Exams are over. Any good games?

So exams are officially over for me, as of the 4.5 hour AP Chem exam. Not enjoyable, and I really don't think I did well at all, but we'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I tried out Minecraft, and the concept looks all right.... the only problem is that it makes my computer go insane. My CPU maxes out at 100% and my memory is 75% occupied. A bit much for just a bunch of cubes, no!? It could be just because I'm trying it out on Linux, but thanks to its intense memory usage it rendered itself and my computer unusable within just a few minutes of playing. So I guess I'll just stick to programming.

Speaking of which, I've decided to rewrite most of my code because it's turned into a bit of a mess already, mostly because we're constantly introducing all of these new ideas and libraries and I'm trying to update it to allow support for the old stuff. So rewriting so far looks like a good idea, and it's going smoothly.

Xubuntu > OSX

Ok I realize that a lot of you probably aren't going to do this, but here goes: I've replaced my OSX with Xubuntu altogether as an experiment. So far I'm not suffering, although midway through the install I realized that syncing my iPod should be rather interesting. All I really use my Macbook Pro for are web development, word processing, email, music... nothing like gaming that would really require a Windows system (all the better... less distraction!!). So I'm pretty much okay there.

I absolutely love Exaile, the media player that comes with Xubuntu. It's light, fast, and best of all includes a file browser, which means that playing a music file doesn't add it to the music library. Why is this a good thing? Well, when you've downloaded an audio file and simply want to listen to it and not deal with the hassle that is managing a heavyweight audio player like Rhythmbox or Amarok, which I do rather often, Exaile is the perfect solution. Mind you, it still has the option for libraries, and still allows playlists and live audio streams, which you can easily download from many of your favorite radio sites like NPR (for my STL readers, visit kwmu.org and click on the Listen Now button -- click on the Streaming MP3 option).

I'll admit that this post was a distraction from the massive studying that I'm doing right now as a result of the AP Chem final that's looming over my head (tomorrow at 12h00... wish me luck), but hey. This is just a study break. I had my English final today, and it wasn't half bad. The best part was when I tried to submit, which I can only guess involves some kind of FTP or SMB connection to some server somewhere on campus, and the submit operation failed. I got to go to the helpdesk and they resolved everything, but they quickly found out that everyone was having this issue and that the school's own firewall was blocking the submission process. Funnier still was the karma: the software admin was against this firewall addition, and the hardware admins were for it. The software admin pushed this "Electronic Bluebook" software to everyone's computer, and the hardware people then had to deal with the huge mess that they had caused as a result of their firewall blocking the exam submission process.

I had a talk with the software admin later on, and joked with her about the firewall and how pointless it was to install it in the first place, saying that I could get around it easily and that I frequently did. "Exactly," she said. "We're constantly spending money on firewall systems just to get you guys to find a new way to get around them!" I suggested to her after that that we should try installing Linux on the school computers. Here began my sales pitch: It's totally free, it's completely scripted so it's 100% customizable, it's incompatible with 99.9% of the viruses on the Internet, and it isn't Windows-compatible, so students can't waste their time playing games and pirating Windows software, potentially getting my school into legal trouble. She said that she'd see if she could get it installed on a machine so that she could play around with it a bit, so we'll see. But how cool would that be!? I also told her that she should talk with the sysadmin at Whitfield, who runs a one to one laptop program and uses Ubuntu instead of Windows on all of the systems. Should be interesting to see how that unfolds!

Still saving up for that Das Keyboard... I'm also thinking about upgrading this compy's RAM and HDD to 4GB and a 120GB SSD. Speed should be amazing considering it's running Xubuntu, has all of that RAM and blazing fast read/write speeds! This thing is becoming by dream machine. After extensive amounts of typing, I've realized how much I've missed this keyboard. I have my awesome bumper sticker stamped on the back of it too, thanks to Randall Munroe's wonderful xkcd store. It's big, blue, and has OPINIONS! on it in bold white letters. I was at the Boston Logan airport and this lady pulled out her white MacBook with all of these "Go Wildcats!" and "Stop Abortion" bumper stickers plastered on it, and I gleefully pulled out my laptop... she glared at me for a few seconds and then put her laptop away. It was awesome. This baby hasn't let me down yet... I'll tell you guys how the Linux-only testing goes!

Totally gave up.

Ok, so Gentoo kind of failed miserably. I'm not going to try and save face by hiding the fact that I couldn't get Gentoo to work at all, something about the X server not seeing my displays even though they were in xorg.conf and I had properly run X --configure. I'm irritated that it didn't work, but there really is no way that I'm going to try starting over with that mess all over again, so I'm going to try a different flavor that's actually at least somewhat forgiving. I've been using Zenwalk Openbox for about a day, and while I really think that it's great, it's definitely not my favorite choice. I don't know if it's the Zenwalk or the Openbox, but quite frankly it looks hideous. Despite attempts to fix this with themes and countless .conf files, it's still ugly, and I want to get rid of it. So as I'm typing this post, I just want to let you all know that I'm downloading xubuntu. Hopefully it should be light enough to not run as slowly as normal ubuntu, but it'll also have all of the commands that I'm familiar with. XFCE is annoying, so I'll be trying out Openbox for a little while before giving up completely.

If I ever have the time, I'll try moving back to Gentoo and installing Openbox. I like Openbox a lot, I just don't like not being familiar with any of the commands. I'm not a big fan of Slackware, which is what Zenwalk was based upon, so that settles that. I'll probably check out Gentoo and Openbox next weekend, after I'm done studying for exams and all that jazz. I'm definitely not doing myself any good by putting off studying for all of this Linux crap, and I'm probably wasting time now anyways by installing xubuntu and writing this blog post. But I guess it'll be a little something to do before the studying commences, which I suppose is what I've been telling myself for the past week. Mais bon, whatever. The important part is that I get studying soon, which is exactly what I'm planning on doing. Planning.

I'm also really annoyed because Gentoo took ages to compile, although I happily played along. I then complied GNOME, which took an entire evening, and then, after compiling GNOME, I realized that I hadn't compiled an X server. So I compiled an X server. The amount of time that this consumes is staggering, I never really grasped why installing programs on Gentoo took forever while installing on Ubuntu usually didn't take over a minute for most files. Does Gentoo do some funky compiling thing that I don't know about? Whatever it is, it took freaking forever, and all the time spent on it went to waste because I've erased the disk and installed Zenwalk for the time being. Pretty annoyed.

Anyways, exams are coming up and I'm getting kind of freaked out now that I realize how close they are. I really have to get studying for chem, I guess I can just use the review packet that she gave out. Thankfully I only have 3 exams, though, because I'm taking 4 classes and one of them is a project. Taking English the first day, Chem the next, and French last. Study time!!

Gentoo

Insistent upon ignoring Randall Munroe's cautionary tale, I've decided to go ahead and move on from Ubuntu. Ubuntu was great until I had used it for too long, which meant that I would have installed some programs without removing them, or I would muck with the system a bit and end up breaking something or other. I'm moving on to Gentoo. Or should I say, I've moved on to Gentoo. I've successfully compiled the kernel and now have a basic CLI (command line interface) upon booting up. Not too shabby. Hopefully at the end of today I'll have enough time to compile GNOME and have a full X environment up and running. So far I really like the customization options. The USE flag is basically a dream come true for me: upon the installation of a program, you choose what programs you want it to have support for. On Ubuntu, it installed support for everything, hence the speed issues.

Another beneficial factor of having to compile everything by myself is the fact that I'll be lazy about installing programs and hopefully I shouldn't install one unless I find it absolutely necessary. Of course, I'm installing a GNOME environment because I have no idea what I'd do without one. I'm still not entirely Ubuntu free, mostly because I've been spoiled rotten by GNOME-Do and Docky. I realize that not choosing XFCE probably leads to a bit of a slowdown, but I'm giving it a try anyways and seeing what it's like. One thing that I'm somewhat concerned about is the boot time, I've looked at it and it hasn't been as stellar as I would have hoped. Ubuntu was really fast. Like, really fast. Clean installations booted in less than 15 seconds. Gentoo seems to be a bit slower, mostly because the dhcpcd client keeps looking for dhcp servers on the network, of which it finds none because eth0 isn't and probably never will be connected when I start up.

Which brings me to the other issue. Wireless. I'm going to emerge wicd when I get back home today, but for now the OS doesn't allow for WPA or WPA2 wireless authentication. That said, it could have been a lot worse seeing as iwconfig actually sees my wireless card. Only time will tell, I'm still in the early stages of building it and hopefully I should have a running GUI by the end of tonight. Another concern is the fact that I'm actually doing this during the week before finals. I always seem to have these huge projects that pop up during high-stress times. Probably for distraction purposes, and I have to say it's working a little too well. Ah, well.

I really, really want a website of my own. Having a wiki would be awesome, and not dealing with Blogger would be awesome...er. And yes, in case any of you are wondering, I haven't posted to my French blog in ages. How exactly am I supposed to explain compiling a kernel in French? My vocabulary doesn't really go that far.

So Far, So Good

Not much has been going on lately, we've all been getting used to living in Paris and a few things still need a bit of ironing out, but I think we've got most of it down. School this week was all right, other than the 45-minute commute and the scary administrators. All of the kids I've met (so far) are really nice, and I know that it's going to be pretty hard to leave them all behind in December, as awesome as my friends are back home. Each morning I wake up at 6:30, leave the house at 7:15, wait for a bus that will take me to the La Défense subway station, then take the RER A to Charles de Gaulle-Étoile, then take Metro line 6 to Dupleix, then walk for about 5 minutes, and then I'm at school. It's quite a trek, and I always end up surprising my friends when they ask me which Arrondissement (basically sector) of Paris I live in, and I tell them that I actually live in the suburbs. That said, could you blame us? There's no way we'd cram all 6 of ourselves into a postage-stamp Parisian apartment.
Anyways, since Monday (30 Aug) we've been entertaining our grandparents, who were flying in for a conference in Berlin but decided to stop by while they were on the way. We checked out the Centre Pompidou, ate at some really nice restaurants, and rode the Bateau-Mouche (which taught me that if I am to ever do that again at night I am to bring an extra layer). It was nice to actually go out and explore after having lived there already for 3 weeks. In driving to all of these places we also went through the Étoile exchange a couple of times, which is (and I may have posted this already, excuse my amnesia) a giant roundabout with at least 12 spokes, 6-8 lanes wide, no lane lines, and a speed limit of at least 40 mi/h (that's 65 km/h for the metrically inclined). I'll post both a video of the Centre Pompidou and us going down the Étoile in this post.

Driving on the Étoile from Jack Biggs on Vimeo.

Fontaine Stravinsky in front of the Centre Pompidou from Jack Biggs on Vimeo.

So that's been the majority of what's happened in the past week or so, we got our Navigo passes in the mail and have felt so official waving our wallets over the scanners to get into the metro. Before that, it involved using tickets, and it wasn't the same because it didn't make that awesome dinging sound. Yes, that's right. I'm weird. Those who are now just starting to check out this blog probably haven't noticed yet if they haven't been reading my posts, so this is just me warning you.
Hope everyone's enjoying themselves! Use my QR code to contact me if you're interested.

Sorry, Guys.

I realize that I haven't posted in a while. Yes, that's right. I'm turning into the least interesting person in the world. Actually, what's happened is that I'm becoming progressively more lazy as the school year draws near, something that I'm sure won't play out well for me once I start having classes in French.

We spent all of twelve hours in Geneva (by the way, the couple in the room next to us was having very loud sex... so much for a good impression of Switzerland), and then it was off to Paris. We arrived about two weeks ago, and since then we've been getting to know the neighborhood. We live about 3 minutes away (by bus) from La Défense, which is essentially an enormous square filled with shops and restaurants. It also happens to be the Terminus of Line 1 and a stop on the RER, so it's a straight shot right into the middle of Paris if we ever get bored (we technically don't live in Paris but rather Courbevoie, which is essentially right on the outer border). We've been poking around the city, mostly getting used to our surroundings (we still have a hard time believing that we're actually living in Europe) and figuring out how to get where using the Metro.

Recently we went up the Eiffel Tower, although I forgot to bring my memory card that day so I was only able to take 3 pictures saved to the internal memory, and I can't find the proprietary cable to hook up to my camera to salvage them. Honestly. Why can't they just stick to Mini-USB? I left my house and I still have 2 or 3 of them floating around, for Christ's sake! I did take a video on my Nano, though, and I happen to have that proprietary connector, mostly because it's everywhere. So yeah. Here it is:

Climbing up the Eiffel Tower from Jack Biggs on Vimeo.

I mentioned some pictures in my video and if I'm not mistaken, not everyone on the interblags is friends with me on Facebook so I'll post them for all of you. They don't do it justice at all, it was a really cloudy day and my camera couldn't cover the entire building, so the few shots that I actually have of the entire Arch make it look kind of tiny. The panoramic photo I tried to make didn't turn out well at all, so we'll have to let that one slide. Here's my best photo:

So that's that. I'll embed the Vimeo video when I get the chance, for now I'm waiting in line until my video gets processed.

Recap

So I realize that it's been a fair while since I last posted, and I just wanted to apologize profusely, both to whoever's reading this and myself, because I realize that I really need something to remember this experience and I'm not doing anyone any favors by putting this off. A lot of stuff has gone on since, and I really hope that I can remember enough, although I'm sure that I've forgotten plenty. I'll start off at the beginning and work my way back.

So last time I posted, it had been the first few days that I had gotten back. Now, my homestay is over and I'm in a one-star hotel that happens to be a block away from Notre-Dame. Which isn't all that bad, it's just ridiculously cramped. We'll be leaving the hotel for Montpellier on Wednesday, but I really wish that we could stay in Paris permanently. I like the beach and all, but I really love this city, and I can't wait for the school year to start so we can make our way back. But I digress. The day after I put up my last post, I went to my neighbor's school, because Nicolas had to study, so I didn't see much of his friends after that, except for Marion who was at his house once after that. So we went to her school, and we were about 30 minutes early. Everyone had stationed themselves facing the school across an intersection, smoking enough to replace at least three bonfires. It was charming. And also rather smelly. Noticing my extreme discomfort/asphyxiation (ironic that I'm typing this while listening to a song that's repeating "I can breathe again", it's French so I don't know the title. Whatever.), everyone proceeded to ask me if people smoked in America. I told them that young kids never smoked in public like this, and that it's very rare for people to smoke, and when they offered me a cigarette and I told them that I didn't smoke, they didn't believe me at all. One thing that I always have to tell myself here is that it's a different country. Just keep telling myself that, up until the point where they all tell me that ritual sacrificing of Americans is quite common, and that they'd need me to lay down on this bier for a brief moment.

So after the first day, which was somewhat uneventful and incredibly boring, we basically just toured around town, mainly to Nice. One day we went down to the Nice air show, celebrating the 150th anniversary of Nice's joining France, and it was really amazing. The only problem that I had was the fact that the announcer liked the sound of his voice a bit too much, and kept talking for at least an hour and a half after the show had actually finished. People were getting pretty angry at him, but he didn't seem to get the point. Anyways, Nice is absolutely beautiful. Old Nice is incredibly colorful, filled with lots of fruit, olive oil, and gelato stands, has a few beautiful cathedrals scattered here and there, and has an amazing view of a turquoise beach. A perfect place to live if you have a ridiculous amount of money, which I happen to not have. After going to Nice a lot, the weather got kind of crappy, so we stayed away from there given that it was pointless to enjoy the beach in stormy weather.

I have to wrap it up now, but I'll be adding more stuff tomorrow! It's almost midnight, so I need to get myself into bed. I'll add a part two later on. I realize that I can edit my posts, but for some reason I just prefer adding it in parts. Adds to the suspense, no? Because I'm sure the entire internet is reading my blog right now, anxious to hear what happens next. See you all tomorrow!

The Dawning of a New Era

So yesterday was the last day of school for me, or at least, the last day of school for me as a sophomore (Despite fleeting thoughts, I've resolved to not be a truant), and its closing really didn't make me feel any different. There was this odd thing that happened to me starting freshman year, where when school ends, the end of the year just doesn't have a tangible feeling of finality, unlike my experiences in middle school. I'm not saying it feels different because I'm an old fart, but it does kind of bug me, because at the end of the year, after studying my brains out, I feel like I have no other purpose in life but to study, and they dump me out to do nothing at all!

While I certainly don't want to go back to school because of that, I'm definitely going to start studying things that I actually want to know, like Perl. Perl has been really cool for me, I've only learned bits and pieces of it, but so far it's looking fantastic. Before Perl, the only language that I could really mess around with was PHP, and PHP for me was somewhat limited in that I could only really use it to develop web pages, although I've heard of people using it for other purposes. So Perl's my current obsession in the computer world, along with getting my bloody Eee PC to work again. I need to get it to work if I'm going to blog about my time in France; that thing is so tiny it's the perfect computer to sneak into a suitcase.

Last night, me and my friend went to see the Repo Genetic Opera, which I must say was pretty darn cool. It was showing at the Tivoli theatre at midnight, and the only reason I went was because my friend had been invited by someone else and she needed an escort. I felt special. Anyways, we went up to the box office, got our tickets, and walked in. The film didn't start for an agonizing amount of time, I'm pretty sure the film operator was either high or half-asleep, because it took forever to start and the last 10 minutes of the film couldn't be watched because he broke the projector. Despite this setback, we enjoyed it thoroughly. The film was shadowed by a bunch of actors, who performed onstage while the movie went on behind them.

The actors had encouraged us to shout at them, shout at the film, and pretty much do whatever the hell we wanted save burn down the place. So we did. Or at least, most of us did. One time, when a scene opened up with one of the characters, Shilo, lying in a pool of blood, this random guy in the audience shouted "NEED A TAMPON?" So yeah. That was pretty much my night. Speaking of blood, the whole thing involved gallons of it, in addition to gore, violence, copious cursing, nudity, sex... It was only afterwards that we discovered that the film was rated R, which led us to wonder how the hell we got in. We got out at about 2 am, and I drove home as discreetly as I possibly could, because I realized about halfway through the movie that there's a 12am-5am curfew for young drivers such as myself. So I dropped my friend off, walked back to my car, and I notice that a police car was cruising down the street, high-beams on, patrolling the neighborhood. Thankfully, he didn't stop me, and while I have no idea why, I was incredibly thankful. My mother probably wouldn't have been too happy getting woken up and dragged out of bed to talk to a policeman about me, especially when she had been suspicious about the whole outing from the beginning.

That movie was so amazing, though, that I bought the soundtrack. I rarely buy soundtracks for movies; the only soundtrack I think I've ever bought was James Bond, which was necessary because I was bored and running around the house pretending I had a gun necessitated some theme music. So that was my night, and it sure was a great reward after sitting around taping pieces of cardboard together for 5 days. And now, it'll be back to packing for France. I still have an entire room to clear out.

French Expedition

So, since I stupidly left my computer at home, I've decided to come in and type on a computer in a physics lab, because I have nothing better to do. Having just finished my French exam, I can safely say that that was the easiest final exam I have ever taken. Foreign language exams are allotted 1.5 hours as opposed to the normal 2, and even though that's less time than the core classes, it still took me about 30 minutes. 30 minutes! Which is a perfect transition into talking about my trip to France.

Just this morning, my dad got on a flight to Madrid, Spain, in his quest for knowledge: Since having 5 degrees somehow isn't enough for him, he's decided to get his law degree. One of the things he wants to learn most is international law, naturally, he used this as an excuse to take us all to Europe. He's going to be in Madrid for about two weeks, then he's going to Germany, and by then we'll all be in France, waiting for him. He'll meet us there, and we'll live in Paris from June to some time in January. I'm pretty excited; I've wanted to go to France for some time, and this is the perfect opportunity to get to speaking French fluently.

So it's off to an entirely different country, to an entirely different language, to an entirely different school: I'm going to a school called EABJM, located in Paris, and about a 15 minute's walk from the Eiffel Tower. Of course, the Eiffel Tower will probably get a little old, but it'll definitely be pretty cool to check out for the first month or so. In the meantime, however, I have to think about school. I still have a week left, and I'm not exactly enthralled. Exams are done, so I'm really starting to think about skipping. We'll see how exciting mini-term is, though. Who knows, reading 1000-year-old books might just be entertaining.