U(boo)ntu

So the Ubuntu thing didn't end up working out. Apparently my shitty old comp doesn't have enough RAM to run the installer, even though it meets the specs for the OS. I might try to find another Distro that can support it, but so far, XP: 1, Linux: 0.

Humanity to Others

After having a discussion about Linux in my networking class this week I've decided to take the plunge into a world that isn't Microsoft. I've heard a lot about Ubuntu recently and heard that it's really good, but the thing that made my decision was called Xubuntu, which should improve the performance of the computers it's on, which I think will help a lot on the PoS comp I'm gonna install it on. I'm pretty excited, cause I've been interested in Linux for a long time now, and actually installing it should be a neat experience. There's also the fact that it's totally free and comes loaded with free, open source software that just makes ya feel good inside. I'll update later with how it goes.

Respect the Narrative Flow

Whew, long time no blog. I think I've started other blogs with that phrase. Anyway, I haven't really had time to blog, or the pressing urge to, so I kinda didn't. I haven't exactly been busy with anything important though. For the last... while I've been leveling up a prot pally in WoW and watching Buffy/Angel again. Having a laptop has freed me of the confines of my room to explore the exciting world of the living room, which has a DVD player in it. The pally's gonna hit 70 within a day or so, and I've been having a blast tanking every Outland instance so far, but my guild is again starting to let me down. A month ago we had a solid group of people leveling to 70 for instances and maybe even raids, but now it's about four of us regularly and a handful of others, without any hope of progression. Nothing scares me more than a lifetime of PUGs. There's also the fact that Age of Conan just came out and Warhammer in the near future.

In the real world I've got two super dull new classes. I was really looking forward to the AI class I was gonna take but it was canceled b/c there was nobody enrolled. My networking class isn't really so bad I'm just not overly interested in the subject. GSP130, however, is the dullest class I've ever taken in any school... ever. The subject matter is about as interesting as fish scales and the professor makes me want to die every time he mispronounces a word. The good thing is that they're both half over and I can get out of there and have a whole week break.

Next week happens to be my 22nd birthday. That weekend we're going to the Stone Brewery in Escondido and then going back to my house for a party. Diana's taking care of the planning so it should be fun. I guess that's about all that's going on, maybe I'll blog again soon?

Been Awhile

Again I go forever and a day between blog posts. This is kinda surprising because there have actually been a decent number of things going on.

Probably the largest event was going camping at Yosemite with Diana, Robbie, and Jen. Yosemite was amazing and made for a spectacular camping trip. The nice thing about going with Robbie and Jen is that they like to hike a lot, so there wasn't much sitting around throughout the weekend. The highlight was on Saturday when we hiked to the top of Nevada Falls. This was easily the most strenuous hike we had ever done and it took us the better part of the day to get up there, but the work was very much worth it. On the way down we got to take a much more scenic and gentle route, which gave us a nice contrast to the 7 million stairs we climbed to get up there.

After this I started a new session at school which has so far been about as boring as watching grass grow. The class I was really looking forward to, GSP290: Artificial Intelligence, was canceled due to not enough people signing up, so I'm stuck in the stupid classes for now. There's also a new GSP club starting up, which I'm not sure if I'm going to join yet or not.

Internet wise, I've signed up for some new sites that have taken up a lot of my time. I finally signed up for (and kept) a FaceBook account, which so far has been way better than myspace. I'm using a new site that hosts flash games and records high scores and little badge things, called Kongregate. For a long time I've had an account on Remember The Milk, which is just an internet To Do list, but the last few days I've actually been filling it out and making sure that I follow through with things, which has been a big help to my lack of motivation. Until just a few minutes ago I had been using the Firefox 3 beta client, but I ended up going back to FF2 just for the Google Toolbar which I love so much. FF3 is gonna be awesome when it's released and websites actually start supporting it, but I just got sick of having to switch over to IE just to use certain pages, like DeVry's eCollege.

I guess that's about it for now, I covered a lot of topics and I'm about ready for bed.

Simulated Reality

For the last 7 weeks I've been in a group called Locker15 to develop a training simulation. On the first day of class Professor Maynes picked myself and Anthony to be the two team captains for the project. After that we picked out teams, picked our names and then went to work figuring out what our simulation would be about. We chose to do ours in a GTA/Crazy Taxi fashion where you'd have a top down view and would need to pick up patients and take them to a hospital. We got a chance to use Game Maker, and even though it's super limited we managed to pull off some really neat things and even though I was skeptical from the beginning our simulation turned out pretty damn cool. I'm not sure how much it would actually teach somebody, but it was fun and it looked nice. After we had our presentations today we still had a couple hours in class so we did some four player Wii Sports and the Prof even got down on it. Overall this class has been a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to next semester.