I’ve had a thought today, that may or may not be continued and expanded upon in a later entry, but which I thought I’d put down briefly while it was still in my mind. In fact, the point is that the thought won’t leave my mind, and I’m hoping that putting it down in writing will be, in some small mmater, cathartic.
Anyway, sometimes, I get really fed up with the condition of the house I’m currently living in. I’m here at IU with two other guys, you see, and my tendencies towards cleanliness and organization, while not comparable whatsoever to either of my parents (whose hospital-influenced cleanliness borders on OCD), are still in the top 5% of all Y-chromosome-carrying graduate students. That said, I do let a lot go, and my room is not always a model of sanctity and germ-free living. Still, the entropic mess that is the community kitchen and bathroom drives me nuts.
I spend a good hour or two every day to keep things from falling apart, washing dishes, scrubbing counters, tossing out trash, making sure rags are clean, etc., and probably once or week or so, I have to buckle down and do a really good job of it. Otherwise, produce and trash would be left out, there would be no pots/pans for cooking dinner, etc. The house would reek.
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Today, I received my sleek new Dell Inspiron laptop. I’m quite excited about it overall. It’s got a sexy Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a pretty screen, all the quirky little things I need like S-Video outputs and firewire, extra USB ports for my massive number of peripherals, and I’m overall quite happy.
With the hardware. The software, however, is another story.
First, Windows Vista is probably one of the more horrific things I’ve had to deal with in recent memory. First, you do not make an operating system better/more efficient by asking me MORE questions when I do something. It reminds me of something I read that was sent from my employer recently: if there is some tedious task, find a way to automate it instead of doing it yourself. Why, then, must I confirm every single thing I do in Vista? Yes, I really want to uninstall AOL Internet Offer. Yes, I really do want to run that program…I clicked on it, didn’t I?
Gah. That takes me to another thing. Not only does it ask for my confirmation for every other action, it does the asking needlessly slowly. Microsoft, just so you know, I did not buy a faster system so you could use up more of my system resources. I was hoping maybe, oh, I don’t know, I could actually…go faster? Vista is one of the biggest system hogs ever, so even though my Dell is immensely faster than my 3 year old Thinkpad, dumb stuff like uninstalling the stupid pack-ins takes much longer than it should.
(Okay, just now, I clicked on a button to change Windows features, and it asked for my permission. Vista is like the dog that doesn’t recognize it’s own tail so he decides to chase it. In fact, the little swirling loader icon looks just like that.)
Anyway, I’m going to install Command&Conquer 3 tonight. It better run like a dream, or heads will roll.
Every once in a while, I feel the need to give the world an update on my life. For one thing, I know how hard it is for friends to stay in contact when they’re traveling all over the world to vastly different places, and although some people say that it’s disingenuous to just pick up with somebody as if you’ve been talking to them every day, I think it’s just fine, and even quite touching. (However, this is not the same as meeting somebody with whom you were never close friends, who then acts as if you were bosom buddies.)
Such genuine acts of friendship transport you back to an earlier time in your life. If you want to talk about time-traveling, you don’t have to watch Star Trek or Back to the Future, just send an e-mail or letter to a friend with whom you haven’t spoken for a few months or years. If the connection is rekindled, you will experience a powerful time-defying moment.
But anyway, all that really is just a preface to say, “it’s okay if my friends keep tabs on me in a medium such as a blog or facebook.” That anybody wants to keep up with me at all is a sweet gesture, and in the past week or two, friends from all about have come out of the woodwork (spurred on no doubt by summer’s approach) to ask me how I am doing and also to tell me about their own adventures. Those who want the juicy details can read on, and those who want even more can e-mail me anytime (dochuyen84@gmail.com).
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This past Saturday, my dad, grandpa, and I took a short trip up to Salem, Virginia, about 20 minutes or so from Blacksburg/Virginia Tech, to check out their 9th Annual Blue Ridge Kite Festival. Many V. Tech students and families were there as well, no doubt to get a few brief moments in the sun and forget the dark tragedy of this past week.
The place was bustling with energy and youth, and although the wind was neither strong nor consistent, a few good breezes lifted the dozens of kites up into the air in a gorgeous spectacle that made the two and a half hour drive completely worth it.
My dad’s reason for going was to take pictures, and I don’t really think that anything I could say we will quite as well as seeing the pictures themselves, so take a look see!
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| (Click the images for larger versions) |
Google occasionally gives random longtime users free invitations that they can give to their friends and family so that they too can have Gmail accounts. Well, earlier today, I looked at my mailbox and lo and behold, I had 50 invitations that I could give to anybody I wanted! Not wanting to waste any, I’m only going to give them out to folks who ask.
So, if you’d like a Gmail account (I think their space is now up to 2.8 gigs or something), send me an email at dochuyen@gmail.com and you’ll get an invitation!
Edit: Looks like they’ve got their servers upgraded enough to handle unlimited signups or something. So you don’t need to get invited anymore. Oh wells.
No, I’m not getting ready for Halloween a few months too early, nor am I being spiteful about the commercial morass that is the Valentine’s Day “holiday.” Instead, what you see to your right (in a Reuter’s photo) is a picture of a most extraordinary valentine, the oldest documented human embrace. You see, archaeologists dug up this loving pair near Mantua, Italy, and the Neolithic pair are purportedly 5000-6000 years old. I mean, if you thought your grandparents were lovey-dovey on their 50th anniversary, try a 5000th anniversary (I don’t suppose a diamond ring suffices…). That’s real love, folks. You can imagine them looking into one another’s eyes in their final moments, holding each other tight waiting for whatever horror it was that befell them.
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(The previously linked YouTube video no longer exists)
It’s so captivatingly haunting…
Goodnight.
My computer programming background has mostly been self-taught, with me learning from online references and experimenting until things worked. Because I learned on whatever system was available while growing up, my main development platforms were 1) MS-DOS/Windows machines and 2) TI graphing calculators (TI-85 and TI-89, mostly). It’s true. My first real PC apps were Pong in DOS and Tetris for Win3.1/95, assuming you don’t count Tic-Tac-Toe using QBasic. For some idea of the immensity of my dorkitude, these were all before or in the midsts of puberty…
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So I’ve officially entered the REAL blogosphere. It’s nice.
