comprak.net

I don’t think I studied for an exam – any exam – as hard as I studied for that exam. Lisa was a saint, by the way – she handled all the wakeups over the week that I broke myself studying. I went all out – ipad, laptop, headphones playing only brown noise from 8pm to 3am every night.

I’ve broken some sort of barrier, from being a student in a program to being a student of everything. I’ve started re-reading Rau’s pharmacology (though I surprisingly retained quite a bit of it) and started reading chapters in old textbooks that weren’t assigned.

Oh, and did you know that MIT offers their courses for free. As does Khan Academy?

I also want Nora and Isaac to see their daddy set a good example. They know I study and do homework and what not. I can’t expect them to work hard if I don’t work hard, right?

Before Leesie asks, I’m taking a break from my studying.

Generally, devices fall in and out of favor based on how ‘clutch’ the device is; as in, when I really need it, does it work? For example, the ipod touch fell into major disfavor when I needed it to do something (I don’t even remember what) and it just couldn’t keep up. It was banished to a drawer and then sold a month later. The new phone, on the other hand, has come through in the clutch repeatedly as of late.

So, as it applies to this redhat installation: XP on this laptop was not cutting it. It was a hindrance to use and I basically started doing school work in the basement, which sucks since it’s freezing cold down there. So, in a fit of despair I did the previously mentioned reformat.

And you know what? It’s been fantastic. I’ve been impressed. I have not missed a beat – I have my dropbox sync, I have my teamviewer VNC, I have my files… AND, I’m able to finally copy large files from the ipad (whereas 1GB files bombed out during transfer in Windows).

I’m surprised, is all. I’ve been on the laptop near constantly since I started studying for this exam, and I haven’t been annoyed by anything. Usually I hit a frenzied wall but the ability to change the number of workspaces on the fly and keyboard shortcuts have helped with that… especially since I’ve been staying up until 3AM for the last few nights.

On that note, the exam is for advanced PFTs (pulmonary function tests) and apparently for those who’ve taken it before it’s the single hardest test in the program. And that doesn’t make a lick of sense – taking this course doesn’t make me qualified to become a PFT tech. If I want to do that, I have to take this course again and take a separate exam.

I have no desire to fail (as the other students have done, apparently). But I’ve been burning the midnight oil in the process. But! after Tuesday, it’ll be clear sailing as I already took my final exam in my second course on Saturday.

Fingers crossed, back to work….

This post is damn near unreadable if you have no concept of linux, so as a break from studying I’m adding a readable section at the end.

YALP (yet another linux post): Fedora (Redhat) 16. RH was my very very first distro, I purchased the seven disc RH3(?) set sometime in the mid/late 90s from BJs. Not sure why they were carrying it, but it is what it is.

Part of me wonders why I didn’t experiment more with another distro like Mandriva, which was my distro of choice in college, but I think I’m stuck in the mindset that I’m using the older Vaio. This one is actually quite nimble, I could’ve played around with it more. Meh.

Anyway, I installed XP but in a hackish completely unsupported way (via USB stick) and it started acting funny, so I dumped it. I wanted an i686 compiled distro because… old mentality. I could’ve just gone straight ubuntu and it would’ve been fine, I think. Now, why did I even install XP? School said it was mandatory. Since then, I have yet to run into anything that remotely required windows (I’ve done most of the work on the ipad, honestly) so it was a convenient time to switch. Anyway…

That said, Fedora is fine. It’s Gnome3 I hate. What a horrible interface. It’s almost as bad as KDE4. I figured out Fedora’s package manager (yum), installed XFCE4 and it’s smooth sailing.

Seriously though, I can’t recommend any distro that uses that abomination of interface. It’s usable by people who are completely computer illiterate, which is great for them and would probably sell well if compared to Windows or Mac machines. It’s kind of like using a very big smartphone. But if you’re trying to get any semblance of work done, it’s a non starter. Now, when Lisa was using Ubuntu, it was still Gnome2. I think Windows 8 plans to use their smartphone/xbox360 interface.

Back to studying for this horrid final… /999

readable section

I reformatted my computer. I was using Windows XP before, but now I’m using some hipster version of Linux called Fedora. I picked it without trying anything else almost completely due to nostalgia, I guess.

I was running Windows for school, but school changed to the eLearning platform which is compatible with everything, including mobile phones. And, XP was always kindof broken to begin with (see above), so I wiped it.

Apparently since the last time I used linux, the new default layout (called Gnome, version 3 or Gnome3 for short) is pretty awful. This was very upsetting, but I reverted to a hipster desktop environment (DE) called XFCE (don’t know what it stands for, honestly) and now I feel much much better. Elated even.

Going back to DEs, Linux lets you separate the operation system from the desktop environment. Windows does not (you know what windows looks like). Mac OS X does not (you know what OS X looks like). Linux does, which means your desktop can crash completely but your system is still running. Technically you can recover from a crash at the command line (that black screen with text) and continue on your merry way if you know what you’re doing. If it crashes, that is.

This is why server machines and most of the internet is powered by linux. It has uptimes measured in years, not days or weeks.

One thing I know Lisa misses is that you don’t need to reboot linux very frequently. I know she went months before closing a browser window. It’s great. I missed it. And I’m actually kind of glad to use this hipster version of linux because it’s not nearly as obscure as the one I was using before (Arch). Running that was like a full time job. This is a fairly stable system.

And this is the 999th post.

Soon…

I could use one.