CheezyOranges

And they cause trouble like them too. Poor Sylvanis, our kitty, has *another* UTI. I would’ve waited until this afternoon to take her into the vet but there was blood, and I didn’t want her suffering any more than she needed to. So to the emergency vet we went. Far from an emergency, but I didn’t want her to pee all over the house or to be in pain. So, she’s on wet food until her medication is gone. Last night, after she got home from the Vet she was all lovey dovey and happy like nothing happened. Weird cat. I guess she’s on wet food for good now since she won’t drink her water.
Silly cat.

This article was written at a student at Loyola Marymount University in response to the Virginia Tech shootings. This is a similar article from our own UCF Future.
I see something wrong here. The article from the Loyola paper points to “electronica,” the continuing immersion of our society into electronic devices and pass-times, as the reason that the shooter was so deranged. UCF’s paper suggests that also. One thing that I don’t enjoy about the fallout from events like this is that personal responsibility goes out the window. Yes, more should have been done by others to get the kid the help he needed, and its probably our disconnected society that may have forestalled that. However, we shouldn’t completely forget about personal responsibility, either.
UCF’s article mentions how FSU has publicly announced its new and improved security committees, including a loudspeaker and 3 task-force committees. Yay. Loudspeakers don’t work, especially in bad weather. All you hear is “blah blah blah blah blah” more so if you’re right under the thing. And additional committees wouldn’t make response time faster. If anything, they’d just bog down the decision making process.
Personally, I think the VA tech administration did all that it could do. Who could’ve possibly guessed that a domestic incident would turn into 30 people dead? The fact that they did email everyone is astounding. Talk about a university up on the times. And honestly, what student is going to allow their university to send them text messages? If its anything like the emails I get on a daily basis from my university, it’d be ignored.
Then there’s the gun-control people, for and against. I’m of the belief that guns should be a little better controlled and regulated, but when a bad guy wants a gun, he’s going to be able to get it. Yeah, the store that sold that gun to the kid is probably going out of business now but that doesn’t help the kids who got shot, does it? And in this case, we really need to examine our society. Lack of guns won’t do anything in a society that is violent, arrogant, and selfish. People will find other tools to murder each other with.
The violence and nastiness permiating our society does come, in part, from media like video games and movies, but again – personal responsibility. Who lets the little kids SEE these movies and play these games? There are ratings on the things for a reason. When I had a job at Gamestop for a summer, more than once I would alert a parent to the rating of a game (say the parent is buying an M game for their 8 year old) and they’d shrug it off. These parents are a danger to their children, if only because they don’t care!
Before we go blaming the standard scape-goats, I think we all should take a look at the examples we’re giving our younger generations. Personal responsibility means keeping the kids from the violent games and movies until you know they’re ready for them, instead of blaming the media for the violence later. Sure, the violence will still be there, but it’s not really the problem is it?

I’m having a hell of a time to get Rails working properly.
Rails requires a database if you plan on doing any really interactive sites, so to kill all the birds with one stone, I installed WAMP, which is a fully integrated distribution of Apache, PHP, MySQL, and some administration tools. Its convenient if you need a quick testing server up and running and don’t want to waste time setting up a bunch of infrastructure.

So, installing the server and ruby is easy – they’re both oneclick installs. Its getting them to work *together* that’s the issue.
Apache doesn’t automatically understand Ruby, and Ruby doesn’t automatically want to use Apache, so there’s a bunch of config files and settings that need to be changed. Having done that, and getting to the happy “Now you’re on Rails!” welcome page (which means server<->Ruby communications are up and running) I try to build an application.

Now, I’m met with all sorts of error messages and missing plug in warnings. And this is the 3rd time I’ve completely un-installed and re-installed the setup. Just short of re-installing windows too, just to be sure. CRAZY!

Is this stupid language worth it? It doesn’t help I can’t find any good tutorials or resources either.

http://secure.lenos.com/lenos/adobe/cs3conference/home.htm

Adobe is holding 2 conferences, one in New York and one in LA, about their new product, Creative Suite 3. It looks very informative and exciting. My employers won’t pay for me to go, but I may ask for the time off and finance it myself. Especially if Greg ends up going as well.
I know its a big hype up for you to purchase their software, but it looks like they will be talking about innovative uses and methods at the conference as well. Plus, its a chance to get to go to LA, which I’ve been wanting to do just to say “hey, I’ve been there.”

Freelanceswitch.com had this article recently. Great for freelancers/contractors/web-workers and students. Many of the online note and to-do list applications would be extremely beneficial to a student on a laptop who doesn’t want to have to wait for clunky programs to start up. A browser really is all you need to get around in the world now-adays.
101 Essential Freelancing Resources

Greg makes the most amazing meatloaf. Well, I can’t really say that as I’ve only ever tasted mine and his, and I only modeled mine after his recipe anyway. Its turkey meatloaf, and you add spices and ketchup and eggs and, really that’s about it. The problem here and now is the breadcrumbs. Tonight is the first night of Passover, and after sunset this evening I won’t be able to eat bread for 7 days. Soooo, I have a bunch of turkey burger mix sitting in my fridge with nothing to use it for. And then, I had an epiphany. One, I make the meatloaf before sunset and eat my portion before sunset. OR instead of breadcrumbs, I use matzo ball mix. The stuff already has amazingly yummy seasonings in it to begin with. Mix that with turkey and onions and WOW. I bet you it tastes great.
I’ll get back to this later with a recipe.. if its palatable.

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So its Thursday, the day I stay late at work and close up. I get the luxury of coming in late on Thursdays, which is nice. I always stop by Pita Pit and pick up lunch on my way into campus. And I normally have to consider where I park, because Thursdays were the nights I’d give Jason a ride back to Pegasus Landing. But, its been a week since his funeral, and the Faculty Center is still sort of reeling from the whole thing. Jason’s computer is back from the shop and we’re going to have to hire someone to take his place. We haven’t done any public memorial about him, but our 10th anniversary is coming up and we’ll probably do something for that. After all, he’s the second person (I think) to have passed away who worked here. Its still just a stunner. I keep thinking, maybe this is all a bad dream and I’ll go to work and he’ll still be here. But I know it isn’t. He was a really good friend to a lot of people, and we miss him a lot.

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About 6 months ago, I installed Ruby on Rails on one of our web servers at work. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the proper time or resources to get to know the development platform very well, and so the server fell by the wayside. I found out yesterday that it had been deleted from our virtual server repository. So it got me to thinking again on trying to learn how to use Ruby at work.
Only problem is that work won’t see it as an asset because they’ve been through the ‘application built in a language only one tech knows who then goes somewhere else and can’t maintain said application’ thing. We have an inventory system which is in need of updates and its written in C#. No one here knows anything about that language, so the system sits and breaks and we can do nothing to fix it but start from scratch.
I’d like to learn it if only for the joy of knowing another language (plus it may help me get a job someday) and it looks really cool. Especially when used in tandem with AJAX things. That looks like a lot of fun, and it looks like it could take some of my web designs from functional to really useful. Isn’t that what every web developer wants for their sites?

I found out this morning that Jason is dead. He died on Friday morning, before I even had the chance to say his name for Misheberach at services on Friday night. I’m just.. I don’t even know how to deal with this.
I’ve never faced death like this. He was my friend. He was my “closing buddy” as he put it when we worked together. He was always so kind, and so happy. He didn’t deserve to die. He was too young.

So, I installed Linux on my Dell Inspiron 9100.

Firstly, I have to say its one of the easiest installs I’ve ever sat through. I installed Ubuntu from their liveCD, which was really convenient because you can play with the OS while its installing. Before I took the plunge, I read up on problems I could expect with my computer.

First and foremost, this article has helped me greatly, as have the Ubuntu forums. Pretty much everything the guy in the article went through with his Inspiron, I am experiencing. Unfortunately for me, some of the assistance links in his article are outdated, so I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far. Because, so far, this computer has been a beast to get working.

That being said, I *want* to have linux working. This is one of the only operating systems I’ve really never dealt with in any way. My computer not working is just one way for me to further my knowledge of how this weird Linux thing works. I’ve had to delve into the terminal and do all sorts of commands that I don’t understand. Of course, in most of these instances, I just copy the code I’m given verbatim and it seems to work, but yeah; I’m learning slowly. (Note: the links below worked on my Dell Inspiron 9100 with an install of Ubuntu Edgy 6.10)

The OS installed with only one hitch – after installing, it was supposed to restart itself. The computer hung, so I restarted manually and the computer booted up fine. So, awesome, I thought. I have Linux! Yay! But no, the first problem quickly presented itself. Like the article I was guiding from, my wireless wasn’t working at all. Turns out, its a problem with the card and the drivers. After trying numerous methods to get it working, all of which I found were outdated, I stumbled upon the method here, and it worked! Apparently, the problem is so widespread that a tool has been specifically written to *make these cards work with Linux*. But every time I restarted my computer I had to re-initialize the drivers. This is apparently because of some weird bug on computers that have more than 1GB of memory. Crazy. That wouldn’t do.
I reinstalled the OS from scratch (much easier than windows!) and started fresh from the steps I knew worked, and viola, wireless and WPA.

The next hurdle is getting the sound card to work. I’ll write about that once I’ve experienced it