Seth Kinast’s Blog

I love it when stuff like this happens. An article I write for Neowin referenced by a completely unrelated site. I feel cool ^_^

I know, I know, I haven’t blogged in forever and a day. Always put it off because I had more and more to say. It was so much easier to just go out and play. But now I’ve gotta blog, and now I’m gonna pay.

</nerdhumor>

I finally get to go home this weekend… hopefully… for the college age retreat up at Maranatha. It will be really nice to see people again, people that I know and that like to hang out with me and that like to give hugs. Not to mention Mom and Dad and Grandma. However, it will be kinda hectic… one because I have to drive up Friday morning early (= by myself, boo, i’m nervous), and two because I have a LOT of work to get done this weekend. A midterm, an essay, and i’m sure more homework i haven’t gotten yet. So I’ll have to try to get a lot of it done tomorrow.

I enrolled today in my 17 hours. Enrolling a week before everyone sure is nice, and I got to enroll with juniors by hours. So even my honors peers don’t get to enroll until tomorrow (take that, Hannah! ). I got all my classes, including the super secret bonus class. No, you don’t get to know what it is. Yes, I accept checks and credit cards as well as cash.

So I was talking to Kristina Kory on MSN (she’s so cute!) and then signed off to go get Wendy’s. Just before I left, she pouted, “aww you get wendy’s, you’re lucky, i want wendy’s!” So I promised to bring her Wendy’s for lunch on Friday! I’m sure she’ll be the talk of the town, getting lunch brought to her by a *cough* dashing, debonair young college student!

Hamerla is an awfully nice professor. I’ve lost my Honors compilation book, and asked him if anyone had found one. He lent me his own personal copy to use until the end of semester, and said he would just use the original books! Good guy. Glad I have him for discussion section.

I got my new camera. I know, I just got a camera. But the Gateway, while insanely cheap, had a plastic lens and heated up to no end when held. Like too-hot-to-hold hot. Plus, its screen had a bad pixel. I wanted to keep the Gateway, so I took it back to Best Buy and asked for an exchange. Nuh uh. No more in stock. Paige drove me later that week to the Greater OKC Best Buys, both of them. None in stock. I asked what was going on… they were being discontinued! Whoops. So no camera for Seth? Could this tragic picturefest come to an end so soon?
But I was browing around on gotApex, and found a Kyocera Finecam with identical or better specs than the Gateway for $174 after pricematch at Staples. Almost exactly what I paid at Best Buy for the inferior Gateway! This thing takes burst shots at 3 per second until the card is full. It feels almost like a film camera, it’s so fast. Long story short, Staples gave me the runaround because they didn’t have any in stock because IT was being discontinued too, so I ended up getting it from Outpost.com for $208 and a bit, including shipping. Far better than the Gateway. I feel really good about getting it.

Linux gets better and better. I’m starting to boot into it by choice, not by desire to tinker. If I could just get printing to work! I could almost use it on a regular basis. I never Palm synch anymore, so that’s not an issue right now. And Bluetooth would work if I gave it enough time. And just because of dependency issues, I shouldn’t give up. I just wish I could have a Linux guru at my disposal for 1 hour, enough time to get me straightened out. I still don’t understand what programs should install where, etc., and what is the method for determining where to find a program. The find tool gets a LOT of use with me . But it’s so nice to be able to say dig 155.313.38.8 and get results back, without having to use 31.2 additional programs. And I still have my Thunderbird and Firefox, and SUSE’s wonderful auto-upgrades, so I’m running KDE 3.3.1. Kopete has also been a lifesaver.

Hannah came and spent a few hours with me tonight. During the course of her stay, she managed to hit me in the head with approximately 3 dozen pillows, poke a bajillion holes in my bulletin board, and pull the sheets of my bed. That’s about par for the course when she comes over. Hehehe. Cousin Ashleigh was on her way to Joplin from Texas, and so passed through and ate brunch with me. It was really good to see her ^_^

j’irai par les forets; j’irai par les montagnes. je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps…

Took Hannah tonight to dinner and a movie. It was a lot of fun We ate at the Boomerang and then went to the Northstar Theater on Robinson.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was actually pretty good. It was all recolored to look vintage, as it took place after WWII. The amazing part was the amount of set that was completely computer-generated. It was hard to tell apart from the real stuff. Worth seeing.

Tomorrow will be a good day… I’m going to go play racquetball with Wade and Matt and then do a bit of homework. Then have fun!

Photo Matt got hit by the same design flaw I did last night. Windows installed a security update and asked to restart. I told it no, I’d restart when I was good and ready, thanks. Unlike SP1, Windows gets angry and petulant and asks to restart EVERY TEN MINUTES. I was getting tired of pressing “Later” but was going to bed soon anyway, so I left some work open and went to sleep. I got up in the morning to see… my Linux screen saver? Eh?

If you don’t tell XP SP2 to restart later (because you’re not there), it decides to restart for you. It does NOT save any open work, nor does it shut down cleanly. This is incredibly flawed from a design point of view.

Bleh, I’m back to SuSE for awhile. I need to go turn off updates and never do them again. I don’t remember what all I had up but I know there were a couple documents and at least one e-mail. Not to mention any messages I might have gotten over the night. Boo.

You can turn it off by following these steps.

Phew, it’s finally all over. The test took almost twice as long this time since I had 40 questions to do instead of 20. And I checked the BEJEEBERS out of it… good thing, because I found a few wrong answers! So I bumped my Unit 1 grade from an 80 to a 100, and got 90s on Units 3 and 4… Unit 2 stayed at 90. The exam answers are posted half an hour after the exam concludes… but I was too scared to look. Hannah came over and graded it for me because I refused to

I haven’t been able to go home since Labor Day, and it’s getting COLD here (low 50’s). Mom sent me a big box of warm clothes that I got today, so that was a welcome package. I’ll wear something nice and fuzzy tomorrow ^_^

With the weekend here, I’ll have time to… do all my homework. Owch. Well actually I’m just complaining… it’s not that much really, and I have a movie to look forward to! I have to pick a topic for my research paper in What is Science?; I’m considering writing on the development of antisepsis and surgical procedure. It’s something I’m pretty interested in, and there is a LOT of material.

The nods to friends have taken a brief hiatus to make room for the electoral vote predictor (gotta redesign this website! Not enough space!) but I need to mention that Nate has gotten his blog set up finally. Hopefully he can be more dedicated to writing on his than I am on mine Wordpress 1.3 coming soon; I can’t wait!

Time to go save the galaxy from aliens or something mindless like that. I’m done working for the day…