Event Log
January 18th, 2006 @ 11:23 pm UTC by evanYeah, I’m boring and can’t come up with a better title.
So…now for some items that I think are worthy of note.
First, Apple released its MacBook Pro, an Intel-powered replacement for the Powerbook. As best as I can tell, it’s smaller, faster, gets better battery life, and is generally the most kick ass laptop I have ever seen. I can’t wait to get one. Cain and I agree that the only downside we see so far is that it doesn’t ship until February.
In preparation for getting a new laptop, moving off to college, and generally moving from one to multiple primary computers, I’ve been trying to work out some way to sync documents back and forth among my computers. Normally, this would be easy. There’s a utility called Unison that’s designed to do exactly what I want. However, there are problems. First of all, the directory structure of documents on a Mac is different from that on Windows is different from that on Linux (which doesn’t really have an organization standard). That can be dealt with easily enough, though. The second issue comes from non-standard characters in filenames. Thanks to having weird things like Les Misérables in my music collection, the Mac goes haywire and attempts to make multiple copies of the same directory. It’s all an issue of text encoding, which is really just a pain in the ass to have to deal with. Syncing things other than weird characters shouldn’t be an issue, though.
In Youth Symphony on Monday, we started the rehearsal with tuning, as always. We then proceeded to play the March Slav all the way through. This doesn’t sound like much, unless you know how Youth Symphony runs. We never play anything all the way through. Last semester, we hadn’t run through any of the pieces before the concert itself. Anyway, that just sort of surprised me.
Next, either Monday or Tuesday (don’t remember), I received my first pieces of college junk mail that was actually targeted at me. University of Pittsburgh sent me something about Jewish opportunities, while University of Mississippi sent something about becoming fluent in Mandarin. Actually, I’m not entirely sure the thing from Mississippi was supposed to be targeted, but it was still odd. Of course, I tossed them, like I do with all my college mail (I just like to read them first).
I’ve done some more development on the LiveJournal Crossposter. Now that people are starting to use it, the feature requests are really pouring in. I’ve done my best to accommodate the ones that I think make sense so far, although there’s still the major issue of the post headers that has to be dealt with. There are still some issues that have to be dealt with carefully, though. I don’t want to put too many options into it, because I started the project to escape the complexity of Live+Press. However, it’s not like people are making bad suggestions. Anyway, I’ll just keep trying to make everyone happy.
I’m slowly starting to work with Catherine to come up with a new design for this site. It’s kind of hard because I have no idea what I want. I’m much better at spotting what I don’t want.
Also, I talked to Mr. O’Neil (my NJCL mentor) today. It’s everyone’s fault, but we’ve been out of touch for the last month or so, but we’re going to talk tomorrow about the NJCL site and all that good stuff, so once again, I can deal with everything. The officers have also decided to overthrow Zach and establish a oligarchical dictatorship.
Now, this next bit is purely so I can write a post and check all of my categories. It just makes me feel special. Yesterday afternoon I checked with all of my colleges to see what they were still missing. It seems to be turning out surprisingly well. That being said, I still can’t confirm my status at Stanford or Caltech. MIT, Columbia, Worcester, and UTK still are missing items, although Columbia is still processing.
And finally, we had a snow day today. It was wonderful. Last night I gave up on any chances of us getting out, so I finished all my homework, leaving me with absolutely nothing to do. Of course, I still have some reading to do for English. And my math homework that’s due on Friday. And we were supposed to have an economics test today. But that’s OK. Today was a relaxing day.
Oh yes. And for those of you that aren’t familiar with the concept of a Nashville snow day, I invite you to enjoy my photo log of the event. Trust me – this is how all of our snow days are.
And now, I shall go do my math homework. Because in a sick way, I kind of want to at the moment.
Tags: college-admissions, high-school, jcl, news, site
Hehe. I’ll keep my thinking cap on for you and you let me know if you get any ideas. Helping clients figure out what they want is an integral part of being a designer. =) And bah! We had snow too – much more than you guys had – and a ton of black ice. (And actually, I think we’ve been having record highs all last week, but then boom! there goes the warmth.) But our superintendent is a moron and we haven’t had a snow day in two years. I think we’re due one, but such is living in freezing cold Ohio. x____x;;
Evan!
I didn’t know you had a blog until I was looking through the comments on MIT’s blogs.
BTW, I am defered too, and I have not had enough courage to send in any supplementary material yet. Good luck with the rest of the schools, I know you will get in somewhere you want to be at.
Leo
Scariest piece of college mail I’ve received to date: ROTC. Ew. It made me nervous and my mother and I had a race to throw it in the recycling bin.
What encoding does the filesystem have?
And what exactly are you talking about ‘structure’ in any of the three OS’s filesystems that you mention? Are you talking about things like where to put documents, where different types of files go?
On Windows, you have your home directory: \Documents and Settings\%username%. Incidentally, gaim points to this directory as ‘Home’. Then, you have My Documents where you put your “documents”, as well as Desktop, where you have the contents of your Desktop. Application Data, similar to the various hidden .%program name% folders in Linux, hold all of the program configuration and other ‘stuff’.
I’m sure you can probably set up Windows to point to a different home directory path; I may try to do this sometime in the future.
I actually prefer the structure (or lack of one) with Linux; you get your home directory and with GNOME, one folder called ‘Desktop’ for your desktop. Everything else, you create yourself. There aren’t any system-wide symlinks to ‘My Documents’ or anything like that. If you want something, you just type it in: ~/folder_name. I suppose this is just personal preference; I like using the command line interface a lot, and using shortcut keys. One of the things I don’t like about OS X is that I haven’t found a way to get the equivalent of the ‘Run’ command, nor are most programs launchable from the Terminal.