Voder-Vocoder

I had my first practicum this week. Friday my cooperating teacher had me get up before the class and explain something. Even though I knew the material cold, and even though I explained it well, I was still nervous. I am not used to talking to such a large audience, and I could not tell how well the students understood. I need more experience at this.

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Anybody know where I can get free and/or very cheap CD sleeves, envelopes, or jewel cases?

Link

Mark got lost in the middle of the boonies last night. I pointed out that if it is nighttime and you are within 50 miles of a city, you can always figure out how to get home by following the light pollution.

This method worked.

The folks just sent me their old P200 laptop. (It barely qualifies as a notebook, as its dimentions are 8.5 x 11 x 2.2 inches.) Thanks, guys.

It's a Compaq Armada 1571DM. I named him nimrod.

He's a behemoth. CD and floppy drive. Integrated power supply. 12-inch 800x600 screen. With all that, there is just one usb port and no ethernet jack. And you can tell the previous owner (Dad) showed him some love: good condition, maxed out RAM (96 Megs), LCD in great shape.

I shredded the drive and installed linux.

Due to the ancientness of the hardware, this became an excersize in minimalism. Windowmaker is still good, if not user-friendly, so I didn't even bother trying something newer. Back in the day, I would use netscape 4.x, but I'm going to give dillo a try this time around. I considered forgoing the gui alltogether, but knew I would want it for browsing, if nothing else.

Turns out that yum uses a lot of processor power when it resolves dependencies. Or maybe it gets into infinite loops.

UPDATE 2004-09-12:The battery is quite dead, and I'll never get the winmodem to work. I may have to invest in a pcmcia modem at some point. But everything else seems to work perfectly.

I just read Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division today. It was good enough for me to finish in a day. It makes me think. Why the hell do we pay people to serve us drinks? I can make my own drinks, thank you! I'll pay for the materiel, but emplying somebody just seems like make-work.

Paul Graham has a neat essay About Essays.

Havoc Pennington put together a nice document detailing what Red Hat does all day: Open Source Software Subscriptions

In the last couple of weeks, I've seen quite a few guys wearing ties at the club. I'm taking as much responsibility for this as possible: I started doing that regularly last fall.

There were also large numbers of guys in drag last night. I had nothing to do with that.

I also saw someone in a business suit. I hate those ugly things. Two words: padded shoulders. Ick.

I got a new job as a tutor this week. It's a student job, so it pays squat, but I figure steady hours doing something I love is worth something.