Lazypud
Ok! so yeah, I have been busy and unmotivated for the past three weeks. Work has been going well. The semester has finally slipped into finals making the days much easier at work. Professors + students + busy = staff gets left alone.
Speaking of finals, I have one this entire afternoon. Taking classes and working full time is no good. I respect the people who are able too constantly take courses while working or with more classes - it's difficult not having any time for social obligations.
RANT: Taking honors physics has scared me away from pursuing an intense higher education again (PhD!). Being out of college for a few years then going back - it's way more difficult for me to be modivated. I already know exactly how much I don't use the majority of the classes. I'm even more aware at how friviolous group projects and examinations are and that their intended concequence is to force someone to study. Taking tests and silly projects may help me learn the material a little better - but it really makes it difficult to enjoy the material. There's no time to focus on very interesting points in the material due to review days and constant examinations. I loved the occasional class period where my 'aged and wise' professor stepped forward on an aside to discuss things within his field of research - mass extinction events caused by nearby high energy gamma ray bursts or his personal thoughts behind some of the universe ending hypotheses. The tight schedule of examinations prevented many of these asides - he'd literally say "oh no I cannot go into that, we must finish this."
These tests and assingments are, so far, the best way to assure that students going into a critical field know their shit. I want my pharmacist to pass a rigiorious instruction in chemistry and biology. I don't think someone dabbling in physics for personal interest and use needs to be treated to the same 'fail out' course intensity. Higher education should spend some resources focusing on a more casual scientist - someone who's interested to use the material in their garages and back yards, but isn't smart or modivated enough to pursue a true scientific career. I think it would lead to some neat innovation or discovery. I guess this whole attitude is the same reason I dropped out of Mechanical Engineering so long ago.
MEATSPACE: Not much has changed. The city of lawrence has decided to rip up the street infront of my apartment 6 days a week - making me very thankful that I can sleep through a bear attack. The improvements that the city is throwing into the street right there makes me believe that the old "historic" building I reside in's days are numbered. The building's new neighbor - a huge hotel, presumabally for rich sport fans, is about 50% complete. I'm expecting a developer to come in and level that corner of campus when it's a bit closer to completion. I would have said First Management's (the worst fucking management company ever) refusal to fix anything inside the apartment was an indicator - but they don't fix shit anywhere. ever.
Otherwise all is good. My teeth extraction was kosher - I had a great 5 days laying around playing GTA4 and Dwarf Fortress while dead to the world from codine. Oh! So earlier the week I got my teeth out, some kid got put into a coma because he went without oxygen for 5 minutes. Aparently whoever setup the NO2 tubes in the surgeons new office didn't properly setup the oxygen feed - the kid only received nitrus for about 5 minutes and still hasn't woken up. I only heard about this from coworkers and couldn't find anything on the web, but still! Kinda cool to dodge that bullet.
VACATION: I'm looking at scheduling a Vegas trip with some buddies in the stead of the usual trip to Burning Man. 4 days in luxury, huge buffettes, free drinks and showers sounds more enjoyable (this year) than 10 days of dust, drugs and MREs. I'm also trying to rope someone into going to PAX with me afterwards.
I am planning on taking some time this fall to take a handful of weekend courses:
SIG SAUER - Armorer and 101 courses
On-Point Tactical - Basic Scout
Urban Excape and Evasion
Oh, and I can't forget the yearly snowboarding trip to Durango. Purgatory and Telluride are high on the list!
DC
Was keen!
So I was in DC for a work conference for a week. These are some of the photos I have now, hopefully Jess sends me more:
1. forgetting to smile after KU won whilst watching it in a BAR in DOWNTOWN DC with about 50 other KU fans. Kinda cool that there's bars around the world rooting for the team of my workplace.
2. post fart whilst comfortabally looking for the papers from the training session I just attended.
3. The atrium of the Hotel/Conference center we stayed at. It was pretty baller, altho didn't really impress me much. The name cracked me up: "Gaylord National."
Ha!
Remote VNC & Dynamic DNS
My buddy Drama asked me last night while drunk & bowling how to install a remote desktop on his daddys puter, so he doesn't have to go there or suffer through painful family phone support. I didn't find any good guides immedatelly, so I wrote him this as an e-mail. Maybe 2 other people in the world will find it as useful, so it gets BLAGGED.
The software I use is TightVNC. Very useful. Basically here are the steps:
1. install tightvnc server & viewer (for testing) on your dads puter
2. open a port you can remember in the router pointing to that computer's ip (I use something like 54545 or 54000 for mine)
3. run the tightvnc server, set a GOOD password, set it to start by default with the computer.
4. test it a couple of times with the "allow loopback connections" option selected. connect to it using the tight VNC viewer and the IP of your dad's house (www.whatismyip.com) followed by the port.
- it'll do a fun recursion thingy here if all is well!
5. go home
6. drink a beer
7. setup TightVNC viewer on your puter
8. connect to your daddy's IP and port, view that shinznat.
Now, to avoid having to ask him to give you his IP whenever you want to connect, set up a service called "Dynamic DNS." Here's how to go about setting it up:
1. setup a free account at a place like dyndns.com.
2. subscribe to the free "Dynamic DNS service." It's hidden pretty well in dyndns, but you'll find it, I believe in you!
3. navigate to the DDNS service on your router. it's in Setup > DDNS tab for DD-WRT firmware
4. set it up with the account information provided to you by dyndns. I used h.dontexist.com because it makes me laugh.
5. set the update intreval to something sensible, every 10 days is fine for most ISPs, some cable companies are much quicker on their IP rotation and should be set to 1-3 days.
6. ping the connection to a port you know is open on the router. You should see it resolve to your dad's IP
- @engelhaft ~ $ ping h.dontexist.com
- 64 bytes from adsl-76-250-254-231.dsl.tpkaks.sbcglobal.net (76.250.254.231): icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.559 ms
7. fire up TightVNC, throw in your dynamic address (h.dontexist.com) and port, connect, do whatever the hell it was you wanted to do.
8. fap
^_^
the GREEEEEEEEEEENNNN maaaan!
Turns out that I like this color of green. Neat.
If you see any black text boxes/unreadable shit just comment. I'll fix.
Liaf
Interblags:
Looks like my website renewal is coming up this month. I'm gonna piggyback off of Xich in a few weeks, so figure that all things will be shit for connectivity. I still also need to devote an evening or two fixing the glaring graphical problems with this - but I probably won't until later this week at the earliest.
Puters:
I spent a few hours yesterday rerouting my watercooling rig in my quad core system. It's way quieter now (avoided a loop that had the pump working overtime with a 90 deg fitting) and pretty damn efficient.
I also made room and setup a printer that I got for free when I purchaced my MBA a few months ago. It's actually not a peice of shit and looks alright, so I might just keep it around until it's ink runs out.
Working on Primes puter WAS going splendedly. There were some wicked bad sectors on his HDD which a 35 hour zerowrite took care of. I replaced it's motherboard (The southbridge had some heat damage and the sata controller was fucked) with the same one I bought myself. Everything went well and a 4 hour burn in test came out with A+ results. Mark came over and picked it up, moved it home, and it immediately starts showing the original crash-after-15-min-of-use. My thought is that it's got to be something with one of his peripherals. I can't really figure out how it could be something else - maybe it's a on disk harddrive controller or bad ram stick, but one of them should have thrown at LEAST an error on the burn in tests. So maybe his mouse is asploding things, I dunno. I've only heard mention of something like this happening once from Drama.
Meatspace:
This weekend was fantastic abeit short. Jess and I went up to KC to eat at Italian Delight, catch Louis CK at the Midland and hang out & drink with Tony at a bar called "the News Room." It was a spectacular friday night that ended in a blizzard out of fucking NOWHERE driving home. 45mph limit and I was still just 'guessing' where the road was half the time. Amusing cruise. Managed to make it up the 12th street hill in a tiny little saturn first try as well, I challenge you to do the same with 2 fresh inches. (there was even an SUV full of guys slid-down to the bottom that I passed triumphantly on the way up.)
Saturday was started with me waking up at 3:40 PM. Exactly, 3:40 pm. That's pretty hard to beat in the standard of uselessness. That night we went out to Gary's place for a hottub party. I consumed much Rouge Dead Guy Ale and some delicious malt-liquor + energy drink conconction. Mucho beer pong, hottub and chasing schweppie around whilst paddling him was had.
Sunday was recovery. I spent the majority of the day surfing the net and watching random tv shows I have. I cleaned up a bit, putting shit 'where it belongs.' I think I've decided to stay in my apartment for another year. Half to avoid moving again and half because I actually like it. If I can figure out how to kick the remaining dratfs asses, it'll be totally baller.
Now I sit here with a piddly task list (6 things for the entire week so far...) and little modivation. My blogroll is EMPTY and hackernews is uninteresting. My webserver isn't responding to my FTP attempts so I can fix some of the bullshit errors in this CSS. I have terrible homework to finish tonight. It's 10% shit!
payday
Yaay Kansas is paying it's employees after all.
Way to almost fuck it all up government! Bravo!
Op, eyeballs
I gots glasses! You may now additionally address me as 'buddy harry.'
Srsly.
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- Srsly.
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- “h trying to pose like a woman & not look smug”
*edit: Oops, I updated wordpress and lost theme stuff. Guess I have another project! *
Vidjia Games!
Games!
This is long winded and a tangent from my daily life, so... yeah you've been warned.
I just watched Adam Sessler's (from the ill fated Tech Tv of my pre-drinking days) response to the flame war regarding his Killzone 2 review. (available: here and pretty damn funny to see a tv host with the freedom to tell people to "shove a cock in your mouth.") Let me brief you as I'm fairly sure only META has any idea what I'm talking about. Killzone 2 is a game that just came out for the ps3. It's apparently good. It's earning good reviews from the sources I trust.
Sessler's review has created a flamefest rekindling some "xbox 360 vs playstation 3" internet flamewar.
What the fuck.
This generation - that I think I'm still a part of - has the desire to go out and defend a consumer product vehemently on a multitude of shared conversation spaces across the internet. Let me restate that. There are lots of kids. Who go online. Who then post messages to forums at a hundred a minute. Defending a consumer product. As if it's their own kin.
This issue speaks to me fundamentally. Our generation (it's becoming harder and harder to lump myself in with my perceived idiocy of my peers - a hauntingly hypocritical statement) has been lam-blasted with commercials, product placement and the most materialistic culture in known history since conception. McDonalds has had toys in it's food for as long as I can remember. Saturday morning cartoons are about collecting shit and competing with (beating's more accurate) your friends over all else - due to a larger collection. It's these fundamental aspects of our culture that has given the message board dwellers the entitlement to name call and defend an entertainment system with such bravado.
Of course, it's not any one company/person's fault that individuals act this way about an entertainment system. It's everybody's. We all buy into consumer culture and feel some of this - that's how it has become a value in the younger generation. (I've heard sociologists refer to it as 'generation entitlement' - not much sums up my view more elegantly.) We're all guilty of replacing social interaction with some easier convenience, slowly weakening our ties to our community and neighbors. We are more "social and connected" than ever before, but in reality, not many of us will ever talk to a stranger in their daily life unless they physically bump into them (I do. Fuck does it startle people. ESPECIALLY students! ha!) We exist solely in cellular 'tribes' of people, larger cliques that occasionally interact and exchange members with one another, but pretty much stay within our well defined walls. We'll sit around at home talking to other friends on the internet instead of existing in our local community.
This brings me back around to the 360 vs ps3. One group of people who "invested" in the xbox and one group of people who purchased a ps3. A very obvious, core value to each of these groups is that they do not OWN the other console. There is an instant, implied loyalty there. After a person makes a 300$ investment, they now are entitled & even expected to defend their investment in the eyes of their peers. (peers in this case are 'gamers as a whole' not the individual groups of xbox/playstation.) They have created the shared group identity solely in opposition to the other group. It's not "I play games on the xbox!" that comes across in any game forum. It's "Playstation 3 is SHIT for x, y, and z reasons now fugoff" or "you're bias against SONY because you're getting PAID by MICRO$OFT!" Instead of a greater community that any new game or system is accepted and judged on it's merits, we have games that are instantly filtered through a "oh it's a PC game instead of a console game" lens. (it took me quite some time to actually judge the xbox fairly as an entertainment system - years in the 'PC trenches' caused a deep biases.) That a glimmer of my perception on why people are so dumb about something as simple as a review of a game.
So, Adam Sessler, it's not your fault. It's just you reported (fairly) on something that's a pulsing, inflamed and raw nerve amongst our generation. That's why the pires were constructed and burnas applied.
My solution? Light a cigar, kick your feet up and antagonize playfully - only through self realization will this culture refocus its alignment towards something besides materialistic shit. Read Fight Club. Eat a good steak. BREATHE.
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*edit: I should have titled this "SUCK ON SOCIOLOGY!"