I just found out that APPARENTLY the universe and solar system don’t belong to anyone.

I call dibs on owning the Universe, the Solar system, and everything in it.

You all have 30 days to find a new universe to live in, I’m renovating this one.

I have noticed a disturbing trend on these interwebs of ours over the last few months. It seems like someone decided to let cultural ignoramuses loose upon the grammar of the internet.

Look, I forgive lolcats. I forgive 1337 speak. I even forgive txt language. What I refuse to forgive is the destruction of one or more syllables and replacing them with s. I call this Retrobraining. It happens when instead of coming up with a relatively new grammar (lolspeak or 1337 speak) or coming up with new names for the common sphere of idiocy that confounds the politicians (interwebs, internet, internetosphere, etc.), the brain of specific people seems to retrograde back to the brain size of other humanoid species on this planet (Apes, chimps, Valley girls). This retrobraining is stupid. For example:
Super + Retrobraining = Supes.
Totally + Retrobraining = Tots.

and the list can go on.

It’s time to stop the retrobraining habits people. It’s blatantly stupid. Or if it’s too late for that last phrase to make sense, it’s blats stupid. Damnit. Now I need to go play chess for five hours to make up for that example.

after having this netbook for over a week, I gotta say I love working on it. I’m listening to tunes, working on Kaplan stuff, have used it at school the last few days to get class and student situations figured out (this thing is much better to work on than the Ventura Office computer they gave us), and honestly, now that I’m used to both the keyboard and the smaller screen, I can’t say there’s a huge difference in working on this vs. my desktop.

Well, a difference in what it’s being used for: teaching. I did load a few games on this thing (Hey, I gots to be me), but those are mostly games from the good ol’ days. Battlechess, Cribbage, and Magic The Gathering.

Interesting story about Magic: The Gathering…the old mid 90’s version has the complete 4th edition on it, and I got the expansion pack that was released for it. I recall that the deal was that I’d help out around the house more often than I had been doing if my mother purchased the game. I cannot recall if I fulfilled that promise or not.

Anyways, this computer is actually a joy to work on. It doesn’t get too hot on my lap (like my old laptop), the fan isn’t loud and annoying, it is extremely portable, and it does everything with minimal difficulty.

Satisfied with it? So far so good. The way I figure it is that my last laptop was $2000, but this one has it beat in hard drive size, memory installed (still going to up it to 2 gigs in the future). Not quite a 1.7ghz processor, but at 1.6ghz for what I’m using it for, it does the job. Just shared memory for video, no complaints there. So this one cost $260 vs. $2000.

If anything goes wrong with this after 3 months, I figure it’s as large an investment as I made on my previous laptop.

I really have no reason to complain. I (heart) moore’s law.

it’s been one of those days.

finally helped my parents fix their webcam issues. w00t for registry editing!

The Conservative Bible Project aims to rewrite the bible by removing liberal bias.

This is sickening. I believe the bible is the God-breathed written witness to the acts of my God throughout the history of mankind.

To make the assumption that there is a “liberal” lean to a translation is heresy. If it is God-breathed in the original, it is, ipso facto, God breathed in the translation. There is a reason why everything is in there, and to assume that God would allow His word to be mis-aligned in translation is to assume that He really isn’t that worried about presenting the Truth.

These people make me sick to my stomach. They are giving conservatives a bad name.

We’ve settled on a defense date of November 14th, at 5PM. I’ll have info up here next week sometime re: a web conference should you be interested in observing.

Do I make this a formal grievance complaint about non-compliance with accreditation requirements?

It won’t schedule things any faster, but it might wake them up to the problem and perhaps put in policies so it is no longer an issue for future students.

you don’t even know.

So as we saw yesterday, I ran a simple stress test to see the effects on opening/closing windows and programs on the netbook. It all checked out.

This morning, I ran a stress test on the battery. I used regular headphones this time instead of USB, and ran it on battery. The programs running were AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Live Messenger, Firefox opened to Facebook, IE opened with three windows, one to a Seminar which was streaming video/audio, musicmatch jukebox playing, MS Word 2007 opened, Avast antivirus running, and Wireless on.

This time I was at school, so it wasn’t a constant wireless signal, because occasionally it would disconnect and try to reconnect to the wrong one (which worked better, I guess, because more processing went into the connection attempts). Also, the screen was on the brightest setting.

The reason I did this was to offer up some “real world” stress testing, which is absent so many times from the bigger companies. Best Buy said it’d get 3 hours and 48 minutes of run time (depending on conditions) while Asus said about 4 hours. I have a 3 cell battery.

Anyway, with all those programs running, the screen on all the time (no shut offs set in the power section), I let the laptop run while using it.

It ran for 2 hours and 24 minutes before hitting the 2% mark and hibernating.

This is more than enough time for me when I travel. Everytime else, I’m within close proximity to an outlet. Or if I’m on a plane, I’ve got my PSP out, and a 12 hour battery in there (plus it’s haxxored…nes, snes, old PS games, good times) to keep myself busy.

I’m posting this so that people can see how the computer will perform in actual working situations, with multiple programs running and work going on. Chances are, however, that I can get way more than this time out of the battery.

I would just cut down the programs running, the screen brightness, and shut off the tunes, and I could very easily squeeze out another half hour in all probability.

But, as I said, it’s good to know the lower limit that I can push the battery to.

I’ll be honest. When I first saw these things, I had SERIOUS doubts as to what they could do. Especially when I started looking at the WinXP or Win7 “Starter” os’s that some of them had on them. So I opted for this model because it had a full OEM version of WinXP home. I’m used to that one.

So I bought the Asus 1005HA. I had heard there were issues with slowdown (in some of the reviews I read on other machines) with lots of programs open/operating. Since this machine has pret’ much the same hardware as those, I reckoned what the heck. I’d run through a scenario with as many programs as I would likely ever have open at any one time. Note that the antivirus I’ve got on there is Avast. If you’ve got Norton, and your comp slows down with mult. programs…that’s likely your problem. Anyway.

I tested the new computer with all four IM programs running (MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk), Firefox open on facebook, four windows for IE open for kaplan seminars (three static, and one seminar), musicmatch rocking on a connected USB headset, and opening and working in Word 2007.

It is looking fantastic. No noticeable slowdown whatsoever. w00t! Battery life test today sometime possibly.

Technically, it’s a netbook. Picked it up at best buy today. Now, one could ask why the blazes I would need a new computer of any stripe. Basically it’s because I’m starting up teaching at Kaplan, and I figured it’s about time I got a dedicated computer for just teaching.

It’s got XP Home on it (I didn’t want to mess with 7, everything that I work with is on XP home). It’s about cognizant with everything that I had on my 2004 gateway laptop, except it isn’t f’ed up, and the screen works and it’s up to speed.

Just getting used to the screen size.

Best thing was that I was going to buy one on sunday at fry’s, but the salesman was a bit of a jackass and wasn’t at all helpful. So I went to bestbuy today, the guy was really helpful.

Plus, I got the model that is exactly the same thing thing hardware/software-wise but it’s a glossy finish instead of the newer matte finish.

Which resulted in me getting it for $260 instead of $300. I’m teh winnerz.

The plan has cleared all the important people. I’ve done as much as I can…we’ll find out in a couple weeks.

to try and save an earlier defense date in November rather than in December. If this clears, then I will have done all I can with all the information I’ve got. It’s in God’s hands now.

Writing the dissertation was nothing compared to the hassle of scheduling it.

not talking the dissertation, that’s out of my hands for the time being, but rather the work situation.

I am going to be losing one of my classes on November 10th out here. This is not unexpected, as I was “subbing” for a teacher out on maternity leave. At the beginning of the semester, it was planned that she would be back then. No biggie.

I got an email from Kaplan letting me know that they have a class scheduled for me starting the 11th…which has a seminar component which meets once a week at about the same time his other class did.

Sometimes things fall into place when one doesn’t fight too much.