A brief rundown:

Thanksgiving was fun. I was very thankful for my two turkey dinners; having in-laws rocks.

I played the Wii.  It was great except for the two hours I spent at fishing in Twilight Princess. My brother's girlfriend came in and in like two wrist jerks caught eight fish.  This may be a slight exaggeration.

We all went and saw Stranger than Fiction, and it was excellent. I've heard good things about Casino Royale, but with how fast movies are coming out on DVD nowadays, I'm thinking of waiting just a bit. I don't know if any of you saw StF, but I've heard some people say--okay, critics--that the love story isn't all that believeable.  I'd just like to say that it is, for the reason that there are two basically nice people who have to be around each other even though they're at odds. Basically nice people can't overcome having to be socially nice to each other when they're forced to be around each other. Them falling in love is just an extension of that in my mind.  Plus, after the flours and the guitar, how could she not?

Aside: I need to listen to more of the Pretenders. And the Clash, of course. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the Wreckless Eric song in the movie wasn't just the perfectly executed crescendo of the whole piece.

Right now, though, I'm sick, of the highly annoying "just a little bit" variety. I wish I could just get sick and then get over it, but I gather that that's not how things work. Advil is my friend.

Also, I'm trying to figure out LaTeX because I want to produce an interlinear Beowulf, or at least an interlinear Minor Old English Poems. I'm just a fool.

Yep, internet's a-working.  Huzzahs all around!

Welp, I bought a wireless router and card today so maybe this afternoon I'll have internet at our house.  If so I'll post again, if not...  well, there's a major headache for you.

I think it'll work fine, but I hope I can share the connection from my Desktop PC to my Ubuntu laptop via a network cable.  Isn't it supposed to be wireless?  Sure, but a PC card is $40 and a laptop card is $40 so I decided to only spend half of what I could've spent.

As I've said before, I'm a total Linux newb.  So here I am, on my hobbyist Xubuntu w/ Gnome Compaq Presario 700...

I start wondering if my resolution is too small.  Wasn't it larger in Windows?  Hmm.

Two days later and I've done a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg like twenty times.  Most times it Breaks Things, but other times, it merely doesn't give me anything higher than 1024x768, which I've gotten used to.  Even though it's soooo cramped.

DATELINE: Tonight.  I reconfigure again, lying blatantly and using the vesa driver.  I tell it to use 1280x1024.  I load Gnome, and ALAS I cannot see the bottom/left of the screen, which ALSO means I can't access tools I need because I'm still not up on keyboard shortcuts.  I restart and try some stuff.  I can only get into a command line at root, under circumstances I cannot recount to you.  I think I pressed ESC at startup.  Anyway, I installed Lynx and used it for the first time in maybe 15 years.  I found what I needed on ubuntuforums.net and restarted.  Now I'm still in dinky little 1024x768, but at least now I can operate things.

I immediately remarked to my wife: "Linux is just the perfect operating system for computer hobbyists: You can get yourself into some serious trouble quite easily, but you can quite often dig yourself out of your hole, and it's incredibly satisfying."

That's about it.  We've been booking hostel reservations for our vacation to Europe next week.  Did I mention that?  Flying in to Barcelona 10/6, flying out of Rome 10/17.  Hooya.

I did some Beowulf-related tinkering this afternoon, and found out something crazy.  Tell me if this makes some sense or no sense:

(original) Beowulf.doc - 257k
(from that came) Beowulf.odf - 76k
(from that came) Beowulf.txt - 150k

(ODF = Open Document Format, championed by OpenOffice and all opensource-typa people)

So...  the OpenDocument file is almost half as small as the text file??  Some things I just don't get.  I thought TXT was as small as you could get, with zero extra encoding.

Sigh.

Okay, this week has been crazy. I gave a test yesterday and graded it today. I'm in a constant war between "I'm not a good teacher because every single one of you is messing up on these five things" and "But dagnabbit I told you directly what to do and not do." So you can see that my being right and their being dumb is winning out over my usual self-doubt. The thing is that there are actually some smart kids in the class who can actually write well, only they don't know exactly what to do. Oh well. More tests, more classes. Passing is passing.

And besides, maybe they underestimated me. Of course I've never DMed any of them or they'd know never to do that.

Also in the news: I looked over my reading list for my November 4th Comp Exam and Freaked the Crap Out!! Tonight at the library I started reading the Poetic Edda instead of working because, well, either I pass this thing or I fail.

I have been scanning slides, though, which is mind-numbingly boring. And it's on a Mac. Hey Mac people: here's a reason Windows is better. When Windows is terribly slow, I feel like it's something I can fix myself by shutting down some background programs, and then everything will speed up again. This feeling is corroborated by factual evidence. On a Mac, however, I just have to deal with it. There's no "conserve some system resources" option for me to enact, and so it runs slow all the time. For Macs, the solution seems to be "oh, that computer's too old."

My old 450 MhZ AMD (designed for Windows 98) ran Windows 2000 just fine (up until the 6-year-old hard drive crashed, and this iMac's clunking by on something much newer. I'm only running Photoshop! For crying out loud, aren't these computers optimized for that dang program? I never had this problem on my 450 with GIMP.

Also, according to Robbie, Tiger will destroy every file you have ever had. This may be hyperbole or my own simplification of a complicated issue, but I've never had that happen upgrading, from DOS to Windows, from Win95 to Win98, from Win98 to Win2000, from Win2000 to WinXP. Sure Macs are sexy, but I don't see how you people just put up with all that crap. Sorry, expensive crap. Honestly.