This and That (or “baby, it’s been so long!”)
Dear Blog,
You have my sincerest apologies for the neglect I’ve shown you. For the first time in three years I have failed to update you at the minimum rate of one post per month. I only hope I can make it up to you through this post.
So yeah. I started college (RIT; TS;WRM explanation). Fun indeed. Passed the first round of Computer Science House induction formalities, and on track to make it through fall evals. In other words, I’ve developed a high enthusiasm for the floor where I live, because of the highly social, usually low-pressure atmosphere. And having upperclassmen you can bug by endlessly asking which professors are best rocks.
College so far, fun. Classes are pretty easy, writing papers sucks just as much as I anticipated it would, and I can feel the freshman 15 excitedly gurgling in my gut. I get to wake up at 6AM to register for all my winter quarter classes this coming Wednesday. That should be a blast.
So let’s get down to business: the college necessities. You know, the things you have to buy to replace stuff that just can’t go to college. We’ll start with the monitors.
I loved my ViewSonic A90. Always did. One of the highest-quality CRT monitors I’d ever used anywhere, and it proudly sat on my desk for nearly 2 years (or 3? I forget). Unfortunately CRTs don’t fit too well in a dorm. I had the budget planned out for desperate times such as this, so when the time came it was pretty much a no-brainer: LCDs for the win. I settled on the ASUS VH226H, or rather, two of them. They sport a 1920×1080 resolution per screen, giving me a generous 3840×1080 desktop. The picture is gorgeous as is the 2ms response time, and they quite comfortably handled the 5-hour trip up to Rochester along with the rest of the clan despite my lack of adequate packing material.
Up here I’ve got Nighthawk containing Bigmomma’s 1.1TB RAID5 array, Charlie for desktop stuff, and Scribus as my laptop. I’ve had the chance to learn some really cool stuff, like joining my home and dorm networks transparently using OpenVPN and what life is like on frighteningly fast Internet. Let’s just say the Enano demo should be a tad bit faster. Lord knows what I’ll do when I have to shell out $100 a month for Internet access 1/5 the speed of this in three and a half years – or what I’ll do over the summers. Maybe I should look at getting all my web stuff split off?
Audio has also seen an upgrade here at RIT. I noticed that a lot of people on CSH were using M-Audio’s AV40 studio monitor speakers, and now I can see why. I found a pair for myself – refurbished, $120 – and don’t know how I ever survived without hearing the 16KHz+ range. My music is crystal clear in every respect now. I can’t imagine why M-Audio discontinued these. They’re brilliant sounding monitors with more than adequate power (though you can make them distort if you turn any one thing up too loud) and they complement Logitech’s X-540 sub in a very elegant way. I’m still using the Pioneer amp for the rear channel, now connected to two of my X-540 satellites, as the cheap speakers I got from Goodwill randomly burned out completely. My whole system is quite unportable, but I plan to tote the AV40s along home with me for Thanksgiving along with Scribus and my 320GB USB hard disk with a 1:1 copy of ~/Music.
What’s also nice is the fact that I live down in “the L”, the short hallway section past a 90-degree turn on CSH. The acoustics are perfect for playing loud music at night, and I only have neighbors on one side of me. It’s about 1AM right now and one can probably hear my music three doors down, but nobody cares because everyone’s still up.
Speaking of music, I discovered Marilyn Manson tonight. Recommendations from friends got me to listen to The Golden Age of Grotesque and Mechanical Animals, and I have to say they’re both extremely listenable. I like it: metal/industrial with a touch of electronic is really one of the genres where I feel at home, and that’s exactly what Manson is.
One has to question the sustainability of this practice of purchasing things. I’m pleased to announce that thanks to my good friend Nicholas Byfleet, who has been a companion of mine since roughly 7th grade, I now have a job as a sysadmin and web software engineer with his company, Byfleet LLC. I’m really looking forward to the job, because I’ve been told that I offer a unique skill set to the company and my Linux experience has helped him out with the occasional MySQL crash and Apache configuration typo.
So yeah, so far things have been good. I don’t know when I’ll get around to finishing up Enano 1.1.7… there are a few things that really should be changed before the next release (a Windows specific bug with the wikitext parser and proper server side comment pagination come to mind) and I need to get around to coding them. It’s mostly polished up, there’s just those few annoying to-do items, you know? Patches welcome as always.