Crying for you, Canada, I'm crying for you

Why is my best case scenario a government that runs itself in circles just so another worse government doesn't go around punching holes in the ship's hull?

x_x

Election Blues

As far as I'm concerned, one party is the avatar of evil and the other one is so inept as to lose a popularity contest against an avatar of evil.

There are also some regional flavors too, I guess.

I wonder if Japan is the final evolution of democratic societies: bankrupt, ineffective, childrenless.

SIGH

So remember there was a guy a while ago who got Fate tattooed on his back.

This guy.

Anyways, at the time he was saying he wanted to get Nana Mizuki (alternatively know as Fate-chan's voice actress) tattooed on him next. Of course people called him an idiot.

But that was then and now is now:

What gets me though is that as far as ink goes, that is a damn fine tattoo. He found an excellent tattoo artist-to do this?? ARGGHHH!

edit: Incidentally, he hopes Nana Mizuki would get married soon because that's how he rolls. Wut.

I don't even...

So is GQ some sort of welfare Esquire?

It's like a trainwreck, you just can't look away.

Though I am amused that Monteith is remains significantly more clothed throughout than his co-stars. Significantly.

Also, no doubt Grondin has found these pictures of Lea Michele's "tiny" breasts already.

What am I doing here?

I took that Facebook personality profile test. This is what it gave me on college majors that matched my personality:

1 Undecided
2 Graphic Design
3 Photography
4 English Literature
5 Culinary Arts
6 Art
7 Liberal Arts
8 English
9 History
10 Interior Design

What the fuck??

The highest science related thing is chemistry at number 14. Chemical engineering is down at number 31.

Also, apparently I'm fucking neurotic. Which, I guess would not come as a surprise to any of my close friends.

God. If I don't find a place to live next term, I'm going to just move to Queens and take up Modern Languages or something.

Seriously?

I hate you, America.

On math and Key

If I were to plot my feelings of despair and sadness versus time as I watch Clannad, the plot would only span R² whereby it is sad everywhere and the level of despair resembles Dirichlet's function.

I talk like this in real life too.

I don't think I'd be cut out for Linux

...because apparently I epically fail at building from source.

On the other hand, now I have Xcode on my computer, so I can make Unix apps.

Or rather theoretically I could if I knew how to.

Right now it's just taking up massive amounts of space.

How's the switch?

First off, I'd like to say Macs are extremely slick when things are working together. Like you wouldn't believe, it can't do a lot of things Windows can do, but it is good at what it does. It also definitely took a lot less effort making things work nicely.

OS X can actually support dual screens without forcing you to jump through hoops just to make the wallpapers different. As a bonus, you never get things stuck off screen when you're disconnected from a monitor like you do in Windows. Well, sometimes you do, but it's not as frequent.

The templates in Pages are a billion times better than whatever comes with Word. The screen savers are nicer. It comes with built-in East Asian character support instead of needing to be installed later because apparently Windows decided it doesn't want to give you the option during the initial install process. Basically, I'm satisfied with how everything is on a Mac the first time. With Windows computers, the more "ready to use" the manufacturers claim, the more time I'll be spending uninstalling bloatware later.

The problem is when you need to get some work done and Numbers is built to make your graphs pretty and not to actually crunch numbers. Maybe that's why artists like Mac so much, because they never have to do fucking math. MS Office for OS X is apparently like its Windows counterpart but infected with polio because Microsoft decides it hates Mac users (incidentally, my Chem 100 assistant prof hates Mac users too). Open Office for Mac is so terrible. It's clearly running over a windows emulator of some sort, and it has it's own tool bar. It's better than MS Office in that it is free and Calc has more tools than Excel for Mac (see point: previous), it's worse in that it has its own file formats that Office apps can't actually open. So I have a mess of redundant files in different formats floating around until I figure out what I should save things as. To add to the confusion, I still have not found a way to change the default application for opening things in OS X. Also, OO integrates horribly with OS X, needing to open terminal, and then an emulator before actually initializing Open Office itself. Meaning it starts up slower and uglier than even Photoshop CS2.

Quicktime can't actually play .avi files properly despite installing DivX codecs so I had to install VLC player. That's okay though, Windows Media sucks in comparison to MPC and Winamp too. Plus, I didn't need splitters and FFDShow to get .FLVs working on VLC.

I spent a large amount of time trying to make Frostwire for Mac store its shit in the data partition, but no matter how I change its preferences it still creates folders in my Mac partition. I gave up and just installed it Windows-side.

Spaces is a marvelous concept, but there are enough flaws that I decided not to use it. One is that I'd like the ability to have separate spaces on each screen when using a monitor, after all, that is what a second screen is for. It's a shame that they overlooked this with such fine dual screen support otherwise. Secondly there are bugs with apps showing up wherever they want to. Photoshop decides to open up anywhere the hell it wants despite being assigned a space. Even more infuriating is that if I hover the cursor where the font selection toolbar should be when Open Office is open, it will switch to that space for some reason. I hope this stuff gets fixed somehow, because I'd love to use Spaces if it worked.

Finally a pet peeve, Finder keeps leaving .ds_store files all over my data partition which is clearly visible in Windows and Explorer likewise keeps leaving thumbs.db files all over the same partition that is clearly visible on OS X. It makes me want to shoot myself.

Additional Note: Adding to the point that you can't do math on a Mac, it's funny because Maple, the software used by mathies to do inane shit like calculate pi to 10 000 digits (significant figures dammit!), came with two installation CDs: one for Windows and one for Linux.

Well, fuck.

My computer died, at the worst of times as usual. It only needed to last another week before all my data is backed up, now I am going to have a hell of a time retrieving the data. Incidentally, my most worthless data is still intact, since I've stored it all online so as not to waste HD space. Hurrah for my magical girl image collection, I guess.

The last time I had a computer die was the week before my media art final and compsci final. The media art final was an website.

The Macbook I'm on right now is in some kind of limbo because it's all ready for Windows installation, but I don't actually have windows. The data partition can't be created until Windows is installed, and I don't want to configure OS X right now either because there's a non-zero chance I'm going brick it and need to start a clean install.

In other news, I managed to cut myself twice on a Dell PSU trying to open it. It remains unopened. <_<

Fuck computers, seriously.

edit: On the bright side, Safari is definately more stable than Fx 3.

Tuesdays make me despair...

soph: you dont have a schedule yet?
Peter: I do
Peter: I haven't really looked over it carefully
Peter: it will probably make me despair
soph: lol how many hours a week?
Peter: I don't want to know
Peter: because it will make me despair

Well, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to look.

Now I'm in despair.

It's pretty heavy course load but I more or less expected that. The worst is my schedule for Tuesday: 8:30-11:30,12:30-2:30,4:30-5:30, 7:00-10:00. Fuck! That's 9 hours of lectures and labs! My ridiculous timetable has left me in despair!

Next time on zetsubou channel: Shopping for laptops leaves me in despair!

People are sane...

...until you put 10 or so of them together in a group. Then things start breaking down. But not in a normal train wreck kind of way. If you ever tried to cut a Möbius strip in half lengthwise, that's the kind of twisting I'm talking about. And it's an unsettling thing, to be nothing more a spectator and watch whatever sinister scenario furtively unfold.

It's a general trend I'm noticing.

Targeted at no one in particular.

Though I think I have more than enough anecdotes by now.





What a splendid opportunity to unveil my new tag though.