I finally got around to upgrading to the latest version of WordPress (2.3.1) from 2.0.6.  It was definitely a long overdue upgrade and I see great improvements to the administrative UI and also found a few useful plugins.  I also changed the wordpress theme to this simple design that I found by googling from themes; it is named Black & White and you can download it directly from Blog Oh! Blog.

Thankfully, this was/is not an issue for school work and work work.  Things where the responsibility of the work is not voluntary (technically assigned to me) or have a hard due date – I put a lot of effort into finishing it.  On the other hand, if the project was my idea; therefore, do not have anyone pushing me to do the work or I know there is no real date, it will be a long time before I finish.

I have found remnants of one of my projects that I have started to think about ten months ago.  It's about 15% completed and found myself interested in it.  Chances are, I will get bored of this in a few months.  If so, I am going to try to continue on with other projects in a round-robin fashion.  Theoretically, this means that at the end of this process (if there is light at the end of the tunnel of my ambition), I will end up with five different completed and ready-to-launch projects.

Anyway, if anyone else finds that you have similar issues, I am very open to suggestions.  Thanks. 

Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It…
Date: 2005-04-03, 9:30PM PDT

In the wide world of dating, there are many options. Do you go for the flashy guy with the smooth smile, or the dude in the corner typing away on his laptop? The following are reasons why I think my fellow females should pay more attention to the quiet geeks and nerds, and less attention to the flashy boys.

1. While geeks and nerds may be awkward, they’re well-meaning 9 out of 10 times. That smooth dude with the sly grin and the spider hands? Wonder what HIS intentions are… plus, I’ve never had a geek guy not call me when he said he would. Score major points THERE.

 

2. They’re useful. In this tech-savvy world, it’s great to have a b/f who can make your laptop, desktop, and just about anything else that plugs into a wall behave itself.

 

3. They’re more romantic than they’re given credit for. Ok true, their idea of romance might be to make up a spiffy web-page with all the reasons why they love you, with links to pics of you and sonnets and such… but hey. It lasts longer than flowers, plus you can show your friends.

 

4. Due to their neglected status, there are plenty to choose from. You like ‘em tall and slender? There are plenty of geeks/nerds who are. You like ‘em smaller with more meat on their bones? Got that too.

 

5. They’ve got brains. Come on now, how can intelligence be a bad thing?

 

6. Most are quite good at remembering dates. Like birthdates and such, especially if they know it’ll make you happy. Due again to their neglected status, they’re more attentive than guys who “have more options”. Plus, with all that down time without a steady girlfriend, they’ll likely have mental lists of all the things they’d love to do once they GOT a girlfriend.

 

7. Sex. Yep. Sex. I’m not really familiar with this myself, but I’ve friends who’ve been intimate with geek guys and it’s raves all around. They say a virgin wrote the Kama Sutra… all that time thinking about sex, imagining sex, dreaming about sex, (they are male after all) coupled with a desire to make you happy? Use your imagination.

 

8. They’re relatively low-maintenance. Most can be fueled on pizza, Twinkies and Mt Dew. No complicated dinners needed here, so if you’re not the best cook, eh. Can you order a pizza?

 

9. Most frequent bars as often as slugs frequent salt mines. You won’t have to worry much about your geek guy getting his “groove” on with club hotties because, frankly, he’ll be too busy rooting around under his computer wondering where that spare cable went. You won’t have to worry about him flirting with other women because, 9 out of 10 times, he’ll zip right by them in a perfect b-line towards the nearest electronics store. I’ve seen this happen.
   • Me: “Eww. Victoria Secret’s Models… They’re so skinny. How is that feminine? You can see her ribs!”
   • Geek Guy: “ooooooo…”
   • Me: “Hey!” *notices he is staring lustfully towards the computer store*
   • Geek Guy: “What?”
   • Me: “Never mind…”

 

10. Although he may not want to go to every outing with you, you can arrange swaps, as in, you’ll go to his Gamer Con dressed as an elf princess if he’ll take you to the ballet. Plus, if he doesn’t want to go someplace with you, you won’t have to worry much about what he’s up to. You’ll probably come home to find him asleep on his keyboard in a sea of Mt. Dew cans with code blinking from the screen. It’s ok. He’s used to this. Just toss a blanket over him and turn out the light.

 

11. His friends aren’t jerks. I can’t stress this enough. You’ll more likely get “Omg! A GIRL!! Can I see?!” than “Hey hot stuff back that ass up here and let me get some grub on…” They’re awkward geeks too and will, 9 times out of 10, treat you with the utmost respect and, more than likely, a note of awe. A cute girl picked one of their clan to date? It could happen to them! Hope! Drag some of your single girlfriends over, open up a pack of Mt. Dew, crack open the DnD set and get working. Nothing impresses geek guys more than a girl who can hack-n-slash (well ok maybe if she can code… a geek can dream).

 

12. They’re rarely if ever possessive. They trust you, so you can be yourself around them. You like to walk around the house in a ratty t-shirt for comfort? He won’t care. He does too! They won’t get pissy if you don’t wear make-up or don’t want to bother primping your hair. If you gain a few pounds, they won’t try their best to make you feel like crap.

 

13. They’re usually very well educated. Physics majors and the like. See #5. You won’t have to listen to him blathering on about his car (ok maybe a little), he’ll have loads of other interesting things to talk about. Politics, world events, how much the chicken burgers down at the local place rock, so long as you douse them in hot sauce…

 

14. You’ll almost never have to hear, “Yaw dawg whazzap!!” plop out of their mouths. Unless it’s in jest. They spell properly, use correct punctuation, and are able to tell the difference between the toilet and the floor. They almost never get “wasted”, so you won’t have to worry about coming home to find him and his friends passed out on the floor amidst a pile of beer bottles. Mt. Dew cans, perhaps…

 

15. And the final reason why geeks and nerds make great boyfriends: They actually give a damn about you. Not how you look (though that’s a plus), not how skinny you are, not how much make-up you primp yourself up with, but they like you for you. That kind of thing lasts longer than “DaMN baby you got a fine ass!!!” Believe me.

Haha, wow – how dorky were we back in those days?  Anyway, I hope all of you are doing well.

• Canon EOS 30D Digital SLR Camera
• Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Lens (kit)
• Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM Lens
• Canon ES-71II Lens Hood
• Sandisk 2GB Ultra II CompactFlash Card
• Giotto Rocket Blower
• Lowepro Slingshot 200 AW Bag
• Book: Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson
• Book: The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby
• DVD: The Rock (it was filler, saved me money).

As you may be able to tell, this was a serious investment for me. It definitely wasn't me being impulsive – it was about me finally having the time, money, and the need to explore a hobby that I've wanted to develop for a very long time. It would have been impulsive if I bought the Canon 5D (ok, I admit considering it for about half a day but I came to my senses ).

It's going to take me some time to get to know my new equipment, especially since I usually don't have much time during the weekdays. However, it will be difficult for this camera to be not in my hands when I am not at work. I will be honest here and say you won't see very good photos from me any time soon but I will try my best to capture captivating light through the eyes of my new camera.

Bad news is… I got a lot of rebate forms to fill out. Oh darn, I'll live.

Purchases aside, I've been looking at the weather forecast for this weekend and it looks like there will be precipitation in the area Saturday but sunny on Sunday. Either way, I hope the weather will allow me to go out and shoot this weekend. I am thinking about shooting at one or more of these locations: a park, uptown, and where I work.

Speaking of which… I'll need to revamp my site (preferably redo and design everything from scratch) to make room for the gigs of photos that will be posted by yours truly in the near future.

The project I am currently working on is not yet public. I plan on pitching ideas to a buddy of mine as soon as the generalities are set so I can see if he thinks this is worth risking although the only thing we would be risking is our time. I trust his judgement and also need someone to manage it on their own as soon as I start my full-time job since my priorities would change to focus on the new job.

It will be difficult to make this venture worthwhile in the beginning; however, it is highly lucrative as soon as it picks up speed. Don’t worry. it is not a pyramid scheme, scam, get-rich-quick, nor instant-millionaire type of deal. It feels like I’ve been preparing, researching, and learning about this for about five years.

I am 95% set of making Gentoo my Linux distro of choice. The other 5% is a mixed evaluation of Debian in second and then Slackware being third in line.

Gentoo has by far amazed me beyond my wildest expectations and previous experience with trying out various Linux distros as a desktop replacement over the past few years. I have tried Redhat, Fedora, Debian, and FreeBSD in the past (some of them not successfully due to cumbersome incompatibilities). Gentoo, although it has the reputation of being a very frustrating operating system, only demanded a few hours of my time to get the basic system installed from stage3 (stage2 took way longer on my test P3 500MHz system so I didn’t even bother starting it from stage1). I’ll probably try bootstrapping when I’m ready to get Gentoo installed and hopefully, I’ll have plenty of time free to get everything compiled and troubleshoot anything that needs troubleshooting. Other than the time it takes to get Gentoo basic system, X, gdm, and fluxbox (a very simplistic and clean windows manager) installed, everything was extremely stable and customizable.

I also purchased a 2-port KVM which apparently has a high chance of successly functioning with my Logitech Cordless MX Duo Elite and is cross-compatible with Windows and Linux. So far, all I’ve been doing was running my secondary PC without a monitor and just either VNC (or remotely ssh) into it. This limited to the secondary’s function when the primary crashed so a KVM would make things much easier.

Anyway, I have been taking a much-needed break from everything back at home after the Summer semester was over. It was nice to just relax and not continuously worry about school for a while.

As geeky as this may sound, ever since back in the days when I was finally able to get onto the Internet with ease, it seemed like a whole new world had opened up for me. I had access to so many resources that I could use to learn about what interested me. For example, I remember when I first found Geocities. I spent an entire day learning HTML by example and even trial and error (upload and see). The work-in-progress product definitely looked like a child scribbling some gibberish on the monitor but I found it amazing and absolutely awesome.

That was when it all started. I started to seek out resources I could use to learn what I thought was awesome at that time like Visual Basic programming. My first textbox, command button, and form that did absolutely nothing other than displaying “test” in the textbox when you clicked on the button was spectacular in my mind. All the programs I’ve made during those days were all so trivial but they were still fun and it probably kept me from doing foolish things with my time.

I’m so glad that I learned the ability to self-teach. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that I am more productive learning things on my own than having to go to class and listen and take notes during a lecture. It’s a bit weird when I say it like that but I’m confident that it is true. (But of course, having a professor to go to when you can’t figure something out is something outside of this context.)

… to be continued.

-su-2.05b# uptime
3:38PM up 216 days, 2:01, 1 user, load averages: 0.01, 0.05, 0.01

ALPHA Uptime

Am I going to celebrate if it reaches “up 356 days” ?

You betcha!

(An afterthought: I probably just jinxed it right there… but wanted to check up on this because apparently there was a power outtage at the DC but from what I can see, power was still on in the area where this server was yet the network was down.)

Only this time, I come to realize that Windows wasn’t booting up. Right after you see the Windows XP loader screen, it went blank and showed a BSOD:

Stop c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The session manager initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000017 (0×00000000, 0×0000000) The system has been shut down.

Now, normally, I would have thought okay… Windows got screwed up somewhere. To my horror, right as the BSOD showed on the monitor… I heard a sickening noise as there was a click, sound of lowering RPM, and nothing else. At first, I thought it was my 250GB slave drive that had just died on me. If this was the case, better than nothing as it had been less than a couple of months since I bought it and it only had useless data on it.

I disconnect the power cable to it and booted my computer up thinking it would boot up without a problem. Except… same issue. This is where the idea struck me… I could have lost everything on my primary drive which I was lazy to backup lately. So I sorta panic in my mind and started thinking about what kind of data I would lose if this primary drive died. Nothing that would kill me but certainly all my email correspondences, school work, programs etc… (fortunately for me, there was a paper that I was working on last night but it was due today so I already turned it in).

Anyway, I started installing XP on a laptop Simon gave me as he had no use for it. I wanted to see what that error meant and if there was any way to fix it. During the XP install, I decided to take it out and put it as a slave to my sister’s old computer I’ve brought just for the heck of it. The thing never booted for some reason unknown to me not even to safe mode.

Then, I decided to try safe mode on my computer to see if there was anything different; this resulted in the same issue. Then I tried the “Boot last good configuration” option … and amazingly enough, it booted up fine.

After a long sigh of relief, I backed up my documents and emails I would not be able to retrieve if my primary drive failed. That was a close call.

Searched the net but found out Microsoft only shows this case in NT system knowledgebase and does not mention XP at all so their “Solution” didn’t make much sense.

Moral of this incident: Backup your data at least once a month if not once a week. I thought this would be my 3rd drive failure (first two were both Western Digital drives which explains why I first suspected it was my secondary drive as it was WD).