When I haven't been otherwise occupied procrastinating, I've been quite busy for about a week now packing for college and making sure everything is ready. I'm about 80% done with the packing, excluding clothes appropriate for the current weather and things I use on a daily basis. I leave on Saturday morning.

The giant tear in my laptop bag is being ( Read more... )

In Cherrapunji, India, living bridges are made from the roots of the Ficus elastica tree.
( Selected images )

It just hit me that I only have about two weeks until I will be heading to college. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. A little anxious, a little excited, and a whole lot of something I don't really have a name for, I guess. Interesting.

It probably won't be all that much of an adjustment, since I took almost exclusively college courses ( Read more... )

My family recently ordered a new desktop for when I go off to college in about a month(!). It's a pretty nice one from System76. Quad core Intel processor, 4GB of ram, 500GB of hard drive space and one of the fastest video cards that's likely to do 3D acceleration with FOSS drivers any time soon. Also, Ubuntu 9.04 is pre-installed, so there is no ( Read more... )

Someone recently brought the fact that today is system administrator appreciation day.
http://www.sysadminday.com/index2009.html

I'm not sure anyone likely to read this is a sysadmin, but if you are, you get to feel appreciated.

Since so many of people on my friends list have been saying you wish more was being posted to LJ, here you go. I aim to please. Unfortunately, though, this one may be indecipherable to those without a decent knowledge of desktop PC hardware, or at least electronics in general. Sorry, but this is really all that is going on for me right now ( Read more... )

Today has been fairly relaxed but just full enough to be interesting. I slept in until noon, then worked on finishing up the setup for Galactica (the horrifically obsolete box I am using to control some X10 home automation gear), which had been giving me no end of trouble over the past few days. Today, though, I woke up to find a Debian base system ( Read more... )

Today I found out that not one of the three computers in my house that I don't actively administrate (as opposed to letting their owners handle the routine stuff and fixing problems that are brought to my attention) actually does what people want it to consistently. The netbook is horrifically slow (which is what generally happens when one runs ( Read more... )

I've decided to do a little microbiology experiment over the next few months. I'm going to try to isolate iron oxidizing chemolithotrophs from yellow-orange sediment, watter and biofilms at a spring outside of my hometown with watter with a very high iron content. Complicating matters are the facts that this will be my first time dabbling in ( Read more... )

I just thought I'd mention this for those not following this story. I don't understand what is going on as well as I'd like, but here's the story as I currently understand it. Basically, Ahmadinejad won their recent elections by a landslide but there is a widespread belief that he stole the election and many people, including Iran's election ( Read more... )