So, the coffee on CSU campus has always sucked. I generally steer clear of any coffeeshop that serves Allegro coffee, but for some reason, CSU Allegro is really… nutty.
When I was going to MHS, Gold Bar was really the perfect spot: good local coffee right between me and class. Now there’s nothing acceptable between me and school, so I’ve been going without (and avoiding the highly productive study sessions that coffeeshops yield for me).
But Rockwell Hall (the business college) just opened up its own coffee cart, which I’ve been saying they needed to do all semester.
And they don’t use the same old crap. It’s some local coffee brand. And it’s really good (or at least the first cup was).
This is the building where most of my classes will be.
This is the building where I work.
This is a very good thing.
[warning: meaningless nerdiness ahead. feel free to skip.]
I’ve been running Windows Vista again… the OS itself is stable, but right now the third-party drivers really suck. As in, I get the Blue Screen of Death on a wired ethernet connection, and if I want to use the wireless at CSU, I have to track down some beta software that works about 70% of the time. I got really frustrated with it again today, and booted back into Ubuntu Linux…
I swear. Ubuntu is like a breath of fresh air. It takes up a THIRD of the RAM that Vista does, boots twice as fast, and is way more stable. It helps that it’s fairly barebones, and you just add the components that you need. I guess computers are like cars: XP is the sedan that everyone drives- it works well for everyday tasks, breaks down once in a while, and is a good day-to-day vehicle. It’s not good for big demands, and forget cramming a lot of people in it.
Ubuntu is a Jeep. It’s light, versatile, and you can add or subtract parts to your fitting.
Vista is a blinged-out Escalade with chrome spinners. And horrible resource usage. And yes, it’s ridin’ dirty.
Sorry.
But seriously…. this thing has CRAZY resource usage. In Ubuntu today, I was able to convert a gigabyte of FLAC files to MP3. That’s a decode operation followed by an encode one. It only took 12 minutes.
And this is with really good SMP support built into the kernel, so it was chugging along, devoting the whole task to one core at 90% usage, while the other one happily processed my other tasks at the same time: playing MP3s, running about 4 tabs in Firefox, chatting in Gaim, and some more stuff, too. No noticeable speed impact whatsoever.
Oh, and did I mention that this whole time, I had over 60% of my RAM free? This thing is a beast when I get it away from Windows.
[/nerd rant]
I’m girl-crazy again. It sucks. I think I’d rather be single. Relationships get so lame when they get so crazy. Damn hormones.
I’ve listened to nothing but The Beatles for the last two days. It rocks. I have the complete collection now – every Beatles song officially released. In MP3 form, it weighs in at just under a gigabyte, so the money-wasting side of me is tempted to buy an iPod shuffle just for Beatles tunes.
(I won’t do that. I’m not that crazy.)
I’m realizing that in order of frequency, when it comes to Beatles songs, my favorites are most often written by George. Then Paul. I’m kind of wearing out on John- he gets annoying when he’s whiny (although there are many, many, many exceptions).
I really wish I could take a couple of weeks off and do nothing but drum on a good acoustic kit, as if it were practice for a profession. I desperately need people to jam with. Canned music is getting very, very old.
Good to know… For some odd reason everyone seems to like Ubuntu… WHAT’S WRONG WITH FEDORA???
Nothing at all. Linux is great because it offers choice in distros. Fedora works great, and I’ll bet that it’s the most widespread one in use professionally.
I like Ubuntu because it’s a Debian variant- there are a lot more packages available for it and they’re known for full support of their free version. Red Hat and Novell sponsor their projects so that they can have a “better” commercial version of the OS.
All in all, I will probably switch to SUSE. Configuring that thing is SOOOO easy and consistent.
Ahh… Well, after reading much, much more, it seems that Ubuntu is actually a better bet. Fedora has some package manager issues that I don’t want to deal with, and all the linux nerds here at ASU swear that SUSE is the devil (something about a pact with Microsoft has them all riled up…).
Forget reading. Live CDs are the way to try anything.
And while the Novell – M$ deal is bad, yes, SUSE is an open-source project that had nothing to do with the corporate deal. And it is a kick-ass OS.
Ubuntu is REALLY noob-friendly (meaning zeke-friendly). But with linux, it really doesn’t matter much what distro you use. That’s what makes it so great.