New theme. Woohoo.

The semester has apparently started, seeing as how I’m writing this while working on a lab in physics. I’m taking 16 credit hours this semester, in four classes:

• Japanese 102 (5 credits)
• Physics 151 (4 credits)
• Calculus 3 (Math 272, 4 credits)
• Technology and Society (Sociology 334, 3 credits)

I was originally registered in Japanese 101; even though I’d taken up to 202, there was a two-semester gap between when I took 201 and 202, and another two-semester gap since when I took 202, and both 201 and 202 were taken on top of a full load of classes in high school, so I didn’t feel like my actual level of ability was much higher than 101. But the teacher wanted me to take the placement assessment, and I ended up in 102 anyway. At least I’m not totally bored or totally lost, so I guess I’m in the right place now.

My actual schedule is what impresses me: I have all four classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with physics, Japanese, and calculus all in the morning and early afternoon, then a few hours’ break before Tech and Society; Tuesday I only have Japanese and calculus, and Thursday I only have Japanese. I think I’ve achieved the perfect balance of workload, class load and free time.

I’ve replaced Windows XP on the designated Boot Camp hard drive in my Mac Pro with Vista Business 64-bit on about 500GB of it; the other 200GB (it’s a “750GB” drive, with about 698GB usable) I plan to use for Ubuntu 64-bit. This is partially so that I can play a legal, less-buggy version of Halo 2 on my computer (Vista), so that Windows can use all 4GB of RAM in my computer (64-bit), and so that I can jus have another Linux installation handy (Ubuntu). How I did the Vista installation was interesting, though; I (ahem) otherwise acquired an unmodified, uncracked Vista 64-bit installation disc, and installed it first on a VMWare virtual machine without activating it using the Vista Business license on the label on the bottom of my laptop, which hasn’t been used since I got the laptop last April (I almost immediately wiped it completely off in favor of Ubuntu). It installed and updated fine in the virtual machine, and I deemed the media safe to use on a live system, so I then successfully installed it on the partition I made for Windows. The only thing was I had to activate it by phone, but the automated phone activation system worked fine. I haven’t been able to get Neverwinter Nights to run yet, but other than that no problems so far (knock on wood) other than the fact that I may just have too many computer games.

(Finishing up in the Society of Physics Students room before my last class today.) Other than school, pretty much just random stuff going on. My best friend Rebecca now has a blog of her own, which of course I would say is worth checking out; and I will be uploading my vacation pictures soon, I just need to settle on how thoroughly to go through and edit and index them. Of course, there’s still the high probability of games intervening…

I’ve started using Flickr for online photo sharing and backup, partially influenced by the fact that I took almost 600 photos on vacation and don’t want to put the stress of uploading gigabytes of images on my server. I did have to spring for Flickr Pro, which is an extra $25/year, because the 100MB/month upload limit on a free account was too small, but I asked around and the general response was that it’s definitely worth it. Currently I’m using a trial version of Aperture to sort through and edit my vacation pictures, and as I finish with each day’s pictures I’ll upload them to my photostream (with FlickrExport for Aperture) and post them here.

In addition to mass quantities of photos, I now also have real furniture. My grandmother and I made a trip to Ikea one afternoon and I got a dresser, a TV stand and a bookcase; unfortunately my roommates were both gone when I got back, so I had to carry the boxes all in by myself. A little rearranging was needed to get everything inside and have room to assemble it:

The TV stand was the first thing I put together, and definitely took the longest.

It does look pretty cool though, and lets me keep all the cables for everything neatly out of sight.

My tentative setup, before I’d assembled the dresser:

Only minor injuries were sustained in the entire process. My arm was rather bruised after carrying in all of the boxes:

While building the TV stand I dropped one of the back panels on my finger, but other than that I managed to get everything assembled and remain unscathed.

Next was the dresser a few days later—considerably easier to build than the TV stand.

The finished product:

The finished setup for my electronics: TV and speakers on the TV stand of course, cable box and modem on one of the shelves below, and stereo receiver and router on the dresser.

It was another several days before I got the bookshelf put together; a cold, my general laziness and the fact that there was still lots of stuff on the floor in my room intervened, but I did finally get it put together. It was by far the easiest to assemble; the instructions actually said one person could do it, and I did it while fighting off a nasty cold.

Like I said, I’ve been fighting off a cold for most of this week. Yesterday was definitely the worst of it, but I’m on my way back to being healthy. I even did the dishes, which my roommates are too lazy to take care of—while sick. By hand (with hand sanitizer on hand). Take note, ladies.

I’m kind of giving the Danny Choo photoblogging style a shot here. Probably won’t be a regular thing, but I’ll at the very least post thumbnails or links to new photosets if I have more than just a handful of pictures to share.

All things other than the weather considered it’s good to be back in Tempe, on my own computer again with my anime collection and epic internet pipes and digital cable.

But DANG it gets hot here. Seriously, holy frick.

In any case, vacation was fun. Lots of driving on Monday (yes, we drove from Tucson to LA, in the daytime); stayed at the Residence Inn by Marriott in Los Alamitos. Tuesday, Disneyland; we had a reservation at the Blue Bayou Restaurant there, which was well-timed with the earthquake happening not long before. We didn’t feel anything, but all the rides were closed for inspection for a couple hours. We didn’t go on too many rides anyway; this was the third time in just over four years (second time with my family) that we’d been to Disneyland, so I think it was all still old news right then. Another year or two’s wait might have been better.

Wednesday, California Adventure; pretty good, it was my first time going. Muppets 3D was definitely the highlight of the day; the Animation Workshop was interesting too, and the Monsters, Inc. and Soaring Over California rides were pretty good. Then ESPNZone in Downtown Disney that night for dinner. There are televisions at eye-level above the urinals there. Best restaurant of the trip.

Thursday, a bunch of different things: Aquarium of the Pacific in the morning; Seal Beach in the afternoon; and Dodger Stadium, believe it or not my first Major League Baseball regular-season game outside of Phoenix, in the evening. We were in the vast minority of people not wearing any Dodger Blue, and I didn’t see anyone wearing anything Diamondbacks (even though the D-backs won, 2-1). I did have a Dodger Dog though…you have not tasted an excellent hot dog until you’ve had a Dodger Dog with the works.

Friday, Universal Studios. Much smaller than Disneyland actually, which I wasn’t expecting but much to the delight of my legs. The tour is really the highlight of the park; it’s half real sightseeing, half totally contrived (but passingly fun) theme park fun-tram ride, but fun nonetheless. We opted to pass on The Mummy Returns and Jurassic Park rides; the Shrek 4D show was amusing, the special effects demonstrations were enlightening despite being punctuated by really dry attempts at humor, and the Simpsons Ride was totally worth the 45-minute wait spent watching an about as long Simpsons “Best of Krustyland” video loop.

Saturday, more driving. All in all I took a good several hundred photos, which I still have to get into iPhoto and sort out the good ones before uploading them, but I’ll probably get working on that after I (finally) get some furniture and clean my room.

Oh yes, and it was much—MUCH—cooler in Los Angeles.

Forget translation; this restaurant sign in China didn’t even make it that far, and shows why you really shouldn’t rely on the internet for translating into languages you can’t read:

I don’t post just plain links very much, but when I find one that reaches as far into the realm of Epic as this I just can’t help it. I don’t even know how to categorize this.

My family is taking a vacation to the Los Angeles area next week; so for the time being I’m back in the Old Pueblo. The two things I remembered right away:

1. how little traffic there is, but how much it doesn’t seem like it because of how poorly managed it is; and
2. how little there is to do here.

It is kinda nice to get away from the condo for a while though and be back with my family; it was starting to get old, sitting around all day with nothing to do. Preferrable to summer school, but all the same, calling something an improvement over summer school isn’t saying much.

The one downside to our vacation is that we’ll actually be driving from Tucson to Los Angeles. Not as bad a drive as the one to San Diego—we pass through real civilization, Phoenix and Blythe instead of Yuma and El Centro—but still not optimal. I guess I see where my parents are coming from, with flying being much more expensive and really not saving too much more time over driving, but that doesn’t change the fact that being in a car for seven or eight hours is no fun. I will be taking pictures and will post them once I am back in Tempe at my own computer.

In the meantime, my laptop is now (or will be later this afternoon, anyway) dual-booting again, so that I can at least have EVE Online and World of Warcraft with me at home and on other travels. If it weren’t for the fact that certain games require me to use Microsoft products, I would be more than happy to never have to acknowledge their existence.

Now I just need to finalize my decision between openSUSE and Ubuntu for a Linux distribution to dual-boot. Ubuntu I have much more experience working with, and I prefer its package manager; but openSUSE looks better, and works better with docking and undocking, but it’s been harder for me to configure. I am open to opinions and recommendations, so feel free to leave a comment.

Yup. Part of it was my dissatisfaction with Drupal as a straight-up blogging platform (versus WordPress’s specialization as one), and part of it is the vast improvements made by WordPress in the area of photo uploading and management. That part will still take some playing with to get figured out, but at least I’ll be able to upload more than one photo at a time. I still need to find or write WordPress versions for a couple of Drupal modules I had come to find invaluable, but that’ll get done in time.

I am still migrating posts over from the old Drupal site (which is available here for the time being), but it seems to be going smoothly. In the meantime, proceed to the next post and enjoy some photos of my “new” dice set (which I’ve had for a while, but need to move the photos of over here anyway).

I was having weird problems with Firefox lagging every once in a while, so I decided to just build my own for Mac OS X Leopard on my Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Pro. Didn’t turn out to be too difficult; Neil Lee at BeatnikPad already has Intel and G5 native builds of Firefox 3 available, but I like having the default branding (Firefox instead of Minefield, the fox icon instead of the weird bomb-planet thing) and a little more customized optimization. Here’s a basic walkthrough of how I did it; you’ll need the latest version of Xcode installed, a passing familiarity with the Terminal, and the latest version of libIDL (if you have Fink, fink install libidl2; for MacPorts, sudo port install libidl).

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Like I mentioned previously, this site is now being served up by lighttpd; it took a while to get clean URLs working right, but what right now is making my server tick is a very carefully laid-out filesystem and set of bash scripts and lighty config files, wrapped around a Drupal multisite installation to make installing modules and upgrading the entire system as intuitive and painless as possible. Upgrading Drupal (from 6.2 to the brand-new 6.3 for example) takes no more than running a single command. Here’s an overview of how my own site is set up, generalized to make it applicable to almost any other system.

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Still not on any better of a schedule. Not really worth discussing.

The site is now running on lighttpd, to cut back on the memory consumption compared to Apache. It took a while to get all the rewrite rules working right, but it seems to all be working now; use the contact form (returning soon) to let me know if something isn’t right.

And between finishing up my summer class (”Philosophy of Science”) and working on this site and the one for work, I’m just about completely settled into a new condo with one of my suitemates from last year and a friend of his who I got to know over the course of the year. It’s a nice place, about a mile from campus and cheap enough for us to afford digital cable and epic-fast cable internet in addition to food, electricity and rent. No real gripes aside from the dishwasher apparently being broken; I’m still working on getting everything unpacked and set up, but I like it so far. I don’t have any photos online here yet (they’re on Facebook for the time being) but as soon as I have a way to upload photos straight here from iPhoto I’ll post them.

Really not a whole lot else to write about. Maybe a couple more tech how-tos coming up soon, but not tonight. I think I actually want to be awake for most of the day tomorrow.

My web site is now (mostly, anyway) migrated to my new server package, which as previously mentioned is a NetworkRedux Silver Virtual Private Server, paid for yearly (yeesh). Additionally, all of my domain names are now with GoDaddy, and I’m hosting my own BIND and nameservers—meaning, no dealing with NetworkRedux or having to go through a slow and buggy server control panel which shall go unnamed to create subdomains or make other DNS configurations. I am now in complete control of my web server and all online access to it, and am managing it all by hand (primarily via SSH through the command line).

It did take a little longer than I had anticipated to get things put back together to their current state. I went through a couple of minor configuration crises that I did manage to resolve eventually, and just when I thouht I had everything put together—Drupal up and running and everything—I managed to bork it all again. But my perserverance and late nights have paid off, and tada: the site is back online. Two posts still have yet to be migrated over: one because I’m considering how to attack formatting the large blocks of code it contains, and another because I’ll be rewriting it to include lots of images, which is dependent on the subject in the next paragraph. Any old links (except those to the two aforementioned posts) should still work fine thanks to a little mod_rewrite magic, and the RSS feed is still in the same place as before, so no need to update any old links; it’s all taken care of.

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