Seth Kinast’s Blog

Now that I’m back at OU, I hope to be blogging more frequently than I did over the summer. But I suppose only time will tell…

With that said, here’s my Fall 2005 class schedule.

A couple weeks before I came to college, we went to College Age camp in Everton, MO. I played keyboard for Senior High II camp, so the $140 fee for the camp was waived for me. I took my $140 and gave it to Josh, telling him to find somebody that couldn’t afford to pay that wanted to come.

The next day I had so many computer jobs scheduled that it paid back the $140 and more, and I also found my 2005FPW, for which I eventually would only pay $45.

The week after College Age camp, I took Nate, Becca, and Jules to the movies and then out to eat. I paid for their tickets and food, because they’re all high school students without jobs.

When I got home, I had a $100 check from a client for whom I had done some gratis work; he was especially grateful and said he wanted to feel comfortable using me again.

Wednesday at the DMV, the lady behind me in line had been waiting 45 minutes to renew some of her paperwork; she finally got through the line and completed the renewal, only to find that it cost $20 and they only accepted cash or checks. She only had a credit card, so I paid for her $20 charge.

I wonder what will happen next…

Once again, I’m all moved in. It was quite a bit easier this time; much of my stuff was already packed, ready to take. Yesterday was crazy though; there was so much stuff I had to do. I sort of put off packing— not too badly! Just a little!— so I was a bit rushed in the morning. Then I had to run and get a haircut, and then go over to the DMV to stand in line for an hour to renew my driver’s license. I very much like my new picture, so all-in-all a good trade.

Yet as we were prepared to leave, we found that the bugs we tried to kill by bombing the house last week weren’t all dead :/ so we had to bomb again. So Nate and I took a bit of my stuff and went on to OU; I wanted to get there to check in before they closed. We had a pretty uneventful trip (except for the Semi of Death! Ask a Kinast near you for details) and arrived around 7 last night. Dad got in about 9:30, and we set up my room. The computer and accessories took almost as long as the rest of the room combined Dad did surgery on the light and moved it over to get my monitor to fit under the desk

I’ve almost finished the OU Pre-Med Club website and it is looking pretty slick if I do say so myself. I look forward to keeping it updated this year.

I may have finally found the answer to the photo gallery all the other galleries (Coppermine, Gallery, Singapore) are just so heavyweight! But The File Browser looks to be just what I need. Auto-thumbnailing without having to actually generate thumbnails, no uploading of images manually (just drop in via FTP), lightweight, XHTML-compliant, I’m going to try it!

Getting a new phone gives me a pretty good excuse to do all sorts of things I’ve been putting off:

• Consolidating my contact data
• Getting my Tungsten C back up-to-date with all my stuff
• Standardizing my vCards
• KDE integration (this is the biggie)

I lost all my Palm addresses when it ran out of battery and I didn’t come home to charge it for two months. But I still had lots of data on my Ericsson t610. Behold, the convoluted path I took to reach synched Nirvana:

1. Ericsson t610 to Evolution, via Multisync, via multisync-plugin-irmc-bluetooth
2. Evolution to vCard
3. vCard to KAddressBook
4. KAddressBook to Palm via KPilot
5. KAddressBook to v551 via KMobileTools

For some reason Kitchensync was trash; didn’t want to work at all. So I used MultiSync, which is a Gnome program. Of course the current version can only export to Evolution, not KAddressBook (CVS version can go to KAddressBook via a plugin, so it shouldn’t be long). But it’s all imported now, and I can pretty much ignore the t610 from this point out.

I think I’m going to be really glad that I took the time to move things over to KAddressBook. It’s awfully spiffy; for example, if you’re in my address book and your card is filled out with all your info, for example, screen names, then you’ll be flagged with your real name and photo in Konversation IRC and Kopete IM. KDE is also smart enough to put all the contact metadata together, so it knows that you changed your nick on IRC and will update your address book entry accordingly. And it’s all stored in one centralized place.

Don’t think I’m quite ready to use KMail yet, as cool as that would be. Thunderbird is still much better.

In other news, my car got broken into they didn’t steal my iPod charger or power inverter or CDs, but they grabbed the ~$40 in my armrest. Boo.

Wanna make an easy first million? Open up a chain of college bookstores that don’t skewer the helpless college students and roast them for every penny they’re worth. Let them know when new editions of books will be released. Give them more than $5 a book to sell back their books, especially if you’ve got 5 more semesters before the book goes out-of-print that you can sell it “used” for $100 a pop. ($150 originally, -$5 to buy it back, $100 used, -$5 to buy it back… 6 times of selling the same book and that’s quite a profit!). Don’t immediately hide all the “out-of-date” editions when a new edition comes out, thus forcing students to buy the new one. Most of the time, the old edition will do just fine, thanks. Play nice.

The bookstore wants about $300 for all my books (which is relatively cheap compared to past semesters :/) but I spent an hour and a half on the Internet and got everything I needed for around half that price. Sigh.