The hardest part about writing down what I’m thinking is coming up with a title. I’m pretty sure WordPress requires a post title before publishing. This brings me back to the days of designing crazy layouts on pitas. I always just used the date for my post titles then. But anyway – avast ye, make way for a boring post.

Right now, I’m not sure if I’m in a good patch in my life, or not. I’ve probably thought more about myself and the world in general in the past 4 months than I have in my entire life. I’ve been slowly trying to teach myself how to deal with situations that I have little to no control over, and it is pretty difficult. I remember back when I was younger, I cared so much what people thought about me and I really wanted to be recognized for something – anything. Now, I don’t even care, but my life at this point does feel like a waiting room. I have, hopefully, about a year and a half left of school. The idea of not finding a job right after school terrifies me because I want to be stable. I don’t want to end up living with one of my parents and working a dead end job like everyone else I know. I want to be able to live the life I’ve always wanted to since I was young. Not finding a job is a very real possibility, but I’m trying my best so that this doesn’t happen. One of the qualities that I like about myself is that I’m extremely independent; it’s done more good than harm, for the most part, so I don’t see it as a bad thing anymore. I’ve recognized that I’ve lived about a quarter of my life (or so I hope) and I really want to do as much as I can with the amount of time I have. I think this idea is due in part on why I’ve wanted to take so many risks over the past few months. I don’t think I’ve made enough mistakes in my life and the ones that I have, I’ve learned from greatly.

I am pretty excited about Moogfest, though. The lineup hasn’t been fully announced yet, but I really hope a lot of good artists will be there – ones I actually listen to. I also hope that tickets aren’t expensive; I’m sure a lot of free shit will be given out and I love free shit. I’m going to see the Crystal Method live next weekend and I’ve not listened to them since I was in middle school. Their past couple of albums have just not been that good, but from what I hear, their shows these days are amazing so I’m really looking forward to going.

I’m also going to buy myself an iMac.

Chillax. I’ll still use my ThinkPad, but things have gotten to a point where using Linux has not grown past anything but a great OS for a server, and if I dare say, a novelty on the desktop (or laptop in this case). Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux to death. I’ve been using it since 2001. I started out with RedHat and moved from it to Mandrake, to Fedora, to Slackware, to Debian in 2006. I can build a custom kernel, patches or not, like something fierce. Frankly, I’m tired of how capricious it is. I’ve used a myriad of distros, and while some are better than others, they all essentially work the same. I’m tired of using VirtualBox to perform tasks in Windows that can easily be done in OS X that cannot be done in Linux. OpenOffice sucks and I have to use Microsoft Office. Gimp feels like a bucket of rusty nuts and bolts. There are no seriously good audio players – they’re all either too slow, terrible at managing playlists, ugly, or defective in some other way. I’m tired of using drivers that just cut the mustard. More is needed than just the minimum in functionality. There are other reasons as to why I no longer feel like dealing with Linux on a daily basis anymore, although they are trivial, but they’ve piled up over the years. I’ll still try to work with it on my server, but for now, I’m going to have to switch over to OS X come mid-August. Yeah, I know I’m a heretic. My 18 year old self would carve it into my arm.

I do start school again in 3 weeks. I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve been meaning to redesign the layout for this site, but I just haven’t had the time (or desire). I’ve been working quite a bit lately, so I’ve really not had much time to do anything. It’s been about a week and a half since I’ve had time to spend just checking SomethingAwful and my other slew of sites. I did go to Asheville yesterday and picked up some grape shisha from HookaH-HookaH, and I had a chance to try it out. It was better than I expected, although it looked pretty disgusting. I’ve never actually tried any that used honey instead of molasses, so it was pretty different. It certainly was easier to separate and there weren’t as many twigs as I usually find in Starbuzz flavors.

I finally bought a new server. Yes, Alice has been laid to rest and has been superseded by my new server, mogwai. Mogwai is an Acer Revo R1600 running Debian stable 64bit. I bit the bullet and built a kernel for it without CIFS support and I’m not even going to transfer files to it using SSH (I know, right?). Instead, I’ve found that NFS4 provides throughput speeds way faster than either of those two (why I even used CIFS before, I don’t know?), not to mention it no longer takes an hour to build a kernel.

This afternoon, I ordered a Bodum Santos.

I’m pretty excited because I’ve heard the coffee it makes is really good – not bitter at all, and there are no grounds left behind. Unfortunately, I’m just not manly enough to use it with a butane burner, BUT I’m going to be daring and bring a hot plate to school with me in the fall. If you look up a demo of one in action, you’ll be jealous. And you’ll want one. Amazon sells them for $50 and they retail at $120.

Also: of Montreal sounds like Phoenix. And I don’t have to work tomorrow. Sa-weet.

Something for a change, finally. I’ve been listening to Bibio, lately. It reminds me a bit of Boards of Canada, which is good. I’ve been trying to find some stickers for my laptop, namely GNOME, WordPress, Laughing Squid, and a few others. It’s kind of hard to find them. :(

Time for a story. Some time at the beginning of 2004, I received a box full of computer parts from a friend, including a case with a fitted motherboard. I built a server that I use to this day out of said parts. The highest capacity drives in there were a Western Digital 40GB and a Hitachi Deskstar 80GB. You read that right. A DeathstarDeskstar. I used it as the master drive (still do) and immediately noticed a clicking followed by a strange beep. I was still able to read/write to it (at normal times, too!) and ignored these strange sounds. Fast forward to now. I hadn’t heard about the woes of the Deskstar until this evening when I came across a YouTube video of a guy describing the “click of death.” In it, he demonstrated what it sounded like, beeps and all. So, sure enough, I’ve been using a bad drive for my backups for 6 years…and I don’t think I’m going to swap it anytime soon (I have no money, okay.). I have all of its data set to back up to that 40GB drive once a week. I’m sure I’ll wake up one morning to find that it’s completely dead, but until then… 0:D