It's All Happening -Saturday, March 13, 2004 -2:26 am-
Well, all sorts of goings on in the last few days. It started Wednesday with my COMP217 class. The class is supposed to be Introduction to the UNIX Operating System and C++ Programming. It's being taught on Windows. This seems to be because Microsoft provides free software to DeVry and it's students. Part of the contract for this software apparently decrees that DeVry students can't have direct access to a computer running anything other than Windows. So we're learning UNIX through Windows. Right. This is being facilitated through the most excellent PuTTY, otherwise known as the best program for Windows ever. We log into Windows, fire up PuTTY, and ssh into the Sun box on campus. Right. In bigger and better news, the Sun box can't be sshed into from off campus because Open ports are a security risk.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but OSU's IT department is SOOOO much better than the one at DeVry. Anyway, 2 hours of lecture drip by. It's amazingly painful to sit through. I spend most of my time chatting with other people online. Then there was lab... Imagine you trained a large, but finite, number of monkeys to drive elephants. But you only trained them to turn left. And the elephants were cranky and would only move at full stampede. And then you let them loose in downtown London during lunch hour. That would be a mere shadow of the charlie foxtrot that was lab. There are 45 students in my class. A lab section gets 2 FAs (Faculty Assistants, DeVry's name for TAs) and there was also the prof. Out of all of those people, precisely 2 of us had ever touched UNIX before. Me and the professor. Most of it was tragic. People dropping like flies, giving up left and right, banging things around, but the was one shining moment of wonderfulness. There was a boy who noticed my laptop when I first came in to lecture and started making fun me for owning an Apple. All throughout lecture, he asked stupid, pointless questions just to prove that he knew more than the rest of us. In lab, I made him wait for my help. He didn't know how to quit out of the text editor we were using (VI). My response? Oh, just hit
Actually, he did look quite like a Script Kiddie and I suspect he is. Two hours of carnage later, it was all over except for the crying. I had high hopes for this class, but now I'm not so sure. The worst part is that it's one of those New Wave 80's labs where the terminals are set down into the tables, so you constantly staring at you feet to see the screen.Esc : w q. Wait, I thought you said you knew how to use computers? Is this your first time using a real OS? Huh, you don't look like a Script Kiddie
Thursday, I woke up sick. Blah. I missed all my classes, which is bad, because for two of them it was the first meeting. I spent the day wondering what I had done to deserve the way I was feeling. Eventually, I tried to install FreeBSD on the textbook of a laptop I recovered from my parents. It's an old HP OmniBook 5700CT. It barely runs Win98SE and 2k is out of the question. Owing to how slow it is with 98SE and the fact that I wanted something more secure, FreeBSD seemed like a great choice. Until it kernel panicked while the kernel was still trying to load. Then I tried Mandrake 10.0, which doesn't have the driver for my CD-ROM drive on it's boot floppy. It asked for the Additional Drivers Floppy. This is confusing, because there is no Additional Drivers Floppy in the distribution and there's no mention of this disk anywhere that Google knows about. Grr on the dumbassed laptop. I want a real OS damn it!
Today, I missed all my classes again because I could not breathe well enough to sleep for most of the night. This means there are two classes of which I have missed the entire first week and two classes of which I have missed half the first week. Shit, shit, shit, this term I was supposed to do better. Sigh. On a positive note, my calibration hardware and software arrived. Michelle got me a ColorVision SpyderPRO with OptiCAL and ProfilerPLUS. The Spyder and its software allow me to properly calibrate LCDs and CRTs. This means the colors the monitor is showing are really the ones the computer thinks it's showing. ProfilerPLUS allows me to calibrate output devices like printers. This means the colors showing up on the print match exactly what's on the screen. Ah, joyfulness. The major disaster turned out to be the main monitor on my server. It's maximum luminance is only 53cd/m^2. The minimum acceptable for graphics work is 80cd/m^2. Most new monitors reach as high as 120cd/m^2. The fact that my monitor is 34% bellow spec is a big problem. Making matters even worse is the fact that the blue and green phosphors or guns have shifted their black point way up. This would only be annoying if red had come along with them. The net result is that the red channel is doing all the work to get the blackpoint luminance to 0.30cd/m^2. In other words, the blacks are very, very red. Dropping the black point until all channels can be matched results in all of the shadow tones falling out to black. The monitor looks and works great until you need that last little degree out of it for graphics work, so if there's anyone out there who'd be willing to trade for their monitor, please let me know. Oh, it's a Sony CPD-200GS 19" Short Neck Cylindrical Tube.
On the human front, there are two interesting developments. First, a friend on mine from long, long ago IMed me today. Sarah was my best friend in high school. She was very, very important to me. She was the person with whom I went through most everything that didn't involve Amelia. We went off to our separate colleges and things started not going so well. We started to loose contact with each other. The last few times I saw her, she made me very angry. She seemed mean, judgmental, and bitchy. I had written her off as a total loss over the last few years. Today, she seems to be a much changed person. For one, she's renounced religion, which is shocking because she was Super Christian Girl. She seems much more open minded and liberal. I look forward to re-establishing a relationship with her.
Second, Michelle's sister Jenny is moving back to town. She's coming down to attend a 12 month school on massage therapy. I'm really excited about her coming back to Columbus. For one, Michelle is much happier when Jenny is around. I, also, am quite fond of her. Another great thing is that we do a lot more when Jenny is here. She's not much of a stay at home sort of person, and she drags us with her. As a bonus, she's an absolutely fabulous model, potentially the best with which I've ever worked. She starts classes on the 29th and is arriving tomorrow to look for a place to live. Yay, yay, yay.
writebacks...
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buttercup102280 wrote
it's an odd experience...
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