School has been trying its damned hardest to finish me off, but I refuse to go down without a fight. Gotta be quick though, still way too much homework to do and too much Futurama to watch tonight. Sorry for the delay in updates everyone (*ahem* Rebecca :P).

I’ve been trying out the last couple alphas and currently the beta of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on my laptop. The only complaint I have besides the beta-ness of it is that I haven’t been able to hack together the tablet PC fuctionality on my laptop (a Thinkpad X60 Tablet; the fingerprint reader has also been tricky, but that’s more likely to be fixed by the final release). The new version of X.org included in Intrepid uses HAL by default instead of xorg.conf to detect and configure input devices—but it can’t detect serial Wacom tablets, a.k.a. tablet PC screens. It is possible to override that and use an xorg.conf file, but I’ve been too busy and too lazy to put together a workaround. Only a few days until the release candidate though, so that could change, but I’m planning on having to just use the xorg.conf workaround. Other than that, and the fact that OpenOffice.org 3.0 didn’t make it in, I love it.

Oh, and speaking of Rebecca (mentioned above), I think since she beat me to saying it I can safely announce that she will be baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on November 15, four weeks from yesterday. I’m very proud of her for making this decision (and I also know I’m partially to blame for it); I’ve been so glad to see her coming to church with me starting just this past January, and watching her faith and testimony grow exponentially in that time has helped strengthen my own. No word yet on what time or who will be doing what, but keep an eye on either my blog or hers for more details as the big day approaches.

So how about them Rays?

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…

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.