Saturday, April 16, 2011

Adventures in Linux and Other Miscellany

Well. It's been quite awhile since I last updated here; in the unlikely event that anyone reads this blog besides my mother (hi mom!) I shall give a rundown of what's happened in the last little while.
  • I'm officially going to school year round. It was one of the best decisions I've made, I think. Last semester I took two philosophy classes, which I absolutely loved. If they had a philosophy major here and I wasn't so far along in my history major, I might just switch majors. As it is, I'm thinking I might get a MA in philosophy once I've got my BA, and then possibly a PhD as well. And then I'll be a dusty old philosophy professor, and it will be great!
  • Towards the middle of last semester I deleted my Facebook account. First I just deactivated it, and then I deleted it for good. I'm so glad I did. I don't miss it at all--not one little bit. I highly doubt I'll ever touch Facebook again. Take that, Zuckerberg!
  • I now have a 10-hour-a-week job working as a TA for one of the professors in the history department. It's a nice job; I can pretty much set my own hours, it'll look good on a resumé, and I'm very happy to have work. I'm going to be very busy this semester with the job and the 17 credits I'm taking, but I don't really mind. I like to keep busy.
  • A couple weeks ago I switched my operating system from Windows XP to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (a Linux distribution). I absolutely love it. My computer runs faster, and there are tons of little things that totally spoil me. I have a program called GNOME Do that allows me to open programs from the keyboard--I just press Ctrl+Space and start typing the name of the program I want, and it usually only takes one letter to bring it up. A good friend of mine who's a computer programmer helped me switch it over, and I was afraid that it would take me a long time to figure out how to use it, but I was able to use it functionally right away, and I'm starting to get pretty good at customizing it. I have had a couple of mishaps. The first week I accidentally deleted the wifi widget and replaced it with the wrong one, and my friend (he's a saint, I swear) spent several hours helping me get that sorted out. During finals week I also discovered the hard way that Linux doesn't get along very well with Adobe Flash--it froze up my screen, I tried to reboot to fix it, and ended up with a black screen with (to me) incomprehensible white script. Fortunately that turned out to be relatively easy to fix (again with my friend's help). I now play Pandora using a program called Pithos (which I find amusing, since pithoi [singular pithos] were Greek funerary urns), and have adjusted my settings in YouTube so it won't cause that problem again. With the exception of those two mishaps, using Linux has been just lovely. I can do everything with it that I could with Windows and more. Additionally, Linux gives the user much more control over how the computer works. At this point that doesn't really mean a whole lot to me since I'm not terribly familiar with the inner workings of computers, but I'm teaching myself how to use the terminal so that I at least know enough to fix problems instead of causing them. ;)
So, for anyone who was wondering, there are a few highlights from the last few months. I might upload a few of my philosophy essays from last semester if I deem them fit to put on the Internet. Cheers!

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