Interesting Stuff

If you don’t get the reference in the title, go read XKCD for a while. Over Thanksgiving weekend, I finally got around to finishing the switch from Gentoo to Xubuntu (which is really just Ubuntu with XFCE on it). Yes, I realize I’ve been meaning to do this for months, but I’m lazy. A preliminary review of (X)Ubuntu →

So… it turns out I’m still on Gentoo because I am less motivated to back my stuff up than I had expected. At this point, though, it’s almost done: I need to back up my wiki database, my GPG private key (and I should probably do my public keyring, just to make it simple to restore), and my OTR key. Does anyone know how to access your private OTR key? I have no idea how hard it will be to find that thing.

This evening, I went to Movie Night on the Santa Monica Pier and saw An Inconvenient Truth with some coworkers. One of the producers of the movie was there at the beginning, and was a raving, extremist, hippie liberal. This made me very skeptical of the movie, but they actually did an incredibly good job portraying things and making their point (though Gore kinda goes off on tangents—the election, his son’s car accident, his sister’s smoking, etc). I’m now inclined to go pore over The Skeptical Environmentalist and see what parts (if any) differ between the two. Gore makes a very compelling case. He addressed the parts where I expected to disagree with him very well, and presented some well-displayed scientific data to back up his points. The whole thing was a bit like a slideshow, but nothing at all like a Powerpoint. If you have to make a slideshow (and there are some excellent reasons to not do so), try to make one like Gore’s; his presentation was fantastic. If you haven’t seen this movie, please consider doing so.

On the way back from the movie, I ran into Jed and Steph. They seem to be doing quite well: they have an apartment on 6th street (a fantastic location!), and both seem to be enjoying their jobs. I hope to see them more soon.

With any luck, 24 hours from now I will be running Xubuntu. In the meantime, I’m backing stuff up like crazy… For those of you who weren’t reading this back in the day, my first switch (from Windows XP to Gentoo Linux) happened over the course of these few entries).

I really liked Gentoo’s system of package installation/management (called Portage). I liked the feeling of having the most up-to-date software on my machine, and the knowledge that it was specially compiled for my system. I hated how every once in a while, an upgrade would break something really important (sound, flash, screensavers, SQL, etc). I hated the fact that I had to know every system inside and out just to get it to work. I never fully got printing, samba, videos in Firefox, or several other things to work simply because I didn’t have the time/effort I needed to learn about how to configure them properly.

With the exception of the second sentence above (the one about being on the bleeding edge of software with custom compiles), I believe that Xubuntu will be able to better satisfy my computing wants. Here’s hoping!

Also, thanks to macdaddyfrosh for telling me about Xubuntu; I doubt I would have found it otherwise.

Wow. Last night was a blast, in that “we’re horrible people, but damn that was fun” sort of way. Now that summer math has ended, Atwood is housing a group of Italian exchange students taking English courses at Pitzer. They are from a Catholic school, and the woman in charge of the group, Sister Paula, is a very pious, devout nun. So last night I was hanging out with three people, who said they didn’t want to be named in my blog when I mentioned I was going to write about this. Anyway, I was hanging out with 3 people I will call A, B, and C (C is the only girl among us, and she was a very good sport about this whole thing). A has several good friends who are female and spend a fair amount of time in his room (he’s one of the few Mudders living in Atwood), and the Italians think he is some sort of pimp. He had the idea that we should take this a step further, and pretend to have an orgy in his room while the Italians were outside talking on the couches. We all thought that would be hilarious, so we planned it all out – A and B would go find some porn, and then come get C and me. I went and got some condoms, to add to the effect. When it was all ready, we met up, got some bottles of alcohol, and staggered drunkenly (we were sober, though our acting was pretty good) over to Atwood and past the Italians into A’s room. I managed to drop a condom right in front of them, and go pack to pick it up. It was glorious. Once in the room, we used an awesomesound system A was keeping over the summer to play the porn loud enough to be heard outside the room, but quiet enough that it could have been us making those noises. After about 15 minutes of this, we went back outside and staggered back to Case, and talked for much of the rest of the night. The looks on the Italian’s faces were priceless! Usually they’re very talkative and always chattering among themselves. When we came back out, all conversation stopped, and the ones on the couch facing away from us turned around to look: 3 guys and a girl leaning on each other, laughing, and staggering away. B joked that Sister Paula might try to exorcise the room sometime. I think this was a good enough prank that we might need to do this again sometime (there’s another group of Italians coming in a week or two!). So, yeah… what a night.

Back in the computer department, Mac and I have given up on Windows and Knoppix, and put Gentoo on the system. The going’s still pretty tough, but it’s getting better – I now have a command prompt, read/write privs on the hard drive, and an internet connection all at the same time! I’ve installed XWindows, but haven’t configured it yet. Soon, things will be just fine. In the meantime, I’m writing this from the terminal room (the room with computer terminals, not a room you go to to die).

Yesterday I played frisbee again, and gadzooks it was a violent day. Carrie did something quite nasty to her foot, and I’m a bit concerned about that. I think today she’s going to a doctor to have it looked at (personally, I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s a bad sprain at best). Nick and I had another run-in. We usually guard each other because we’re at roughly the same skill level, but we always seem to run into each other. Yesterday, we both (and a couple other people) were bunched up and jumped for the frisbee, and his leg slammed into my thigh. His leg is rather sore, and I’m not sure if he’s going to play again today. My thigh hurts rather a lot, and going down stairs today is quite painful. However, that’s not the worst of it: during warm-ups before the game (yes, during warm-ups :-P ), I took a frisbee on the tips of the fingers of my left hand, and it did something pretty awful. My middle finger has swelled up rather a lot, and I can’t make a fist (though I can type OK, so it could be worse, but I can’t do much else with it – it was a challenge to wring my washcloth out after showering this morning). Baxter Health Facilities is closed over the summer, and I’m not sure if this warrants a trip to a doctor. Well, I’ll keep an eye on it, and see what happens. And I’m definitely not going to frisbee today.

Well, that’s about it for now, and hopefully I’ll be able to get Instant Messenger working again soon so I can talk to all of you!