Saturday, September 1, 2007
Switching to...
While I love Blogger, I feel like making a fuller personal site, with a blog and some static content. And Multiply just isn't doing it for me...too ugly, too hard to move around. The result? http://yanntx.wordpress.com. Check it out, yo...I'll not post here anymore...at least in the forseeable future.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Wounded but not Whitewashed
Well, I'm starting up my blog again, writing posts as I'm in line and/or waiting for various things on campus...which means that info may not be particularly timely but at least it'll be there.
And yes, I'm at college now. Classes start tomorrow...I'm at Colorado School of Mines.
Anyhow, I got up at 7:10 this morning and headed out, helmet in hand (they had given me one Saturday) and more-than-ten-pound rock in the other, to the school's Intramural Field to start the famous/infamous "M Climb". No, I didn't eat breakfast.
What followed was relatively insane but I survived...
First, our helmets were spray painted. Then out of the mass of upeerclassmen that were generally administrating the affair burst the school fight song...I'll probably quote it in a latter post but let's just say it reflacts the fact that Coors came a year before Mines...and Coors is just down the road.
We then walked out of the field and toward the big white "M" made of whitewashed rocks that was a prominent feature of a nearby low mountain. Then the fun began...at least it was fun for somebody...
Water balloons started pelting at the group. For the first bit...I am no judge of length of distance...most of the balloons were misses, only getting the class of '11 wet indirectly. But as we progressed, direct hits became way too common. One such hit got me in the foot, leaving me limping for the next minute or two. I survived a few such direct hits and am thankful for the helmet that protected me from the slightly more lethal headshots that knocked other's headgear temporarily off.
Oh, and at random points roadblocks were set up along the road, full of people chucking water balloons at us...and for some people flour balloons as well...who would only let us through after we had sung the fight song.
Finally, we got to a point where we were being given water in cups instead of blloons. But then the hard part began. For what seemed like at least a quarter mile we struggled straight up the mountainside on what couldn't legally be called an improved trail. I had the bright idea of, at the end of the ascent, throwing my rock slightly ahead of me, then climbing up after it. Problem was that it would roll down, at one point catching my hand in the middle of thins, leaving a few abrasions.
We finally got to the road again, and started up a much better trail toward the M. As we got closer to the open gate at the lower-right corner we saw anews helicopter flying around...I wonder if I was in that video.
We finally got positioned around the M...and waited...for an hour...while eeryone else came up. Meanwhile we handed buckets of dirty water up to I have no idea where, then handed them back down. I suppose that they might have been mixed with paint to form whitewash...
More later...
And yes, I'm at college now. Classes start tomorrow...I'm at Colorado School of Mines.
Anyhow, I got up at 7:10 this morning and headed out, helmet in hand (they had given me one Saturday) and more-than-ten-pound rock in the other, to the school's Intramural Field to start the famous/infamous "M Climb". No, I didn't eat breakfast.
What followed was relatively insane but I survived...
First, our helmets were spray painted. Then out of the mass of upeerclassmen that were generally administrating the affair burst the school fight song...I'll probably quote it in a latter post but let's just say it reflacts the fact that Coors came a year before Mines...and Coors is just down the road.
We then walked out of the field and toward the big white "M" made of whitewashed rocks that was a prominent feature of a nearby low mountain. Then the fun began...at least it was fun for somebody...
Water balloons started pelting at the group. For the first bit...I am no judge of length of distance...most of the balloons were misses, only getting the class of '11 wet indirectly. But as we progressed, direct hits became way too common. One such hit got me in the foot, leaving me limping for the next minute or two. I survived a few such direct hits and am thankful for the helmet that protected me from the slightly more lethal headshots that knocked other's headgear temporarily off.
Oh, and at random points roadblocks were set up along the road, full of people chucking water balloons at us...and for some people flour balloons as well...who would only let us through after we had sung the fight song.
Finally, we got to a point where we were being given water in cups instead of blloons. But then the hard part began. For what seemed like at least a quarter mile we struggled straight up the mountainside on what couldn't legally be called an improved trail. I had the bright idea of, at the end of the ascent, throwing my rock slightly ahead of me, then climbing up after it. Problem was that it would roll down, at one point catching my hand in the middle of thins, leaving a few abrasions.
We finally got to the road again, and started up a much better trail toward the M. As we got closer to the open gate at the lower-right corner we saw anews helicopter flying around...I wonder if I was in that video.
We finally got positioned around the M...and waited...for an hour...while eeryone else came up. Meanwhile we handed buckets of dirty water up to I have no idea where, then handed them back down. I suppose that they might have been mixed with paint to form whitewash...
More later...
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
I'm gonna crash the internet
Okay, not really, but here's what I've got running on my dual-screened system:
3x Internet Explorer, 5 tabs open total across two monitors
Microsoft Word 2007
Microsoft Excel 2007
Microsoft Outlook 2007 (has open a journal entry that I use as a time clock for work)
Notepad (for quick notes)
WIndows Media Player (miniplayer mode)
AIM & Windows Live Messenger (tray mode)
So, total, I have seven windows open, eight programs, eight instances of various programs plus two running in the background, all on a machine that I bought for $700 a year ago (though I upgraded the hard drive recently...same with the operating system). :)
3x Internet Explorer, 5 tabs open total across two monitors
Microsoft Word 2007
Microsoft Excel 2007
Microsoft Outlook 2007 (has open a journal entry that I use as a time clock for work)
Notepad (for quick notes)
WIndows Media Player (miniplayer mode)
AIM & Windows Live Messenger (tray mode)
So, total, I have seven windows open, eight programs, eight instances of various programs plus two running in the background, all on a machine that I bought for $700 a year ago (though I upgraded the hard drive recently...same with the operating system). :)
My Fave Podcasts
Well, I've looked around a little and here are my favorite podcasts (i.e. the ones that I'll actually listen to\watch). Funny how some of 'em are Mac-related and I passed up the iPhone for a Sprint Mogul...and these are relatively in order of interest...
1. This Week In Tech
2. The Daily Giz Wiz
3. MacBreak Weekly
4. InDigital
5. Net@Nite
6. SecurityNow
7. Windows Weekly
8. CommandN
9. The Tech Guy
10. GigaOM
InDigital and CommandN are both video podcasts. The rest of the 10 are audio. Yes, theyre all tech-related. Just thought I'd note these...
1. This Week In Tech
2. The Daily Giz Wiz
3. MacBreak Weekly
4. InDigital
5. Net@Nite
6. SecurityNow
7. Windows Weekly
8. CommandN
9. The Tech Guy
10. GigaOM
InDigital and CommandN are both video podcasts. The rest of the 10 are audio. Yes, theyre all tech-related. Just thought I'd note these...
Monday, July 2, 2007
What Heppened, July 1st
Well, I’ll start with the most recent things and work my way backward, ending on Friday, the 22nd of June…
On July 1st (when I’m writing this) we got up, ate breakfast at a really nice Wingate hotel that seemed to have just been opened (all the TVs were big-screen flat panel HDTVs) and started driving. Which we did for most of the day. We stopped at the gift shop for the world’s largest pecan grove (in New Mexico, no less!) and went to Subway at Wal-Mart for lunch in a town whose name starts with a D but I forget exactly what the full name is. I bought another cell phone (see my Go4Prepaid blog post…the camera phone was a mere $40!) and a cheap ($30) inverter for the car while I was there, the latter being for charging my and my brother’s laptops, plus whatever other phone chargers and such I have that don’t have (at least for me) a DC equivalent.
There was a LOT of driving time today. I whiled away the hours mainly by watching my brother play (on his laptop) or playing (on mine) either Motocross Madness, Mario Kart 64 or Super Smash Brothers (the latter two with an N64 emulator). But about two hours of my time was diverted to watching the first two episodes of the first season of 24…I didn’t have quite enough hotel time to finish downloading the third episode and all the rest of the season was only about 70% done. I gotta say, so far the show is interesting enough to put as my lone favorite typical TV show )need to update that). Can’t wait to finish watching the season…at least thusfar.
The day was wound up somewhat when our heavily loaded van registered high engine temperatures after chugging up scrubby, lonely mountain byways toward Gila National Forest’s actual forested area. We turned around and safely coasted down the hill, aided by our van’s AutoStick feature…probably the only thing my dad will miss when the family upgrades in eventuality to a Japanese-made car (then again they might have it too). As we came down the hill we spotted a forest fire, caused by lightning from recent storms…we weren’t the first ones to see it and it was a ways away so there was no need to report it. We ended up watching…at an unprecedented-ly close distance…a very good fireworks display put on my the local community…I have some nice pictures and an okay movie, thanks to my new camera’s Fireworks mode. One of the pictures is now my desktop photo, changed thereto when I hooked my laptop up to true AC power at the little cabin where I’m typing this post. No internet here of any sort…dialup is probably long distance no matter what and there’s no Ethernet or WiFi, hence this post not being in realtime. But at least the room is as good as an average hotel room, plus kitchen, sans freezing-cold AC.
Well, got to turn in now. More on my former adventures later…
On July 1st (when I’m writing this) we got up, ate breakfast at a really nice Wingate hotel that seemed to have just been opened (all the TVs were big-screen flat panel HDTVs) and started driving. Which we did for most of the day. We stopped at the gift shop for the world’s largest pecan grove (in New Mexico, no less!) and went to Subway at Wal-Mart for lunch in a town whose name starts with a D but I forget exactly what the full name is. I bought another cell phone (see my Go4Prepaid blog post…the camera phone was a mere $40!) and a cheap ($30) inverter for the car while I was there, the latter being for charging my and my brother’s laptops, plus whatever other phone chargers and such I have that don’t have (at least for me) a DC equivalent.
There was a LOT of driving time today. I whiled away the hours mainly by watching my brother play (on his laptop) or playing (on mine) either Motocross Madness, Mario Kart 64 or Super Smash Brothers (the latter two with an N64 emulator). But about two hours of my time was diverted to watching the first two episodes of the first season of 24…I didn’t have quite enough hotel time to finish downloading the third episode and all the rest of the season was only about 70% done. I gotta say, so far the show is interesting enough to put as my lone favorite typical TV show )need to update that). Can’t wait to finish watching the season…at least thusfar.
The day was wound up somewhat when our heavily loaded van registered high engine temperatures after chugging up scrubby, lonely mountain byways toward Gila National Forest’s actual forested area. We turned around and safely coasted down the hill, aided by our van’s AutoStick feature…probably the only thing my dad will miss when the family upgrades in eventuality to a Japanese-made car (then again they might have it too). As we came down the hill we spotted a forest fire, caused by lightning from recent storms…we weren’t the first ones to see it and it was a ways away so there was no need to report it. We ended up watching…at an unprecedented-ly close distance…a very good fireworks display put on my the local community…I have some nice pictures and an okay movie, thanks to my new camera’s Fireworks mode. One of the pictures is now my desktop photo, changed thereto when I hooked my laptop up to true AC power at the little cabin where I’m typing this post. No internet here of any sort…dialup is probably long distance no matter what and there’s no Ethernet or WiFi, hence this post not being in realtime. But at least the room is as good as an average hotel room, plus kitchen, sans freezing-cold AC.
Well, got to turn in now. More on my former adventures later…
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Stuff I Got
Okay, not like last post but I decided to just get various stuff with my graduation money rather than saving it for college, as I already have earned enough for my first year...
1. Canon PowerShot a710 IS digital camera - $237 at Profeel
2. Transcend 2GB SD card (for camera, palm, camcorder, PC, etc.) - $15.99 at ClubIT
3. Duracell 4x 2650 mAh rechargeable AAs (for camera, 2 backup sets!) - $7.25 on eBay
4. Lenmar Mach3 Lightning (I think) 8-minute charger (for camera) - $29.99 at Vann's
5. Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 OEM - $33.90 on eBay
6. Adobe Premiere Elements 3 Retail - $50 on eBay
7. Canon Elura 100 refurbished camcorder with bag (cheaper with bag) - $338.94 on eBay
8. 3-in-1 FireWire cable - $7.99 on MeritLine
9. 6x Maxell 60-minute MiniDV tapes - $11.96 on eBay
10. $100 toward Boy Scout summer camp fee
For a total of $833.02. This may seem like a lot of money (it is!) but it's really nice to know that just the cash presents I got for graduation are going to cover this, and (likely) then some. Now to get some thank you notes written...:)
1. Canon PowerShot a710 IS digital camera - $237 at Profeel
2. Transcend 2GB SD card (for camera, palm, camcorder, PC, etc.) - $15.99 at ClubIT
3. Duracell 4x 2650 mAh rechargeable AAs (for camera, 2 backup sets!) - $7.25 on eBay
4. Lenmar Mach3 Lightning (I think) 8-minute charger (for camera) - $29.99 at Vann's
5. Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 OEM - $33.90 on eBay
6. Adobe Premiere Elements 3 Retail - $50 on eBay
7. Canon Elura 100 refurbished camcorder with bag (cheaper with bag) - $338.94 on eBay
8. 3-in-1 FireWire cable - $7.99 on MeritLine
9. 6x Maxell 60-minute MiniDV tapes - $11.96 on eBay
10. $100 toward Boy Scout summer camp fee
For a total of $833.02. This may seem like a lot of money (it is!) but it's really nice to know that just the cash presents I got for graduation are going to cover this, and (likely) then some. Now to get some thank you notes written...:)
Friday, June 8, 2007
A Brave New Blog
Well, this is my first blog entry in a loooong time. My aim is to on these entries tell where I am now, and where I’ve been the day I’m writing on, what I’ve done, plus some deep thought and whatever else I want to talk about. So for you folks at home, behold, my life.
Right now I’m at what was my school…until I graduated about 195 hours ago. I’m here because my mom is taking her job too seriously…hopefully she’ll make up for that later on this summer. Maybe I’ll talk about that later. But anyway I’m here occupying myself, as I’ve run out of things to do (write thank you notes…at home…finish biology…at home…finish merit badge work…at home…watch a movie…not downloaded yet). I have internet access, on a different computer (wireless network has been password-protected since the second day of school ’06-’07 and I don’t feel like cracking it or suchlike), but I’ve already checked all the requisite sites there. I suppose I could do so again, but I really don’t feel like that’s as productive as wha tI’m doing now…writing this while that computer is BitTorrenting the first episode of the first season of 24. I’ve already listened to the Daily Giz Wiz podcase (first in awhile) and hope I won’t have enough time for another while I’m here…so I write…
I’m here also because I was spicked up from the house of the school’s principal and her husband, a really cool guy who taught a few different classes last year and was our “connected” (friend-wise) tour guide on the trip to D.C. that I’m amazed ended less than two weeks ago…more like a week and a half. I was there with the other three seniors (yep, a graduating class of four)…well, we were seniors until we graduated...having an absolutely great dinner of steak, corn, salad (who knew spinach could be so amazingly tasty…balsamic vinegar, feta cheese and cranberries obviously do the trick), sourdough bread and cobbler with ice cream. But of course the conversation was better than the food…it’s amazing when you have school faculty that treat you as friends…I hope I won’t have to miss that at Mines but I’m 99% sure I will. We talked about summer activities, a little about the past year…just relatively random things but everything interesting.
We (former seniors) were given a really amazing gift…beside the dinner…a keychain ornamented with a gold-plated (thicker than gold plate actually) ornament with our names, school class year, and an encouraging message that started with “Strong in grace” for all of us on the other side of the ornament that reminded me at first slightly of a dog tag though it didn’t really bear the slightest resemblance thereof. The messages had been the themes of each of our graduation benedictions, from baccalaureate chapel to graduation night. Thankfully, mine was abbreviated: Pursue people first (I’m glad there wasn’t space\was the consideration to respectively include and exclude “ahead of technology”…embarrasses me perhaps rightly). Good message, great gift. Too bad I don’t have any keys to hang on the keyring yet, and probably won’t have for awhile.
We four had a gift to give the school\them, too, helped by a local design firm whose “main man” was our art teacher: a framed and matted bunch of four photos in black and white, three of which were taken with my camera on the trip to Washington D.C., one of which taken on a Polaroid Land camera, three of which weren’t taken by me. The photos were of we four graduates…something to remember us by and a gift back to the school…I’m really thankful for the people at the design firm who helped us put it together, or rather put it together based on our rough ideas.
Start of extreme nerdiness
Going back a little, I had actually gotten to the dinner an hour early, to finish setting up a school laptop that had needed to be reformatted. Just basic stuff, like reinstalling drivers and whatnot. I had reformatted the laptop after a weird shutdown had corrupted the main hard drive, but not until I had safely gotten all the data off the drive by using a Puppy Linux live CD. The Windows XP CD was BitTorrented (I was surprised at the speed of the download when I did it) but the Dell serial number for Windows worked fine with it, as it was the same version of Windows as had been on the laptop. But I still had to install drivers for various laptop parts that didn’t come with the XP CD (but of course did come preinstalled with the laptop originally). A really annoying thing is that Dell really doesn’t provide a true recovery system for their new computers unless you specifically order a $10+ CD addon. You just get a recovery partition on the hard drive…a blank one…and a trial version of Norton Ghost. Ah well, all’s well that ends well and I actually used that backup partition (before upgrading my laptop’s hard drive) to dual boot a beta (RC2) of Windows Vista with the preinstalled Windows XP.
End of extreme nerdiness
While I was working on the computer the principal’s husband showed me the lovely 24-inch wall-mounted LCD he had hooked to his desktop computer (niiiice…beats my 19” panel on my desk but that’s fine with me…no space for a bigger panel where I sit anyway), as well as his new Vonage phone line…I had actually recommended Vonage to him a few months ago. He’s also now on DSL (was on dialup…glad he upgraded) with a D-Link router sitting near at hand. Geesh…the connection was a little less than four times as fast as my glorified WiFi connection at home (I live out of range of cable\DSL), at least on the download…uploads were maybe two and a half to three times as fast. Not as fast as they should have been, probably due to not a big enough data pipe coming into town for that ISP, but still nice and fast.
Sorry if this last part seems brief in comparison with the above but I’m running low on battery and don’t have my charger with me…
Before I went over to the people’s house I was generally sitting around my house doing…not much. Just obsessively checking a few different things online, plus reading up on savings accounts. Annoying that I can’t open one linked to my checking account because it’s in my name only and I’m a minor (16 to be exact). Before that I played a game of Age Of Empires II: The Conquerors against my 11-year-old brother and his friend…beat them relatively quickly of course but I think they had a little fun. Before they had come over I was motivated to actually do stuff…chores mostly, but also a cell phone review, the Motorola w370 from Tracfone…by pumping out the volume on U2’s 18 Singles deluxe edition (yay Yahoo Music Unlimited To Go!). But I still need to be more productive…sigh…
Hmm…that’s about it for now. My mom says she’s about ready to leave school\work and my laptop battery is at 7% and dropping. So hope you enjoyed reading this, my first blog post in…hmmm…several months and the first of this type of blog post in even longer…hopefully I’ll do this again sometime…until then, cya.
Yann
Right now I’m at what was my school…until I graduated about 195 hours ago. I’m here because my mom is taking her job too seriously…hopefully she’ll make up for that later on this summer. Maybe I’ll talk about that later. But anyway I’m here occupying myself, as I’ve run out of things to do (write thank you notes…at home…finish biology…at home…finish merit badge work…at home…watch a movie…not downloaded yet). I have internet access, on a different computer (wireless network has been password-protected since the second day of school ’06-’07 and I don’t feel like cracking it or suchlike), but I’ve already checked all the requisite sites there. I suppose I could do so again, but I really don’t feel like that’s as productive as wha tI’m doing now…writing this while that computer is BitTorrenting the first episode of the first season of 24. I’ve already listened to the Daily Giz Wiz podcase (first in awhile) and hope I won’t have enough time for another while I’m here…so I write…
I’m here also because I was spicked up from the house of the school’s principal and her husband, a really cool guy who taught a few different classes last year and was our “connected” (friend-wise) tour guide on the trip to D.C. that I’m amazed ended less than two weeks ago…more like a week and a half. I was there with the other three seniors (yep, a graduating class of four)…well, we were seniors until we graduated...having an absolutely great dinner of steak, corn, salad (who knew spinach could be so amazingly tasty…balsamic vinegar, feta cheese and cranberries obviously do the trick), sourdough bread and cobbler with ice cream. But of course the conversation was better than the food…it’s amazing when you have school faculty that treat you as friends…I hope I won’t have to miss that at Mines but I’m 99% sure I will. We talked about summer activities, a little about the past year…just relatively random things but everything interesting.
We (former seniors) were given a really amazing gift…beside the dinner…a keychain ornamented with a gold-plated (thicker than gold plate actually) ornament with our names, school class year, and an encouraging message that started with “Strong in grace” for all of us on the other side of the ornament that reminded me at first slightly of a dog tag though it didn’t really bear the slightest resemblance thereof. The messages had been the themes of each of our graduation benedictions, from baccalaureate chapel to graduation night. Thankfully, mine was abbreviated: Pursue people first (I’m glad there wasn’t space\was the consideration to respectively include and exclude “ahead of technology”…embarrasses me perhaps rightly). Good message, great gift. Too bad I don’t have any keys to hang on the keyring yet, and probably won’t have for awhile.
We four had a gift to give the school\them, too, helped by a local design firm whose “main man” was our art teacher: a framed and matted bunch of four photos in black and white, three of which were taken with my camera on the trip to Washington D.C., one of which taken on a Polaroid Land camera, three of which weren’t taken by me. The photos were of we four graduates…something to remember us by and a gift back to the school…I’m really thankful for the people at the design firm who helped us put it together, or rather put it together based on our rough ideas.
Start of extreme nerdiness
Going back a little, I had actually gotten to the dinner an hour early, to finish setting up a school laptop that had needed to be reformatted. Just basic stuff, like reinstalling drivers and whatnot. I had reformatted the laptop after a weird shutdown had corrupted the main hard drive, but not until I had safely gotten all the data off the drive by using a Puppy Linux live CD. The Windows XP CD was BitTorrented (I was surprised at the speed of the download when I did it) but the Dell serial number for Windows worked fine with it, as it was the same version of Windows as had been on the laptop. But I still had to install drivers for various laptop parts that didn’t come with the XP CD (but of course did come preinstalled with the laptop originally). A really annoying thing is that Dell really doesn’t provide a true recovery system for their new computers unless you specifically order a $10+ CD addon. You just get a recovery partition on the hard drive…a blank one…and a trial version of Norton Ghost. Ah well, all’s well that ends well and I actually used that backup partition (before upgrading my laptop’s hard drive) to dual boot a beta (RC2) of Windows Vista with the preinstalled Windows XP.
End of extreme nerdiness
While I was working on the computer the principal’s husband showed me the lovely 24-inch wall-mounted LCD he had hooked to his desktop computer (niiiice…beats my 19” panel on my desk but that’s fine with me…no space for a bigger panel where I sit anyway), as well as his new Vonage phone line…I had actually recommended Vonage to him a few months ago. He’s also now on DSL (was on dialup…glad he upgraded) with a D-Link router sitting near at hand. Geesh…the connection was a little less than four times as fast as my glorified WiFi connection at home (I live out of range of cable\DSL), at least on the download…uploads were maybe two and a half to three times as fast. Not as fast as they should have been, probably due to not a big enough data pipe coming into town for that ISP, but still nice and fast.
Sorry if this last part seems brief in comparison with the above but I’m running low on battery and don’t have my charger with me…
Before I went over to the people’s house I was generally sitting around my house doing…not much. Just obsessively checking a few different things online, plus reading up on savings accounts. Annoying that I can’t open one linked to my checking account because it’s in my name only and I’m a minor (16 to be exact). Before that I played a game of Age Of Empires II: The Conquerors against my 11-year-old brother and his friend…beat them relatively quickly of course but I think they had a little fun. Before they had come over I was motivated to actually do stuff…chores mostly, but also a cell phone review, the Motorola w370 from Tracfone…by pumping out the volume on U2’s 18 Singles deluxe edition (yay Yahoo Music Unlimited To Go!). But I still need to be more productive…sigh…
Hmm…that’s about it for now. My mom says she’s about ready to leave school\work and my laptop battery is at 7% and dropping. So hope you enjoyed reading this, my first blog post in…hmmm…several months and the first of this type of blog post in even longer…hopefully I’ll do this again sometime…until then, cya.
Yann
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