Articles that don’t fit in to any other categories.
Sometime last year, my fiance and I came up with what seems like a great web site idea. Over the past month, I have been implementing this idea a little at a time with the purpose of getting it out the door before school starts. That being said, I’m within throwing distance of the end.
Big announcement to follow when it’s all ready.
This fall semester will be my first semester as a graduate teaching assistant. In my department, the course nobody wants but everybody gets is CPS 100. There are probably 30 lab sections for this course, so every GA will get one or two. However, there are a few other classes available for GA’s to teach. One of them is “Modern Web Site Design”. I was personally hoping to teach this course, as I have loads of web design experience. I’ve been doing it regularly since 6th grade, but that doesn’t matter. I failed to market myself to the department chair, who makes the decisions. Perhaps next semester I’ll actually request the course once I’ve been proven as a GA.
On another note, my next project is coming to completion. This one has the potential to change the way college students do things. Be ready for it.
Every time that i try and extract a large file using the built in file archiving utility in Ubuntu, it crashes. Every time. By large file, I mean anything >= 1gb. I know that this is no fault of my machine, as this happens on every machine I use. To solve the problem, I run trusty WinRAR under Wine on my Linux box. It’s honestly faster than anything I’ve used yet on linux (aside from command line stuff).
If you have any suggestions, I welcome them.
Since 2005, I’ve been a user of Ubuntu. Ubuntu came out about a year earlier, but I caught on with version 5.10. Since that point, I’ve never looked back. I may have side-stepped a bit, but that’s it (I had a 6 month diversion in to Fedora 10).
One issue I’ve always had with Ubuntu is virtual private networking (VPN). For those of you outside the know, you basically make a secure tunnel between two networks. In my case, I’ve always wanted to connect to the Cisco VPN at CMU for work, but since I’m using Ubuntu I never had any luck… until recently.
Just today, August 4 2009, I have finally made a vpn connection between my laptop running Ubuntu 9.04 and CMU’s cisco VPN.
Working from home just became much easier.
I’ve been doing web development for a long time. I made my first (crappy) web page in 6th grade using the then awesome Geocities. After that, I graduated to Front Page express. Throughout my development career, I’ve had a series of epiphanies that have brought my skills to the next level. Bold entries are where they happened.
The Internet is a buzz today with news of the Google’s new Chrome OS. Even the major news outlets have picked up the story, touting it as a “direct challenge” to Microsoft. First of all, nothing Google can do in the OS realm will come anywhere near challenging Microsoft. Google’s experience lies in maninpulating Linux to work for their backend operations. Even if they hire some developers with practical end user OS exeperience, it’s still just going to be another flavor of Linux. The general public doesn’t like Linux. Not because Linux is bad in any way, but because it is different. Chrome OS promises to be VERY different. People don’t want extreme change, they want gradual change so that they barely notice anything has happened.
Nice try Google. I’m sure it’ll be a hit in the enthusiast / Google fan boy crowd, but as for me, I’ll stick with Ubuntu.
I was walking by a Post cereal factory in Niagara Falls this weekend, and I immediately thought of this.
Most people in my field have attended a 4 year university to learn their skills. While it’s not entirely necissary to do so, it does help expedite and flush out the the things you could have learned on your own. The only problem is money. If you are anything like me your parents didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so you always knew that shouldering the debt of a college education would be your responsibility. It’s only now that I’ve realised how expensive college really is.
Currently, my student loan debt is at $50,000 is government loans and $20,000 in private loans. By the time I’ve completed grad school, I’ll have an additional $21,000 in government loans. All in all, I’ve got $91,000 in student loans to pay off when I graduate. With any sort of luck, I’ll get a job that starts me at $60,000 a year.
That’s great for me. I can easily afford to make a student loan payment of $1000 a month. Maybe less. However, I now have to consider my fiance’s debt. She’ll have roughly $70,000 in student loans when she’s done. So together, we’ll need to pay $160,000 in student loans.
Sometimes I wonder if the education was worth it.