markdown. It has proven buggy in some cases, and it doesn’t do everything I’d like it to (like apply custom classes to images so that I can float them). It is also the reason why the live comment preview has to pass the comment text through a PHP file using Ajax to work correctly. Having a non-HTML language is nice for making entries look nicer, but when you get right down to it, you’re just abstracting a language into another language. HTML isn’t utterly perfect as far as readability goes, but most people don’t read HTML documents without a browser anyway.
Google recently released the second beta version of Google Desktop Search. I briefly used the first version, but I found it lacking in features compared to the offerings of other competitors such as Copernic. However, version two is much improved, sporting a clean sidebar with lots of information that goes far beyond search.
After a rather fast installation, Google sends you to your personal search page. It seems to be powered by some kind of local web server, but I’m not entirely sure. On this page you can monitor the status of the indexing service, specify directories that should and should not be indexed, and enter your Gmail account information so that GDS can add that to its index as well.
When the search page appears in your browser, the Google sidebar also appears on the right side of your screen. The sidebar’s appearance is pleasing to the eye, and it is remarkably easy to work with. Each panel can be moved around or deleted, and you can visit Google’s GDS plugins page to get more panels, such as a system monitor, an iTunes control, or a clock. I did notice that there was sometimes an issue with the plugins website where I would click the Download button and end up with a screenful of garbage because Firefox was trying to display the contents of an MSI package rather than saving the MSI to my desktop. However, this did not always happen.
Panels do not attempt to show a lot of information all at once. Each one is a small summary of more information that can be viewed by clicking the little double-arrow icon. This expands a drawer showing, for example, more news headlines, a longer list of stock quotes, weather information for more cities, or more pictures from GDS’s photo randomizer panel. The use of drawers, while certainly not a new idea (Mac OS X has had them for a long time now), is still a nice touch.
As far as the panels themselves go, there are many useful ones to choose from. The default installation includes the following panels:
Now that I’ve talked about all the nice new features on the sidebar, what about the search functionality? As far as I can tell (my index is only 5% built at the moment), it’s very similar to Apple’s Dashboard. You can launch programs from the Start menu using it as well as find documents and other files. The search box is also smart enough to fall back to standard Google web search if your query isn’t coming up with anything on your computer. The quality of the search engine seems good (though that’s to be expected from Google), but I haven’t had a chance to test it heavily because my index is still so small.
Of all of GDS’s many features, my favorite has to be the ability to install plugins. This is a big reason why I like Firefox so much, too. The two plugins that I’ve downloaded for GDS (one that adds Miranda IM conversations to the index and another that lets me control iTunes in a panel) have already made a big difference in my usage of the program. I haven’t browsed the plugin website extensively, but I’m sure that since I found these useful plugins so quickly, there will be many more good ones to install.
Here concludes my quick and informal review of Google Desktop Search 2. GDS does all that I could ever want it to and more, and it has a good chance of becoming a permanent fixture on my desktop. I’ve tried other programs like this in the past, such as Konfabulator and Serence KlipFolio, but neither of those applications were as easy to use and unintrusive as GDS. I won’t give a rating for GDS right now as I haven’t had the chance to use it for more than a few hours. This is my first time reviewing anything in two years of writing on this blog, so the fact that GDS was worth taking the time to review is praise enough. Check it out if you’re running Windows 2000 or XP.
Langosta is now at version 1.1.5. This update deals mainly with the live comment preview feature, moving the preview down to the bottom of the page (below the textarea) in an effort to eliminate the bug where it would jump around. I can’t test to see if this fixed the problem, though, because I haven’t been experiencing it.
There’s something wrong with this design. It’s not that it’s incomplete (lots of small styling bugs / forms still are ugly), but that it just isn’t working for me. The header and background images are pretty, but the colors feel wrong. I hate the yellow background for the content area (it probably looks worse on other monitors than it does on mine). The problem with the yellow is that I can’t change it to white without things looking weird (there’s almost no other white on the entire website), so getting rid of it will require a new color scheme, a new design, another dozen hours of trying to get things pixel-perfect in Photoshop. Unfortunately I really don’t have time for it right now, so a new design will have to wait for a month or so, unless I experience some kind of windfall of free time soon.
I want the new design to be innovative. I want it to be unique, yet still usable. I want it to be rich and complex, with lots of attention to detail (a quality that this one lacks). Though I did a lot of new things with this design that I’ve never done before (subtle shadowing on tabs and corners with PNG alpha transparency that’s smart enough to show GIFs for Internet Explorer, a fixed background image, JavaScript for the live comment preview), I think I can do better.
In other news, the motherboard for my parents’ new computer came today (NewEgg is fast), and the other parts have been ordered. I might post detailed specs later, but for now, this is what will be in the new PC:
None of these components are the best ones I could have bought. The low budget (the entire system comes in at about $360, with shipping) made it impossible to be too picky. Still, I think this system will be much better than anything that my parents could have bought from Dell or HP, even with the deals that are going on right now. My only fears are that I will screw something up or that the Linux distro I choose will refuse to install because of a lack of drivers for the hardware. But successfully putting together a computer is almost a rite of passage for geeks, so I’ve got to do it sometime. At least breaking something will only cost $50 or so with this build, whereas messing up on Marklar would have been incredibly costly ($300+).
Before I go to bed and sleep another eight hours closer to my impending doom, I should probably say something about what Marklar has done for me over the past year. If you look at previous blog entries, you’ll notice that I was fixated upon getting a new computer for a long, long time. It wasn’t an obsession, exactly, but it was close to it. Even with some extra RAM, a newer video card (certainly better than the 4 MB integrated graphics I had before), and an upgrade to Windows XP from Windows 98SE, Crampy was just not enough for me. Even with Windows XP, it crashed quite often, and before the XP upgrade, it would crash about every half an hour. I began to develop a habit of saving compulsively whenever I was writing a report or coding something or playing a game. Every 15 seconds, my fingers would hit the Control + S key combination without me even thinking about it. It was better than the computer we had before Crampy, and certainly better than not having any computer at all, but it still sucked.
The other problem with Crampy was that I was missing out on playing just about every good computer game. I felt like I was always hearing my friends talk about some new game that they could all play that was just too advanced for my PC, and I hated it. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Halo, Final Fantasy XI, the Total War games, and so many others were all playable only in my dreams (and when I was over at a friend’s house).
Sure, not being able to play a few video games isn’t the end of the world, but even so, having to live with Crampy didn’t mean I had to like it. I now wonder why I was always so patient with that computer, why I invested so much of my time in figuring out what made it work and fixing it when it didn’t, when I could have just given up and done something else instead. Things would be very different now had that happened, but not necessarily better.
Every feeling of happiness from every birthday, Christmas, Easter, and Halloween that I’ve ever had, all rolled into one, could not equal the feeling of elation that I got when I finally ordered Marklar in July 2004. Never had I anticipated anything more than the day when the FedEx guy lugged that heavy box up to my doorstep. It wasn’t that all those other holidays and special events weren’t good ones, but rather that this special day was so much better. Besides, I had hoped, halfheartedly, on every holiday and birthday for the past two years for a package like this one to arrive, but every time I was disappointed. I knew that a computer was a big purchase for my parents, and that neither of them thought there was anything wrong with Crampy (they didn’t have to use it every day), so I never let myself get my hopes up too much, but that feeling that this Christmas or this birthday might be the one was always there.
Eventually, after months of whining on Organon about how my parents should replace Crampy post-haste, I finally decided that this was something that I’d have to earn for myself. It wasn’t a happy decision because I knew that the chances of me earning enough money for a new computer before I graduated from high school were slim at best. My only income at that time was money that my parents paid me for cleaning the house, which came to about $10 per week. I was paid $20 for each cleaning, but since the work sometimes took four hours to finish, it was barely better than minimum wage. I think my parents also got away with more than a few free cleanings, either because they didn’t pay me immediately and later forgot, or because my earnings sometimes got used to pay for family outings (I would have gladly not gone to the movies if I’d known beforehand it was going to cost me).
But I soon realized that I had a lot more to offer than the ability to scrub a toilet, especially after I began working on the CSHS website in November 2003. Before starting there, I had never thought of myself as being particularly good at designing websites or programming, but that soon changed when I saw more than a fair number of terrible designs on other high school sites (the old CSHS design wasn’t exactly beautiful, either). I saw that I was good enough at designing and maintaining websites that it could become a good job or even a career for me someday, but that day came much sooner than I thought it would. Mr. Trapani, the teacher responsible for the CSHS website at the time, got me in touch with his brother, who runs a web design and hosting firm that caters mainly to Arizona-based theatre companies and related businesses. Soon, I was working a fair number of hours on various websites for the other Mr. Trapani, and I was amazed to calculate in February 2004 that, at my current rate, I would reach my goal of $1400 by August of that year. Many people think that you can never get anything out of doing something for free, but I spent countless hours working on the CSHS website for nothing, and I certainly benefited from it.
By July, my parents had finally realized that I was serious about achieving my goal, and they gave me $200 so that I could get the computer a little bit early. I ordered it on the 22nd, and it came a week later, on the 29th. It happened to be Tyler’s birthday that day, but it felt like it was mine all over again. I remember hauling the heavy box up the stairs to our office in the house in Arizona and carefully taking out everything packed inside in the top compartment. I remember removing a thin piece of cardboard and seeing my baby for the first time, half-encased in black packing foam and sheathed in plastic. About 99.9% of the world would consider this moment to be one that was hardly worth remembering, but for me, this was the culmination of almost a year-and-a-half of effort. (Adults: Don’t forget, a year-and-a-half is a long time for us whippersnappers.) I paused for a moment before removing it from the box, taking some time to simply reflect upon what it had taken to reach this point. Then, I carefully lifted it out of the box, removed the plastic, and left it sitting on the floor while I finished copying my files and iTunes music from Crampy to CD-RWs. I set it up quickly (with the minor setbacks of not being able to find the power cable and forgetting to flip the toggle switch on the power supply in the back), turned it on, and basked in the blue glow of the front LEDs and the interior lighting. There was a God.
I know it sounds incredibly geeky to say that a new computer changed my life, but that’s really what happened. Suddenly, everything was faster. Not just a little bit faster, but literally five to ten times faster. And with my new video card, I could finally play all those games that I had been missing out on. When I played Far Cry for the first time (it was included with my computer), I could have wept for joy, if I hadn’t been engrossed in the systematic killing of an infinite number of thug clones with semi-automatic weapons.
After moving to Marklar, I never looked back. I got lots of great new games (even better than the older ones that I never got to play), and all of my normal tasks (Photoshopping, writing reports, web surfing, etc.) were much faster, especially when I was doing two things at once. However, there was one problem. Ironically, it took me so long to get a new computer that, by the time I finally had one, my friends’ computers were already beginning to age. I could only play one of my games online with them, and we couldn’t talk about any of the new games I’d gotten because none of them had them. That was unfortunate, but it didn’t stop me from having a lot of fun anyway.
Even though I’ve had Marklar for a while now, and it’s no longer quite as top-of-the-line as it once was, I still don’t take it for granted. I still had to use Crampy every once in a while (at least until it died), and I used plenty of school computers that were about as good as Crampy was. There are plenty of people out there who are in the same situation that I was once in, and I sympathize with them. And, now that I’ve augmented my system with the addition of a flat-panel monitor, a new printer/fax/scanner/copier (nicknamed Boulder because it’s so big and gray) that causes earthquakes when it prints because of the vibrations, some rather nice speakers that I got free from a neighbor, and my new pair of Sennheiser headphones, I feel that I couldn’t possibly ask for anything better. Even though I find myself afflicted with a strong desire for a Mac every once in a while, I have to remember that, for the first time ever, I have a computer that is perfect for me, so how could a glitzy OS and a one-button mouse possibly be any better?
According to the statistics page, I’ve just passed the 500-page milestone. If I printed Organon and put 375 words on every page (a standard amount for most books), this is how many pages it would come to. I highly doubt that I will ever become a next-generation Anne Frank (four years in a cramped attic doesn’t appeal to me), but at least I know. I’m also approaching 200,000 words, and I recently passed six million keystrokes on WhatPulse. Have you noticed that I like meaningless statistics?
It won’t be long now before I have to go back to school. I can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to it, though it’ll be nice to be busy again. I have to register tomorrow, but since I already know what my classes will be (IB students don’t get a whole lot of choice), all I’ll have to do is grab my official schedule, get my picture taken for my ID, pay them some outrageous fee, and leave. It should be quick, easy, and painless.
I honestly don’t know how to feel about going back this year. I’ve always known that school is what I’m best at, and there’s really no reason to not want to go back to doing something you’re good at doing. But I have a feeling that this year could be my most diffcult yet, which is saying something considering that last year was so painful that I came dangerously close to burning out. I think I just need to remember that no matter how much work I get, the stress that it causes me is always going to be my own fault. As long as I think about the big picture and stop worrying over small assignments and things that don’t matter, I should be fine. Being anal about my grades is tempting because I could stand a chance of being valedictorian if I do so, but if the top 5% is good enough for most people, it’s good enough for me. It’s not like I’ll have to worry that much about being accepted at most colleges if I complete my IB Diploma.
Of all my new classes next year, the two that I look forward to the most are IB History of the Americas and IB Spanish. Though AP European History was difficult and painful at times, it really prepared me well for IB History of the Americas. From what I’ve heard from HotA’s teacher, that class will be really similar to AP Euro as far as the methods of research we’ll use and stuff like that goes. Yay. Oh, and I completely forgot to post about it, but I got my AP Euro test results back in July, and it turned out that all my worries were in vain (as usual). I got a 5, which is the highest possible score. The test is graded on a 1 to 5 scale, with a 3 being a passing grade for most colleges, though some require a 4 for a student to get college credit for the class. My hands were almost shaking as I tore open the letter the College Board sent me; I really did think that I was going to end up with a 3, or perhaps a 4 if I was lucky. I somehow got the idea into my head that the test was designed to be grueling, but it wouldn’t be much of a test if only 3% of those who took it were able to pass.
I’m excited about Spanish this year because it should be relatively easy compared to other years. Because I took Spanish in middle school for two semesters and have taken a year’s worth of Spanish each year since, I’m now about two years ahead of the average OHS Spanish student. IB Spanish’s difficulty level is supposed to be somewhere around Spanish III, but I’ve already taken Spanish IV (equal to 7-8 in Arizona), so I guess I’ll get to relearn some things. That’s all right though because I need to improve my speaking ability anyway.
Aside from school starting soon, there are some other things going on in Brett’s World that are worth mentioning. First, my uber-cool Sennheiser HD280 Pro surround-sound headphones came via UPS today. I listened to them for about half an hour, and they sound great! However, every review of them that I’ve read recommends that I burn them in to get the best sound out of them, so that’s what I’m doing right now (I’m going to have iTunes loop through my library once at a moderately high volume - it should take about 18 hours).
I’ve also been busy lately with web design and Photoshop work. One of my old clients from Arizona has been having me do work on the Arizoni Theatre Awards website. Last year, I spent about three weeks at the end of the summer coding a PHP application to allow them to manage their participating theatre listing, and it needed some updating. I’m actually quite proud of the project - it’s one of the most bug-free pieces of software I’ve ever written. The Photoshop work I’ve been doing is more of the same stuff I’ve been doing for Kohl’s: cropping images and saving them in the right format for their planogramming software. It’s not the most fun thing to do, but someone has to do it.
The final major thing that I’ll be doing before summer ends is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time: build a computer. My parents’ computer, Crampy, which used to be my computer pre-Marklar, finally “cramped out” about two weeks ago while I was in Arizona, and it seems that the problem has to do with some failing hardware. The thing is almost six years old, so I’m not surprised. Rather than fix it, my parents agreed to let me build them one for $350 using parts from NewEgg and an old video card that was in Crampy. This should work out nicely because then if I break something, it’s not nearly as big of a loss as it would have been had I built Marklar myself.
When trying to find parts that were cheap enough to be under the $350 target, I found that it was nearly impossible to build a reliable machine for that amount if I added in the cost of Windows XP. Even if you get the cheaper OEM version, it’s still $90, which is more than 25% of the cost of the entire system! Even worse, since we won’t be using Crampy anymore, it would make sense if my parents could simply use that Windows license for the new one. Unfortunately, we bought the upgrade version of Windows XP for that one, so we can’t simply install it on the new one. The only good thing about getting a new copy of Windows is that it will come with all of the security updates (and Service Pack 2), but that’s not that time-consuming when you have broadband. Anyway, the final decision was to hold off on buying a new copy of Windows for the moment and put Linux on the new computer instead (I’m thinking Ubuntu or Kubuntu). My parent’s don’t do anything with Crampy except type Word documents, browse the Internet, and read email, so it’s not like they really *need* Windows for anything. And if it doesn’t work out, we can always fork over the $90 for Windows later on.
That’s about it. I need to work on my summer homework now, so I dunno how much time I’ll have for posting in the next few weeks.
One last thing: I have a virtual stock portfolio that I’ve been watching for about two years. You start with $100,000, and you can buy and sell any stocks you want that are above $5 in share price. Since August 2003, my $100,000 has grown to $219,424, for a gain of 119.4%. Not bad. This year hasn’t been quite as wonderful as 2004, but I think I’ve still managed about a 20% gain, compared to about a 3% loss for most of the major indices. I hit an all-time high of about $224,000 back in July, but I’ve lost a bit of ground along with the rest of the stock market since then. My best-performing holdings are Apple (AAPL), AMD (AMD), Gildan Activewear (GIL), and Red Hat (RHAT) which I no longer own, though I rode it up to $28 after buying it at $10 back in 2003. If only it were real….
Well, I’ve now been back to Arizona for the first time in eight months. I returned home late Tuesday night, but I’ve been busy until now, so I haven’t had a chance to blog about it.
Last Friday, I went to work with my mom early in the morning. I met some of her co-workers, and then I spent the next six hours cropping images for use in their planogramming software. Most retailers use special software that allows them to lay out where products will be placed in their stores, allowing them to calculate whether or not there will be space for a new product. Also, vendors who pay extra can sometimes get better placement than others, and the software helps sort that out too. The images that the program generates are called planograms, and they look like floorplans of a store with all the product already on the shelves. These are often printed and used by stores to stock their shelves according to the demands of the corporate office.
The product images that I worked on were high-resolution digital pictures of new merchandise for the upcoming Christmas season - mostly knickknacks and little homey baubles that I can’t imagine ever buying. My job was to crop the image so that only the product was showing, make the white background transparent (the background was often more of a manila color because of bad lighting), and finally shrink the image down to a manageable size and save it in a certain way so that the planogramming software could read it. At first, this was kind of fun. I got to use Photoshop, and the work was relatively easy in the beginning because the first images that I edited were pictures of products in square packaging. However, I quickly got to the figurines and other things that were very difficult to get right, though perfection was unnecessary because of the way the images get scaled down when they are printed. I managed to get through about 160 images in the half-day that I was there, and when I was finished I was glad it was over.
We left my mom’s office for the airport at about 2:00, and traffic wasn’t too bad (abnormal for Milwaukee). When I got to the airport, I checked in, went through the security checkpoint, and got on the plane without a problem. I didn’t even have to take my shoes off. The plane flight was long and frigid (the pilot neglected to turn the heat up in the passenger area of the plane), but I reached Phoenix in one piece. When I stepped off the plane into the jetway, I could feel the hot, dry Arizona air on my arms and legs…there was nothing that could have felt better, after a cold plane flight and eight months of Wisconsin humidity. I couldn’t help but feel like I was finally getting home after an extended vacation.
I noticed changes at Sky Harbor the minute that I left my gate: parts of the terminal were under construction, with nice, upscale shops appearing right and left, and LCD flat-panel monitors had been placed everywhere as a part of the airport’s new visual communication system. Rather than page passengers over the PA system to notify them that they have a message waiting for them, travelers simply look for their name on the monitors as they pass them by and then go to a special kiosk to receive their message.
I met Jim right after passing the Sky Harbor security checkpoint; he looked slightly different (longer hair), but otherwise, nothing had changed since I saw him on December 21st, my last day of school in Arizona (what a wonderful half-birthday that was!). We picked up my suitcase downstairs (the baggage claims were noticably faster than I remember them to be) and went outside to be picked up by his mom in her bus. She actually drives an Escalade or something similar, but Jim calls it the bus because it’s so big and bulky compared to their old Honda.
Storms were brewing around the Valley of the Sun as we headed northward on 44th Street toward Cave Creek, but I didn’t care. I just sat in the back seat while Jim and his mom chatted, reveling in the feeling of finally being home again. The windows up front were down a bit, allowing the desert air to flow in, carrying with it the distinct scent of rain and dust that I always loved while I lived there. As we continued north and 44th Street became Tatum Boulevard, I began to see familiar shops and restaurants, looking exactly as I had remembered them. One thing that I noticed that I had forgotten about, however, was the way everything looked so new.
Having been to Los Angeles and San Diego multiple times, as well as San Francisco once, I know that there are areas in California that are really, really nice. Places where all the homes and strip malls and streets are new and beautifully designed, where everything seems to ooze prosperity and wealth. But after several visits to the Land of Happy Cows, I began to notice that in California, there are often nice, upscale shops on one street, while the next one over has strip clubs and abandoned warehouses. Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Cave Creek are not like this. Phoenix has its share of crappy areas, especially south of downtown and in the older neighborhoods on Central Avenue north of I-10 but south of Squaw Peak. But all of Phoenix north and east of Squaw Peak is very affluent. Scottsdale, which is situated on the eastern border of Phoenix and stretches for a good twenty or thirty miles along Scottsdale Road and the Pima Freeway, is all about upscale shopping, million-dollar houses, world-class golf courses, resorts, and the like. Cave Creek and her sister city Carefree would be known as the Beverly Hills of the Phoenix area if Paradise Valley hadn’t already taken that moniker. Cave Creek (the suburb I lived in) is an old-west style town that has experienced a lot of growth as huge houses are built on the foothills of the mountains dotting the city’s rough terrain. My point here is that almost the entire northeastern part of the Valley of the Sun is like one huge resort. After being in Wisconsin, going there again was almost a shock.
I’m not trying to insult Wisconsinites by saying that their state is just a regular place while Arizona was like a resort. There are nice places in Wisconisn too, just like there are in California, but there are few areas like the one I lived in in Arizona. Oconomowoc is probably one of the nicer suburbs of Milwaukee (if it can be called that, since it’s almost halfway between Milwaukee and Madison), but Oconomowoc has a lot of 70s strip malls and older houses. Some of the old houses and buildings here have been restored and maintained and look quite charming for it, but they still don’t look new. Also, architecture in Arizona is all very similar: tile roofs, wrought iron, stucco, sandstone, etc. Cities like Scottsdale actually have laws that enforce this. Wal-Marts in Arizona don’t look like big blue boxes like they do everywhere else - they have stucco walls with sandstone trim. Also, you rarely see ugly neon signs in Cave Creek or Scottsdale. Most of them have metal lettering with soft lighting behind them that has the effect of a natural glow emanating from the characters.
It’s true that a Wal-Mart is a Wal-Mart and a gas station is a gas station, but these small touches make a huge difference in the feeling you get when you see them. For a long time after moving here, I couldn’t figure out what it was that made Wisconsin so different from Arizona, but now I finally understand: Arizona was an unreal playground of the wealthy and famous, a dreamworld where everything felt near-perfect. School was relatively easy, and at least a few of my teachers seemed to truly care about what was going on in my life. Kids were stupid and often did dumb things (like smoking marijuana in the bathrooms), but they never seemed to go too far. Most of them dreamt of becoming something one day, and because of their parents’ wealth, they had a good chance of achieving their goals. Everyone was laid back about everything because that’s just how people are there.
I lived in the dreamworld that is Arizona for too long to be able to quickly adjust to Wisconsin. This was not because I had become spoiled by living there. The house I lived in in Arizona, while nice, was probably one of the cheapest ones in the region at that time. When we moved to Arizona, neither of my parents had jobs that paid incredibly well. My dad became an adult probation officer, and my mom had been a relatively low-level employee at the American Stores corporate office in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. We never went out to eat, my brother and I never got toys or money unless it was Christmas or our birthdays, and the only really nice things that we owned were an SUV and a 36-inch TV with a DirecTV satellite receiver. I think at that point we were probably the model American middle-class family because we had all of what we needed but only sometimes did we get what we wanted. This changed slowly over the years as my mom was promoted through the ranks at Albertsons, but we really didn’t change our lifestyle because of it. It was enough that we were surrounded by affluence; there was really no need to behave like the people we saw every day driving around in Porsches and Lexi and BMWs and so on.
So here I was, this regular middle-class kid used to indirectly experiencing opulence who suddenly got uprooted from nice, safe, happy Phoenix and plopped down in conservative, busy Wisconsin. Not only did I find myself in a place where there wasn’t a Starbucks on every corner (the nearest one is TEN miles away! *whimper*), but I realized that my family had turned another corner: we had made the transition from middle class to somewhere around the bottom of upper class. Suddenly, because of my mom’s new job, her Albertsons severance package, and the money given to us by her new employer to help with the move, we had moved up another rung or three. And I wasn’t sure I liked it.
Everyone knows that there are benefits to having money. But while I enjoy the effects of my parents’ success, I keep having these nagging pains that none of this is right. My mom didn’t need to take the new job; we probably could have survived a few months while she searched for a new one in Arizona. We don’t need a TiVo or a giant 61″ HDTV. We don’t need a pool table in the basement. We don’t even need a basement, for that matter, nor do we need a bonus room over the garage. Suddenly, having our basic needs met is taken for granted, and these things that we want become things that we need.
What I don’t understand is why I should feel so bad about all this. Having nice things is part of the American dream; it’s not like they’re stolen or anything. My parents have worked hard for the past seventeen years to bring our family from a relatively poor existence in St. Louis (when three of us lived off of $20 per week for food and baby supplies for me) to where we are now, and it’s nothing short of amazing. Each time my mom was presented with a new opportunity to give us a better life and to advance her career, she took it. Each time that happened, I was a little ticked off for the first month or so after moving, but I quickly got used to it because even as a kid I could feel that everything was better than our past life. But the difference between the move from Arizona to Wisconsin and all the other moves was that in every other case we were improving our lives substantially by relocating. However, how can you improve if you have already crossed that invisible and magical threshhold from worrying about money all the time to a basic sense of financial security? What gain is there in getting paid more if you already have everything you need? Sure, you can buy nice things like cars and TVs and such, but every new thing has less value because there were so many other things preceeding it. Soon, you almost feel guilty because you know that you have reached a state where everything is superfluous and excessive. That’s why I hated moving from Arizona: there, I felt as if everything were right, but here, everything is too much, which makes it excessive and…wrong.
But how can I fault my parents for wanting to be able to have some of the nice things that they could never have when they were kids? How can I fault my mom for wanting to have a career, when that’s exactly what I’d eventually like to have? How can I be so ungrateful as to tell them that they’ve gone too far, that we need to go back to the Spartan-yet-blissful existence that we once enjoyed? And why the hell should people even try to become a success in life financially if being successful means that you feel like I do? Maybe the thing that everyone, including my parents, overlooks, is that the gradual road to success is not one that is meant to be completed. Maybe we’re supposed to continue down it until we find an existence that appeals to us, like my life in Arizona, and that’s where we stop. The problem is, how can one know where to stop without having gone too far first?
This is what I thought about while sitting in the back seat of the Escalade, watching malls and shops and office buildings whizz by. We reached Jim’s house after about an hour, and after a quick dinner, Jim and I got down to the business of playing video games. We went to bed around midnight, and we slept in late the next day. It was just like old times. On Saturday night, some of my old friends, Dylan, Travis, and Joe, came over for a very long round of Super Smash Bros. Melee. While four of us were playing SSBM, the fifth would play Rome Total War, which I brought, on the computer. It worked out really well, and everyone got a chance to besiege Rome and fight the Carthaginians and so on. It’s a game I definitely recommend for anyone who likes strategy games (like Risk, Age of Empires, chess, etc.). I think we all ended up going to bed sometime around 5:00 AM.
On Sunday, Jim, Dylan, and I played more video games, but we interrupted our insane gaming marathon with a nice dinner at a restaurant in Cave Creek called El Encanto, one of my all-time favorites. The restaurant’s signature dish is called pollo fundido (”ruined chicken”, in Spanish). Pollo fundido is sort of like a chimichanga that isn’t deep fried. Instead, it’s smothered in a jalapeño cream cheese / sour cream sauce with extra cheese over the top and rice on the side. It might just be the best unique Mexican dish I’ve ever had, though fajitas will always be my favorite general Mexican food.
We played more video games Sunday night, and on Monday Dylan left, so Jim and I started a game of Heroes III, a turn-based fantasy strategy game where you have a hero who moves around a large map fighting packs of creatures and finding artifacts and gold. This game is highly addictive and tends to take up hours of your time without asking, so you have to be careful. Later that day, my other friend Tyler came over, and we started a new game so that he could play too. We ended up playing until the early hours of the morning, when I finally discovered the Holy Grail and vanquished the last AI hero.
Tuesday, my last day, was sort of a sad, subdued one. Jim, Tyler, and I played more video games (you’d think we would have had enough of them by now, but we kept right on playing). Tyler left at about three in the afternoon, and it was then that I realized that I should probably pack up so that I could be at the airport by 5:00, in time for my 6:00 flight. I arrived just in time to board (about ten minutes beforehand), and I got through security and checking in by myself for the first time (I was kind of proud that I didn’t manage to screw up at any point along the way). The plane was completely boarded and ready to go when the captain announced that we would be delayed about ten minutes to allow some other passengers from a flight that had just landed to board. Ten minutes became thirty minutes, and when we finally were able to take off, we were running about an hour late because we had to wait on the tarmac for another half hour. I really didn’t care; every extra second I could remain in Arizona was a gift, even if I could do nothing but look longingly out the window at the sunset as it fought with the stormclouds for attention.
When the plane finally got up to speed and began to lift off from the runway, I kept watching as the Phoenix disappeared below me, looking out over Mesa, Chandler, and Gilbert at the lights on the mountaintop radio towers. As we broke through the layer of clouds blanketing the area at the time (it was monsoon season), I watched as the last lights faded into the mist and darkness, and I shut my window with a feeling of finality, knowing full well that this could easily be the last time I’d ever set foot in this wonderful place.
I arrived in Milwaukee four hours later after a turbulent flight. We had been scheduled to land at 11:30, and the pilot had told us that we might be as early as 11:00 before the extra passengers arrived, but it was midnight-thirty on the clock in the skyway at General Mitchell as I walked briskly toward reality. There’s really nothing to say after that point…I got home late, I went to sleep, I woke up the next morning feeling as if it had all been a dream.
Thursday was a rather good day. I earned $100 for working at my mom’s office, so I ordered some surround-sound headphones from Amazon.com for my computer. I know this seems to go against everything I said about excess in this entry, but I feel different about things that I’ve actually earned, like good old Marklar here. Marklar and his various peripherals is my only prized possession and the only thing that I own that has a lot of value. I really don’t need anything more.
Also, my old boss from Arizona emailed me saying that he wants to hire me for a project for the rest of the summer. I have no idea if by “hire” he means pay me handsomely or if he wants me to do it on the cheap (viz. for free) because the client is a non-profit, but I guess I’ll be finding out soon.
I’m suddenly feeling this strange need to write a book or short story or something. I’ve make several false starts toward this goal over the years, sometimes writing as much as ten typed, single-spaced pages and then dismissing it all as crap. But I still feel like there is a story inside of me, waiting to be written - it just has to be treated carefully, like a tree that needs to be transplanted. Every root is a tendril of thought that comprises my story, and breaking a single one can compromise the entire project. My tree must be removed carefully and lovingly replanted in written form. Okay, that was a weird metaphor. Hopefully it still gets the meaning across.
Well, it feels good to get that uber-entry out of the way. I should be posting a bit more regularly as summer draws to a close - which reminds me: school is getting way too close for comfort. Jim started school on Thursday, and that was a harsh reminder for me. Suddenly September 1st seems much closer than it did on the other side of this trip. Oh well, though. I feel a sense of freedom, a sense of finality after returning to Arizona. I feel like I’m ready to return to being the person that I used to be. I feel like I want to live again.
Over the last two days, I’ve been on a mini-vacation with my family at Wisconsin Dells. If you’ve never been to Wisconsin, chances are you’ve never heard of “the Dells” before. However, maybe you have heard of Branson, Missouri, the so-called country music capital of the world (I thought that was Nashville, Tennessee). I was born in Springfield, Missouri, only a few miles away from the hill country known as the Ozarks. Luckily I escaped when I was eight and I have since lost the southern drawl that now only survives in a few VHS home movies. Anyway, Springfield is about an hour away from Branson, so I went there a few times while I lived there. The town of Branson is really nothing special, just mile after mile of stupid tourist traps and great American country music shows that just beg to be seen by innocent families from Illinois who don’t realize that Missourians are only a tiny bit more civilized than their Arkansan neighbors to the south. One highlight of visiting Branson is Silver Dollar City, a slightly cheesy old-time amusement park with roller coasters and water slides as well as old-timey shops. Maybe I just thought it was cool because I was eight at the time and the only other theme park anywhere near Springfield is the Six Flags at St. Louis, which I didn’t have a good time at, but that’s another story.
Having been to Branson, I really expected Wisconsin Dells to be similar. It was. However, the town itself actually has some neat things to do in it, much better than Branson ever was. But what really made this a cool mini-vacation was the resort we stayed at, called the Kalahari. My parents didn’t say anything about where we were going to stay or what to expect, so I automatically assumed that we’d stay at some generic hotel and then get passes for a nearby theme park or water park to have some fun. I was way off. The Kalahari was easily a four-star resort, and it definitely ranks among the best hotels that I’ve ever stayed in. The entire complex was almost brand-new (probably built one or two years ago), and it was also quite large: around 800-1000 hotel rooms, three water parks, four restaurants, and a convention center.
The water parks really weren’t that large individually, but put together they would have taken up a lot of space. Our building of the hotel had a large swimming pool with hot tubs nearby, but there weren’t any waterslides there, so we found ourselves going to the other end of the hotel, where there is a large indoor pool and an equally large one outside. We stayed mainly in the outdoor pool on Sunday (the first day), but this probably wasn’t a good idea because I got a major sunburn. The second day, we stayed in the indoor area to avoid the sun, and I didn’t swim much because my sunburn made it painful even to move (yes, it was that bad).
Now that I’m back home, I’ve made a major discovery: it’s August! Wog! How did this happen? How can I only have a month left before school starts again? Normally by now I’d be happy to go back to school because summer for me is usually synonymous with boredom, but I find myself dragging my feet because I know that I need to get my summer homework done sometime soon. Someday, I’ll do it…not today - tomorrow? No…next week, maybe…or…never….
Oh, and I’ve come to a decision on what web host I’m going to switch to: TextDrive, simply because I don’t want to spend the extra cash for an LVS and because TXD has such a good reputation among other web developers (programmers, especially). I’m tempted to rewrite Langosta using Ruby on Rails because TXD supports it, but I’ve worked way too hard on it to do that now. I definitely want to develop my next project with RoR if I can, though.
Webalizer tells me that ten people reached my site by typing in phrases like “brettia” and “brettia.com” into a search engine. While I have to wonder at how anyone could be so lazy that they’d rather type “brettia” into the Google search box, hit Enter, then click on the first link that comes up when they could simply type the URL in the address bar, I guess I prefer those search phrases over “german toilets” and others that got me some hits in the past.