Moving past WYSIWYG

One thing that I have always loved about owning a domain is the ability to host multiple services at one address. For instance, I could have my blog address at one subdomain, a file server at another, and maybe throw in a tumblr or soup account for fun. At the moment, the only service that I currently have running at this domain is a blog and a catchall email address, which have now just realized hasn't been checked since I created it. Hmm. Anyway. The advantage to having these subdomains is that while they make your site slightly more complicated (which can be easily rectified with a know-how of when to put what links when), they add significant customization options.

While it may not be 100% evident that I'm using Blogger right now (seeing as I've removed the navbar and the only hint is a tiny bit of text at the bottom of each page), it is very much my preferred blogging engine. I'd go with WordPress, but as I've said previously WordPress.com tends to put a price on a lot of basic features that Blogger gives to me for free (thank you, Google Business Model). A nice feature of Blogger is that not only do they let me publish my blog to a specific domain, but they let me specify a missing file server as well. This means that if I request a page to my domain that doesn't exist as per my blogger account, Blogger will defer to the missing file server to see if any other files exist on that specific file path. I'm planning on setting one up soon, just as soon as I finish coding some other stuff first.

What exactly does this give me? Well, for one, it transcends the limitations of a WYSIWYG-nature site like Blogger. WYSIWYG, short for What You See Is What You Get, basically means that I can be sure that the blog post that I am typing right now will indeed appear on my site as these exact words, in the format that I have specified using the toolbar above this text box. Unfortunately, this also means that I can't program in any sort of dynamic content into my site. Let's take a simple PHP script as an example:


What you're currently looking at is not WYSIWYG. If it were, that's exactly what you'd see if you were to query that PHP script from a webserver. Instead, what we simply see is two friendly words: hello world!

Of course, WYSIWYG works in the majority of simple situations. Ironically, WYSIWYG is practically nonexistent on the web; although I am currently typing this post in a text box, there's a script that's going to be called when I hit the "post" button that will automagically format all of this text into the proper HTML equivalents. You're simply viewing this text like this because your browser is interpreting the HTML tags around everything I type and is translating it into something that looks much more attractive to your eyes. Try viewing the source to this page (usually found in the Edit menu, search around on Google to find the appropriate function in your browser). That is what this site really looks like. Hurting your eyes? Try looking at it for hours on end; the code you're seeing is the sweat and blood of many web developers' hard work.

Got my keyboard!!

Hello internet!

My keyboard arrived in the mail, so I decided to make a post out of sheer excitement. It honestly types like a dream, I've never typed on a keyboard more awesome. The give is perfect, and it's completely unmarked, so I really look like a pro while I'm typing. Now on to some real news... or at least, what I consider real news.

I managed to get my club passed after being asked and turned down by 3 faculty sponsors. That was slightly more than I would have expected, but whatever, at least we have a sponsor now! The activity is going to be reviewed over Spring Break by the activities committee, and hopefully they'll approve it. I have a feeling though that, given the amount of faculty sponsors that turned me down, I shouldn't feel too optimistic about the outcome of their decision. One thing's for sure though: if it's passed, it'll be a lot of fun, and the logo looks absolutely kick-ass!!

Also, during cycling practice today (or what little we had), my coach's bike got hit by a car and subsequently ran into 3 members of a team. There was a bit of an accident but everybody was fine. At least it offered us a good chance to get to know the rest of the team; me and my co-captain sat with them on the side of the road and had a fun discussion.

That's kind of it in terms of updates, I'm just geeking out about my new keyboard. I need to come up with a name for it/him/her. I also need to decide s/he/it's gender.

Grounded -- hopefully.

Forgive me in advance for my pathetic grammar, it's early and I'm trying to pass the time by writing a blog post while my kernel compiles.

I have to stop naming my titles ambiguous names. No, I am not grounded. I'm grounded in terms of my distribution-changing madness. It's over. For now. I've settled with Debian, using the GNOME interface. I realize that that's pretty much exactly where I started, but I stuck with Debian instead of Ubuntu because I like to tell myself that I actually got somewhere with this whole thing. Also, I've decided to not go with as much eye candy because it's starting to detract from my need to actually do work.

So Debian it is. And it's very minimal, which I like a lot. The brightness control works (ditched KDE because it didn't support it), and I'm fairly sure that I could get the keyboard backlighting working with some effort. At this precise moment I'm hardening my kernel with grsecurity, a tool that basically fills in a few security holes in the system to prevent intrusions. Lightweight...ness and security are the two things that I'm going for and I intend to achieve them if I can't have anything else. Also, there are a few slight differences between Debian and Ubuntu, and I like a lot of them. My only complaint is that it's not very keen on giving me compositing support, which could be due to the NVIDIA driver that my MacBook Pro uses.

I installed my system as per this guide, and the disk encryption is fantastic. Only hitch is that I deleted the Mac OS X partition that I had installed (oops) for the purpose of installing rEFIt, which is an EFI bootloader designed to not suck as much as Apple's. Thinking that this software would, you know, be written to the bloody EFI partition was apparently too much of an assumption, because it disappeared as soon as I got rid of Leopard. Oh, well. I'm currently just booting off of their handy rEFIt CDROM, which then points the computer to the GRUB partition that I have installed. So that's nice.

Amidst all of this distro panic and exam worries (thankfully I only got one B+, the rest were above!), unfortunately, I wasn't able to work on my PHP project. I'm going to try to explain myself to my teacher tomorrow, hopefully he'll forgive me. I feel pretty guilty about wasting my parents' money for an hour of us sitting around not going over the code that I've written.

On a happier note, if any of you are interested in a screenshot of my new and (hopefully) here to stay system, feast your eyes!!

iPhone and moving.

No, not that kind of moving. Just moving distributions -- yes, that's right, I'm really having a distribution identity crisis at the moment, but the only reason that it's happening is because I'm frustrated with Ubuntu's slowness and lack of customization options. So instead of Xubuntu, which honestly has served me quite well, I'm moving on to Kubuntu instead, because while Xubuntu was nice and fast, I don't have it quite like I want it, the device support is shaky (couldn't get keyboard backlighting to work and apparently sound recording is a nono on any of their machines), and I absolutely love the KDE desktop widget functionality. So KDE it is! For now. If sound recording doesn't work on that I might go berserk.

Speaking of sound recording, my last post was a video whose audio was made possible by my new trusty iPhone, courtesy of a friend of a friend. And while we're (sort of) still on the subject of customization, he jailbroke it for me so that it would work on my carrier (AT&T) without a data plan, so that I wouldn't have to pay $30/month extra to get it to work (although now, funnily enough, I've purchased their 200MB data plan because a friend got me hooked on Foursquare). Wasting no time, I immediately customized everything customizable on the machine, although sadly enough Jobs isn't releasing the 4.0 update to the iPhone 2G, which is the generation that I have, so I can't download most of the things on the Cydia store like tethering or multitasking. Which I actually don't mind, because I only have a 200MB data plan and the iPhone 2G's CPU definitely isn't the fastest thing in the world. With some Locktool and Fontswap magic I was able to completely change my lock screen:

That's the Ubuntu title font combined with the HTC Clock, with the slide to unlock removed (the gesture still unlocks it, the button's just gone). I'm so proud of myself. Also, I installed a terminal app, so I can ssh into my Mac and make it say dirty things. Hehehehe.

First Video Post!1!

I seriously gave hours for publishing this single, 8-minute long clip of me rambling about random stuff that could have much more easily been rambled about in a blog post. So I seriously hope that you enjoy the video below. Lucky me, Xubuntu apparently can't record audio, so I was forced to record my audio with my new iPhone (talked about in video), convert the file to a .wav, convert the video to a .avi, join the two together, export it, and upload it to vimeo. By the way, thanks to the conversion process the video quality is horrible. Just thought I'd warn you ahead of time.

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!

I love Conky

Okay, I realise that this is probably the millionth post on the Internet about Conky, but I just want to shout it out there: I love Conky. Conky is an incredibly customisable system monitor that allows you to display pretty much any value on your system, let it be the current track playing on your xmms2, audacious, or mpd media player, the temperature of various thermal sensors in your computer, the disk i/o, graphs, rings, or bars of your cpu, memory, disk, or network consumption... if they don't provide an option for it natively, you can always devise a method of your own by ways of the ${exec} variable coupled with a custom script. Let me just show you my desktop as of this moment:


In case you're wondering what the font was, I'm a huge fan of the Inconsolata fixed-width font. The weather data comes from a script that I made myself, mostly because I didn't know about the ${weather} option until it was too late... Oops. In any case, what it does is parse out a specific web page on the data from a weather site every 10 minutes. Overkill? Probably. Anyway, here's my .conkyrc:



Also, user chorny has provided me with a bit of help on the Pastebin API. Apparently uploading to pastebin is as simple as installing the App::Nopaste library from CPAN, something that I didn't know anything about. You can also install it as a cli command by running

sudo apt-get install nopaste

on Ubuntu.

I'm also on the market for a new keyboard because I'm really not a very big fan of the one on my Thinkpad, it's a bit cramped. I realise that Thinkpad keyboards are some of the best on the market, but I'm fairly sure that this one was not famed for its keyboard. All kinds of gunk keeps getting stuck between the keys, thankfully whenever I want to do some serious typing I switch over to my MacBook Pro, whose concave keys I find marvelous. I don't think I'd ever want to move to a Unibody model because I love this keyboard so much. Anyway, I'm thinking of buying a Das Keyboard Ultimate Silent for several reasons:

1. A regular Das Keyboard is too loud, I wouldn't be able to do any typing during the wee hours
2. I like the idea of having actual key-switches instead of plastic domes, plastic domes are mushy and feel like pudding
3. It's unmarked, so I get serious geek cred for being able to type on an unmarked keyboard, and I don't have to deal with the OCD stress of using a Dvorak layout with a QWERTY layout marked on my keys.

Alright, back to studying! English exam tomorrow at 8h, AP Chem the day after that at 12h. Wish me luck!

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.

Universities

So yeah, I know that I haven't posted in a while. It's mostly because I haven't found it really worth it that much. But do not worry, because I am posting now! Besides, this blog started out as a daily thing and it's definitely not going to stay that way, so this has turned into more of a whenever-I-feel-like-it kind of shindig. I suppose it's mainly the fact that I have 5 different social networking sites and Facebook always seems the most appropriate, seeing as it's in my bookmarks bar and won't require more than 200 characters per post, as well as the fact that I'm not willing to devote my valuable precious free time to typing, it'd probably be more something along the lines of sleeping.

Bref! I've decided to develop my own website for this stinky blog because it hasn't been fun managing two different blogs for whoever wants the french or english version of my posts. Hell, the posts that I put up usually aren't even about the same thing! So I'll develop it into a website and switch over to it. Haven't really figured out how I'm going to manage an RSS Feed and Facebook link functionality, but I'm sure I'll get there eventually.

So some of you might be asking, "Jack, how was France?" And to be honest, words cannot describe the amazing experience that I had there. Photos can't even describe the sheer awesomeness of my friends, their personalities, the breathtaking nature of every single monument that I've visited and the experiences that I had had there. So I'm going to answer to you, dear reader, as I have to everyone else, that it was simply amazing. It sounds boring, and you may want to ask me more, but I honestly can't fit all of it into words. I will never stop missing the amazing friends that I made there and the wonderful people and teachers that I had met. I will definitely be going back there someday and without a doubt I will try by all means necessary to make it there during this summer.

So that was my one paragraph on France. I'm sure it deserves more but I'm not going to give it more because if I did this post could be stretched around the earth several times. On to the real meat of this post, which was explained by the title: Universities! That's right. As a junior half-way through the year, I now have the right to start worrying and biting my nails over a very scary prospect: Applying to universities. On my list currently:

• UCLA
• Berkeley
• maaaybe Stanford
• Harvard
• Tufts
• Amherst
• EPFL
• Carnegie Mellon

It's quite a list. On the top of my list is EPFL, an engineering school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Not only is it in the French-speaking part of the country, but it's also halfway between Paris and Rome. Can it get any better? Yes it can. The school is positioned right across from Lake Geneva and will be just a train ticket or two away from my French besties, probably two if they've landed in England. I'm going to Boston next weekend to check out Harvard, Tufts and maybe Amherst if we have the time, considering that we only have two days to visit all three of them and I've heard that Amherst is a bit of a drive away. Also, only to twist the screws, all my EABJM buddies will be going to Boston this weekend, not the next to attend a mock-Congress at Harvard. I wouldn't have minded maybe a 4-week distancing, but one? C'mon life, that was a bit too much.

With that I resume developing my awesome new blog. I hope all of you are doing splendidly, and have an awesome day / night / dight / nay wherever you are.

Actually Posting Tech Stuff

So I know that you all are probably looking forward to reading a few facts on my visit to France. Well, I kind of intended this blog to be my daily blog as well as my posts for tech, so those who don't want to read this post can either close out of this window or read it clutching their head whilst making tortured noises. It's really up to you.

Recently I came across a few items thanks to my newest obsession: Google Reader. I have to admit, I had tried it out for a while and it never really made sense to me until I actually started following multiple blogs: up until then, the only blog that I checked frequently was Make: Magazine. After needing to consume more internet material thanks to an absence of actual internet, I decided to, in my twenty minutes of daily internet, save all of the content I possibly could from every tech blog I could find. After getting hooked to said tech blogs once we found a wifi network we could access from our house, I needed a way to constantly check them all in one place. So I tried out Google Reader, and from there I discovered a whole array of things that I've been missing out on.

First to come was Gnome-Do, a utility which I absolutely have no idea how I missed. Gnome-Do provides you with an interface to search for files, create calendar events, play music in your Rhythmbox library, manage tasks on your Remember the Milk account, post to Twitter, and (my personal favorite) install new applications with apt-get. But that's just the tip of the iceberg; Gnome-Do comes with a plethora of plugins that enable you to interface with a whole variety of other resources, and it even has a dock mode to let you imitate the famous OS X staple (except said staple does not include a do-it-all search feature). The downside: It's only for Linux, and the plugins, from what I can tell, are not third-party but rather developed by the Gnome-Do team, so development of new plugins is really up to them. Still, it really is quite an amazing feature, and I've never been so happy with my Linux system.

Also, after browsing Google Reader for some time, I began to get a bit tired of the interface. For one, I was tired of skimming everything with my down-arrow-key held down to find some content that I actually wanted to read. Also, there was no way for me to be able to share the links on Twitter or Facebook. So when I stumbled across Feedly, a Google Chrome extension / Firefox add-on, I was instantly hooked. Feedly takes your Google Reader, Twitter, and Flickr accounts and merges them all into a start page, allowing you to see all of your content at a glance. When you click on an item, it expands to show a preview, which you can either open into a new window or preview the actual webpage in the same window. Thanks to Feedly, I can now tell you what is latest in Fail.

Finally, the last thing I wanted to talk about was Springpad. Whilst browsing Lifehacker, I stumbled across a positive post concerning a certain piece of online organization software called Springpad, and I decided to try it out. Springpad is essentially a single place for you to put everything: contacts, calendars, to-do lists, products, books, bookmarks, wines, and all kinds of other stuff. You can use these different data types in different ways: for example, a to-do list for a bunch of wines, a shopping list for various products, etc. The really cool part is that it pulls various information from the web concerning the various items you post: Springpad might add an Amazon purchase link to a product you list, or a review concerning the wine you're currently interested in. It also lets you organize everything into apps: categories with specific layouts to help you get more organized, for instance, a school planner you can fill with various books, or a trip planner complete with events, packing lists, ideas, and even an itinerary created from the various addresses you've linked to the aforementioned items. My only gripe is that while it does integrate with Google Calendar, the synergy ends there: It appears as its own calendar, doesn't pull existing events, contacts, notes, tasks, bookmarks, or anything else from your Google account, and doesn't synchronize with other popular organization services like Remember the Milk. But it's still in beta, so it's likely that such features are down the road.

So that's pretty much it. To those of you that have read this without wanting to, I will now give you an update on France: Not much is going on, but we have managed to buy a car-turtleshell that will let us ride with more space and ever-increasing dorkiness. But we bought a van to begin with, so I guess we should have expected that. We're off to Rome on the 31st, and we're going to meet my grandmother and my aunt there to go family-tree-hunting with the Mazzeis. Also, as you all may have read, I now have internet in my apartment, so message me! Well, that is, if you can stand the 7-hour time difference.

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.

Awesome Mobile Lab Concept

So I was hanging ten on the waves of the interwebs, when I stumbled across this article, which talked about building a mobile lab from an old cargo trailer:
After sitting in a puddle of drool for several minutes, I began to think of the lab that I'd design for myself. Sure, it's a massive undertaking, and it'd be extremely expensive, but it'd be pretty darn cool. Since I'm going off to France in 10 days, this is probably going to be one of those backburner thoughts that probably won't ever be realized. But since I love thinking about stuff like this, I'm probably going to be designing this for the next few months.

This guy equipped this cargo trailer with a CNC Router, a circular saw, sander, soldering iron, and so much more! He also included a battery bank, which is charged by a solar panel on the top, and by a Honda generator which he fires up when there isn't enough power. It's also got locking drawers, bolted-down furniture, a dedicated Mac, and Ham Radio equipment. I think I've found a new home. But before I decide to live in a trailer down by the river, I think it'd be best to actually know how to use these tools. No sense in getting a trailer filled with a bunch of stuff that I don't know what to do with.

On a different note, mini-term's proven to really not be fun at all. I think I'm going to try to change groups: I'll try to convince them to switch me to "Bike St. Louis," on the excuse that I want to see St. Louis in all its grandeur before I go off to France for several months. Besides, I'm on the cycling team, so it'll probably be a walk in the park. Hope I didn't just jinx it. *Knock on wood!*