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.

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.