Sean Middleditch

I’m wracking my brain trying to find some decent chainmail.

I have an outstanding offer for a $100 chain shirt, zink-plated steel, that need’s a few repairs. However, for starts, I’m lazy and don’t really want a fixer-uper, because I can tell you right now it’ll take me 8 months to get to it at least. Second, I still have the bad lower back, so I’d rather avoid wearing a ton of heavy armor. Aluminum is a lot lighter than steel, so I’d like to go for aluminum. Finally, again because of the laziness, I’d like something low maintenance, so I’m kinda gearing towards a riveted shirt. Add to that the required specifications for gauge, diameter, sleeve length, shirt length, etc., I’m having a very hard time finding exactly what I want for a price I can stomach.

If, just if, I can get over my desire for riveted mail, I can get all my other requirements met for barely more than the $100 shirt I was offered.

I’m just waiting on some confirmations on the parameters I need for the mail to be KANAR legal, and then I’ll probably just spring for the butted (non-riveted) mail. Unless I happen to chance upon something riveted that meets my requirements. I’ve sent out a couple emails to some manufacturers of really cheap but quality mail, so maybe I’ll get a good offer.

My biggest fear really is that I won’t be allowed to go for aluminum, end up getting some steel mail, and find out the hard way that my back can’t handle that much weight for that long of a period time.

Given my lack of time lately, I’ve decided to unsubscribe from almost all of the mailing lists I usually read, including the GNOME, Free Desktop, Fedora, and GC lists. I also went ahead and unsubscribed from a few lists that seem to be dead or very low traffic.

That pretty much just leaves the lists for my projects and some non-computer hobby lists.

School will be the death of me, I swear.

At the very least, I’m quite unused to having this much homework. I haven’t had a single ounce of freetime in two weeks outside of the days I had pre-allocated to certain activities. This weekend is going to suck since it’s a KANAR event weekend, and I really don’t have the time to go all three days and go to practice and get the metric crap ton of homework and studying I have to do.

Never mind how I’m getting screwed on tuition since I can’t afford to go full time (since then I’d have no income) but I have to pay more in order to go part time. Wee-doggy, thank you UM, where’s that jar of vasoline at again?

Next semester is going to be even worse. Two math courses and I’ll probably be sitting in on one programming course (to learn the ways of UM grading and evaluation before going on to the more complex programming courses… many of which I truly feel are going to be beneath me, but the school board wants me to take just to make sure I didn’t miss somehow anything super vital in my many years of (quite successfully) programming professionally. ::sigh::

I’ve had some requests regarding D-VFS over the last two weeks. Sorry people, but I just don’t have time. Notice how AweMUD hasn’t been touched lately either, nor any other project I’ve gotten my hands in. I’ll also note that my workout schedule has been shot to hell, I barely get to touch any of my dear musical instruments, and my other hobbies have all pretty much stopped.

I really can’t wait for the day when my only real, hard obligations left are my 9-5 hours at the office. All the evenings and weekends to myself. Again. I miss those days.

Several friends of mine started using Hoary Hedgehog at the same time I did. One of them has ZERO Linux experience, and found it pleasant enough to use. The other had only slight Linux experience, and likewise found Ubuntu to be pretty nice.

Good job, Canonical. You’ve managed to take one of my least favorite distributions (and it was my least favorite because it was flaky, buggy, poorly maintained, and basically useless for doing real work without tons of manual spoon feeding) and make it into one of the more usable OSes around. Certainly not without its problems (as I’ve already gone over a few), but certainly above par for Linuxes.

I updated my machine to Breezy. I figured this is a temp installation until I get my SATA drive replaced, and all my important data is now backed up in several places, so what could it hurt?

The upgrade actually doesn’t seem to have changed a single thing that I can notice. I did try to install Beagle, but the package from Breezy just crashes.

I did find some more irritations with Ubuntu (and which stem from Debian, really). They are mainly due to the silly packaging. Debian has this idea that all packages should be split up - which I agree with, although I don’t think dpkg handles it very gracefully - so that you have packages like libmetacity0, and packages like mozilla are split into a bazillion sub-packages, but not in any way that’s useful to the user.

Does the user really care if libmetacity and metacty are split up? No, they don’t. If you have software that needs libmetacity, chances are you’re going to be using metacity itself. And if you’re not, the cost of having metacity proper installed is going to be negligable at most. There is absolutely no change in functionality or ANY visible behavior by having metacity and libmetacity being separate packages. It does nothing.

On the other hand, splitting up the Mozilla Browser and the Mozilla Composer has a very direct impact on the user. Composer is a whole separate (from the user’s perspective) application. It has its own menu entry. It has its own window when you start it. It’s separate. Yet, in Ubuntu, and most other Linuxes for that matter, it’s bundled in with the browser.

The misplaced effort and over-engineering (or lack of engineering, as the case may be) that results in policy and habit of splitting a small app like metacity up into several parts but which lets two distinct applications be bundled together is a little mind boggling.

Arch Linux and certain other distributions take an ‘Upstream’ approach. Mozilla is shipped as one package, so its built and installed as one package. While I dislike the results, I’ll be happy to admit that it’s a fine policy for a distribution and that it’s on the upstream project to split their source distribution up.

Debian, Ubuntu and other OSes where the distributors go through immeasurable effort coming up with fancy ways to package software have managed to do all the work of solving the technical problem of dealing with upstream projects that don’t split up their source, but completely fuck it up downstream - splitting up packages that have no good reason at all to be split up and not splitting up things that should be.

Granted, I’m also of the opinion that distributions shouldn’t be packaging 95% of the stuff that they do. There’s no reason that Ubuntu should have to package the ‘universe’ or even the ‘multiverse’. Upstream should be providing packages. And packages should work everywhere. The amount of duplicated effort, duplicated bugs, and the resulting quantity of wasted time is insane.

Hopefully that’ll be fixed, someday.

My bitching aside, I’m happy with Ubuntu. Still not entirely sold on it over Fedora, but I see no reason to switch off Ubuntu until I get my hard-drive fixed. Then I’ll have to decide. ~_^

Since my main hard-drive is toast and I don’t yet have a replacement, I decided to go ahead and install Ubuntu on a partition on my spare 40G hard-drive. (It’s telling that I consider a 40G hard-drive to be small and depreciated, isn’t it?)

First impressions weren’t great on this box. I was asked which resolution to run my monitor at - would have been ugly for someone who didn’t know what to run it at, especially on an LCD like this one.

Second problem was that my mouse did not work. Apparantly the USB controller is blacklisted, though I have no idea why. It’s always worked perfectly in Fedora and other distributions. After I figured out why the mouse wasn’t working, I plugged it into a different USB port on a different controller and now it works fine.

The not-actually-spatial Nautilus thing is irritating the crap out of me. Currently running in browser mode with the location bar turned off. I have no clue why Mark is being so obstinate about keeping the broken spatial Nautilus; it’s harder to navigate with than browser mode and it breaks the spatial mode something fierce.

Ubuntu suffers from the broken Kerberos support in gnome-vfs bug I fixed for Fedora. Probably won’t be fixed in Ubuntu until it’s fixed upstream in GNOME. Maybe that day will be soon. Probably won’t be. Even despite my having submitted a patch.

The fifth problem with Ubuntu is that the admin tools are very lacking compared to Fedora’s. Ubuntu is new so I forgive it this one. I’m glad they didn’t copy Red Hat’s tools because those things are lessons in UI gone wrong. At least they work, however. I’ve now manually gotten this machine configured for things like Kerberos authentication, which was simple once I figured out which packages I needed (and copied the config files from the old drive; these files thankfully weren’t touched by the massive sector death).

A sixth problem is how tall all the windows are by default, except the ones that actually need to be tall. Firefox first opened in this tall, narrow window that’s just… disturbing. Possibly just me not being used to it, and possibly it’s the Golden Ratio playing its psychological tricks. Some windows, like the sound configuration window for GNOME, opened in a size too short to be useful without resizing.

Oh, speaking of sound, problem seven is that Ubuntu enables the disgustingly awful GNOME event sounds. Ugh. It’s not even that the sounds themselves are bad, they’re actually what I’d consider broken; crackly.

All the other problems I’ve run into were things Fedora got wrong too, so I figure the cause is something upstream (like Totem being pretty bad for playing DVDs compared to Xine).

Ubuntu definitely does a lot of things RIGHT. Speed is one. Most of the nice things are really small - inconsequential when you look at them on their own, but they REALLY add up to something spectacular.

My only fear now is that the Debianism is going to bite Ubuntu in the ass. I think a lot of people now know me as the anti-Debian bigot, though, so I’ll avoid delving into that topic too deeply. ;-)

So the serial ATA drive I spent countless hours getting to work just died today. Lovely.

I’m fairly sure I can get it replaced under warranty, but between shipping it out, processing, and shipping it back, it’ll be close to two weeks before I can actually get that replacement drive.

I’m thinking about buying a second drive of the same model and putting it in as half of a mirrored RAID array, and when I get the other drive back plugging it in to the array. That way I’ll have something to use nowish plus I’ll be protected against future disk failures.

I really don’t have the money to be spending on this stuff, though.

So I’m fairly sure I’m completely failed my first quiz at UM. Not a good start. It’s a history class, and the quizzes cover the rote memorization parts of the class (where discussion and essays cover the more interesting aspects of history than simple dates/names), and I am _horrible_ at rote memorization. On the upside, now that I’m familiar with the style of quizzes the instructor gives, maybe I can prepare better for the next one.

I have a feeling I’m doing just as badly in my other class. Poem analysis. In my opinion poems are among the lowest form of literary expression - they’re people playing with words instead of trying to use the words effectively. Once the poetry section of the class is over I might do better. Let’s hope.

Yesterday was my orientation and class registration day at UofM, and today was the first day of classes. I’m now officially a student of the college of Language, Science, and the Arts.

It seemed a bit surreal, walking the streets of Ann Arbor with a backpack on, heading to class. I’ve spent more hours than I could count in Ann Arbor just hanging out with friends, shopping, dining, wasting time… all the while looking at all the school activity going on around me. Now I’m part of that school activity. I’ll be spending even more time in Ann Arbor every week now, but doing so as part of my academic life, and not part of my social life. The old, big buildings I used to look on at with mild curiosity are now old, big buildings that I will be spending countless hours inside studying, listening, and learning.

It’s just an odd feeling, one I don’t particularly like. I like the school so far (after my single class session I’ve had there) beyond any doubt. I just don’t like the feeling that I’ve somehow regressed. No longer am I going to be someone with time and money to spare flinging it around the city. Instead, I’m one of the students, walking the streets between classes with my backpack, browsing the book stores not for fun or interesting material but for class texts, dining there not because I feel like having a great meal at Zingerman’s but because the Subway in the Union is a convenient place to have lunch.

Guess I’ll just have to wait now until I’m an alumn. Which will be several years. After transferring from WCC, I’m around 12 credits short or so of being a junior. This short spring semester will over give me 5 credits, and going part-time in fall will only give me another 10 to 12, I think, so I’ll be a junior by the winter term. It’ll then be another 35 credits until I’m a senior, so that’s another year and a half or so until I’m a senior, and then it’ll be another year and a half or so before I can possibly meet the requirements for my degree.

My advisor, Michael, has been extremely helpful. Far better than the useless - nay, harmful - advising I got while at WCC. I have a firm grasp on the requirements for my degree, I have a semi-decent plan laid out, and things look good in general.

I’m still slightly saddened that my 75+ credits from WCC didn’t all transfer to UofM. Only 40 or so did. Barely half. I’d be almost a senior if they had all transfered. Of course, while I’d be close to a senior, the actual degree requirements for a CS degree wouldn’t have been close to being met, so the extra credits probably wouldn’t have helped me any.

I think what I’m least looking forward to are the math classes. Of all the classes I’d need to take, math will be the most difficult both in terms of pure work and complexity of comprehension. Namely, I need more calculus and statistical classes. Stats sounds fun, simply because I’ve never taken a stats before, but yet another calculus class doesn’t sound very entertaining, especially given I next to never even use the calculus I’ve already learned (and, thus, mostly forgotten… uck).

I also need to see about getting into the CS program. None of my CS credits from WCC directly transferred to UofM (I got credits, but they don’t count for pre-reqs) so I’ll need to talk to the CS director and see what can be done. I really don’t want to waste a ton of time and money taking classes that are well under my skill level just to get pre-reqs for the more useful classes.

The cool thing about the LSA degree is how the credits work. One fourth is general requirements. One fourth is the “distribution,” which are classes ensuring that I have a well-rounded education. The other two fourths are my concentration (major) classes and electives. However, if I focus my electives into a second concentration, I can earn two majors will relatively little extra effort. Granted, those elective courses will be more difficult courses than if I took more general electives. I’m still fairly sure that I want to go for the double major, in computer science and creative writing.

Oh, one thing I think is kinda cool - I’ll be learning Latin. Something I half-heartedly started doing in my spare time. I have taken only a single course in Spanish and remember not even a bit of it, so even though the Spanish class transfered to UofM, I’d still need to retake it and relearn all the stuff I’ve forgotten, and then I’d still have three more terms of it to take. I figured that it would be better to just pick a language I’d rather learn, like Latin or Japanese. Between the two, I went for Latin, simply because I think it looks more fun. Japanese probably would have been more useful to me, though.