So, I’ve realized that blogging (for me) would be far easier if I’d just post short little snippets from my life.

But then what use would twitter be?

I’ve tried to solve the problem by finding a way to have WordPress automatically import tweets and make “mini-posts” from them. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find a suitably awesome transformation engine that turns my thoughts into PHP code. I suppose I could actually try to pick up some PHP, but that’s just a bunch of hooey.

My Search continues. If any of you happen to stumble onto this morsel of a post and know of such a neat little wonder, let me know (widget implementations need not apply)!

Since I literally have nothing to do during the summer (since apparently, corporate America hates me, and Academia has conspired with them to ensure my demise), I’m going to try to start a new one-post-per day project.

Honestly, I don’t know who I’m trying to kid (certainly not myself!), saying that I’m going to make a new post every day, but here’s to delusion!

Also, eagle-eyed readers (read: no one) may have noticed that I have not yet fixed my blog after last night’s fiasco. And that’s not a Good Thing. Sure, it still runs and stuff, but it’s not how I want it to look. I did, however, realize that I’m really just missing the Meta Links (and honestly, I don’t need those anymore), and need to move the blagroll up to the top (and honestly, who looks at those?).

Edit: Stuff’s fixed!

Yes, folks, that’s right, a new version of WordPress was just released earlier today! I being a good webscript follower, decided to upgrade to the newest release to ensure that I don’t get hacked or whatnot (though, I’m sure after that, every goddamn hacker just set their sights on hacking my site). You can get it from the usual places if you do your own blogging.

I did not, however, upgrade to WP 2.8 (the version just released). “Galador, have you gone crazy?” you may be asking, “You just said that you updated your install!” How very observant of you, dear reader! I did in fact update my WordPress, but not to some skanky stable version, heavens no! Instead, I decided to be adventurous and follow the SVN trunk (for you non-techies, the development version, straight from WordPress to me).

And of course, being the dev version, it FUCKED SHIT UP. If you see the layout between now and probably sometime tomorrow when I fix shit, this is not how I want my blog to look, goddammit. If I wanted to change how my blog looks, I’d change the fucking theme! Why do I suddenly have a list of categories and archives on the right side? I don’t want that. Where is my blogroll? And what happened to my meta links. (It’s a good thing I have a separate login button in my theme’s header, else I might [*gasp*] have to type out the admin URL manually! *shudders*)

To be fair, of course, the WordPress doodz do give you a bit of warning that that SVN trunk is probably going to be bork. Ah, the grief of running on the bleeding edge!

UPDATE: It appears I owe a bit of an apology to the WP devs for this post. Seems the only thing that went “wrong” with the update was that somewhere between WP v2.7 and v2.9-rare (I’ll interject here that the WordPress dev versions have hilarious version names), they switched to a much simpler sidebar configuration where you drag and drop (or, if this happened during or prior to 2.7, I guess I never changed the default) “widgets”. Since I didn’t have a widget configuration, it just assumed some defaults. So there you have it, folks! Give these fine people a round of applause for actually making shit easier! *claps*

Liek whoa! Two posts in one day!

, in case you didn’t know, is a very sweet markup language for making professional-looking documents and is used pretty heavily in the Maths and Sciences, because it has wicked formula support. If you’ve seen math formulas on Wikipedia, then those were created with LaTeX. I’ve recently discovered that there’s a pretty sweet WordPress plugin, Easy LaTeX that allows you to embed formulas on your blag.

Though, I probably won’t use it very often (read: possibly never again after this post), I thought that I’d at least show it off once. I might even update my infamous “Derivatives Made Easy” (the #1 result on google for that phrase… I still get a lot of hits to it) post with nice-looking formulas instead of the paint-drawn ones I have now.

So, here’s some of the neat-looking stuff you can make with LaTeX:

Check it out bitches. New theme! Just need to fix some of the little things, and it’ll be sweet! But unfortunately, it’s 2AM, and I’m tired. In the morning (or afternoon <_<) the work shall be done!

I'm trying to pick up some PHP skillz, too, lately, so we'll see how that goes.

As for the what I've been doing, I've been on Spring Break for the last week (didn't go anywhere :[ ), but I have watched a new movie every day so far. I also started work on an MyDB Movie List. Got all the ones I could think of off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll get more.

I realize I haven’t been making as many posts recently, due to being busy with school and all, but I have an idea for some (possibly weekly) posts to keep the masses sated. Maybe more details on that in the future. I might also have another guest entry coming up soonish, so be on the lookout for that.

If you tried to visit my lovely site yesterday, you saw that it managed to expire. Apparently, the economic crisis is so bad that domain registrars can’t even send out an email reminder to their customers.

The problem has been solved, though, thanks to the quick action on the part of my webhost.

You may now continue to enjoy the greatness.

Hey guys! As the title would indicate, I’m not yet dead. The past few days have been simultaneously very exciting and very boring for me — starting with last weekend, the Beale Street Music Fest. I’ve watched two movies and been over to one of my friend’s houses everyday over the past four days. I’ve been job hunting (oh, the Joys of Summer), reformatting my laptop and re-installing Windows XP, and all sorts of other goodies.

So, you may be wondering, “What the hell is wrong with this guy?” How can he be bored after doing all of that? Well, besides those things, my life has been incredibly boring at home — internets = dialup, no Xbox 360 [It caught the RRoD bug =( ], and parents being mildly annoying. Just a day in the life, I guess.

But that also means I have quite a bit to write about, so be on the lookout for at least three more articles from me over the next day or so, and possibly even a guest blogger on the horizon. So, keep an eye peeled. ;)

Yes, very yes.

I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes or so importing all the old entries I made from various old blogs I kept (and by various, I mean my old Wordpress.com blog and my Xanga). It was really rather easy once I got everything working, and now I have all my internet writings compacted into one place.

If you wanna go back and see some of the entries I made in my long-forgotten past (actually, about two years ago), you can go here for the Wordpress stuff and here for the Xanga entries.

I’ll forewarn you, though, especially if you’re wanting to look at the Xanga stuff: that’s some of the longest content I’ve ever put finger to keyboard for. It also means that my XHTML compliancy on those pages are shitty (Xanga’s “editor” makes it look soooo bad).

As I write this blog post, I am in the midst of Microsoft’s newest operating system endeavor know to some as “Longhorn” and to considerably more as “Vista.” I’m sure there are mixed feelings among my readers out there. Some are probably like, “OMG, dued! L13k t3h pwnsauce!” Others will probably be like, “You traitor ;)” and yet others (probably a considerable mainstream of those interested in the topic) will be like, “What’s it like? Is it better than XP?” The latter of the questions will be what I focus on in this post.

So. First of all, I’ll have to say that although I’ve had it for roughly two weeks now, I really haven’t been able to sit down with it yet, and get into the “nitty-gritty” of the OS. I usually like to do that when I get something new, whether it be Windows or Linux-based. So although I have had the time to mess around with it, I haven’t yet had the time to “look under the hood” so to speak.

Now, the first thing that I noticed when I installed it was that it didn’t take as long (or seem to take as long) as a comparable XP install.

So, when I finally got into Vista itself, I was mildly surprised that nearly all my drivers were installed. When I installed XP, I had to install at least six or seven drivers to get my computer fully operational. Not to say that there weren’t problems with the drivers. First of all, my video card on my laptop sucks. Balls. It’s an ATI 9000 IGP, which means it’s an ATI 9000 card (already quited agèd) that shares the main system memory for the video memory as well. So, although I upgraded my laptop memory to 1.25GB, 128 of it is still dedicated to video. Anyway, for the IGP series, ATI doesn’t release a driver themselves. You have to depend on the system manufacturer to release a video driver tailored to their integrated chipset. Suffice it to say, Toshiba has yet to release a driver for my video card for Vista. I’m not saying that Toshiba is a bad company (in fact, I love my laptop), and I doubt Vista was recommended to be run on this model, but it would be nice if there was a driver for Vista. But I digress. After much fussing and manual driver installation, I finally got the XP driver to work under Vista.

So then, after I got the video to work, I tried to install Alcohol 120%. It was quite an old version, and I didn’t even think about checking to see if the version I had was compatible with Vista. It wasn’t. So, as soon as it tried to install the virtual CD drive drivers, Vista would instantly bluescreen. Not a pretty site after you just spent about two hours installing Vista and fussing with the graphics driver to try and get it installed. I tired to restart, it still tried to install the driver. I tried safe mode, it still continued to want to install the driver. Luckily, the Vista boot DVD includes some really good recovery tool, and System Recovery is quite the lifesaver.

After all the crap with the drivers, I haven’t had too much trouble. All the applications I use on a regular basis (Firefox, Windows Live Messenger, Xchat, Google Talk, and Office to name those that come to the top of my head) all work perfectly. The only application problem I’ve had (besides Alcohol) is that Komodo (a programming IDE) doesn’t seem to want to find the respective programming interpreters (PERL, PHP, and Python) and didn’t want to debug. So, it was pretty much rendered useless. ActiveState does have a new version out, and I haven’t been able to try it yet to see if it works better with Vista or not, though. I’ll get around to trying that out, and give you an update sometime (probably attached to some other post in the future).

Other than a few mishaps along the way, my transition to Vista was pretty smooth. Now, for some of the UI/way of thinking changes that have been made that I don’t quite like. For one, the User Account Protection. I can’t express in mere text how much I loathe this piece of shit. When you perform an action that requires administrative permissions (read: just about every fucking thing you do while running Windows), you have to wait for an annoying popup to come up, hit “Continue” to give the program/action the permission to perform this act, and possibly rinse and repeat. Sure, it might save grandma from fucking something up majorly, but if you get bugged by a little prompt asking the equivalent of “Are you sure you want to do this?” every time you have move a file or install a program, it gets rather annoying rather quick. Suffice it to say that I turned it off the first day of using Vista. Also, the networking system is a bit weird. Wireless and LAN networking isn’t too bad, I suppose (unless you want to make some “advanced changes” like assigning static IP addresses), but if (God have pity on your soul) you have to set up a dial-up connection and need to change a setting, have fun. I think you have to go through about 3 (very well hidden) dialog boxes just to get to the dialup configuration box you could get to in XP by right clicking the connection and clicking properties.

Another caveat (that I was extremely pissed at) was that because my graphics card sucks so much, I can’t use Aero (the fancy-effect Windows theme). And I can’t figure out how to change this color scheme from this gay almost-baby-blue.

Overall, I’d say Vista is a pretty good operating system. Good enough to upgrade from XP right now? Not likely, but if you’re getting a new computer, and it comes with Vista, then by all means, it’s a good OS to have. Wait for about the first Service Pack (apparently, it’s due for a release later this year already) to upgrade from XP if you’re not getting a new computer would be my advice. If you get it with a new computer, for free (like I did), or you just have some money burning a hole in your wallet (though if that’s the case, you can certainly send some of that moolah to me… just arrange it through the contact form on my user page :P), then go ahead and get Vista. It’s pretty good.

First, I’d like to apologize for the semi-lack of postage for the past few days. First, I’ve been amazingly busy with school on one hand (I had three tests earlier this week), computer stuff (I installed Vista on my laptop [that’s fodder for another entry, however], finished [sorta] Gentoo on my desktop, and helped a friend set up a website [which is still under development, so I can’t give out a link just yet]), and other random stuff that I’ve forgotten about. So, here’s an update!

Yes, last night it snowed, so today school was let out. (It wasn’t much snow, but in Arkansas, just about any snow whatsoever is enough snow to let school out.) So, today was a fun day.

I slept in fairly late (about noon), at which time one of my friends came to the door, and asked me if I’d like to go with him to lunch, to which I agreed. After that, I went up to the second floor of the dorm and played on the LAN with some people in Halo 2. That’s always some fun shit.

Then me, my roommate, and some friends from the second floor went to Wal-Mart, ate at Long John Silver’s, and then went to Hastings. At Wal-Mart, we bought so much random shit that you wouldn’t believe (the 88 cent clearance bin in the toy section = win). Long John Silver’s chicken is pretty awesome, and one of the guys from upstairs bought some Hi-Def cables for his PS3 (yes, he is one of those kind of people ;P ).

The we came back and played even more Halo on the LAN, and it was a blast.

Now, I’m back in the room, writing this blog post when I should so totally be writing this homework assignment for KPED (a class that is like PE and Health combined into one) that’s due tomorrow (based on current weather patterns and the conditions of the road, it’s almost guaranteed that class will be held tomorrow) that is completely stupid. Oh well, it’s only midnight. Procrastination for the win.