Resnet is unreal

So I was playing Smash in their room (endearingly referred to as "Battlestar Galactica" by my don) with some people on my floor, when one of the Resnet guys walks in with a cardboard box.

"You'll never guess what I've got!"

It was a Dreamcast. He got another Dreamcast.

Mind you, this was on the same day that I returned his first Dreamcast.

For those keeping count, at this point they have all 3 current gen consoles in their room, 2 Dreamcasts and a Mega Drive. That's some serious geek cred right there.

FX3 IS LIKE WIN95

WHEN A PROCESS GOES DOWN, YOUR ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM SINKS LIKE THE TITANIC.

IRONICALLY I WAS ON THIS PAGE WHEN IT DECIDED TO CRASH 3 TIMES IN A ROW.

SOMEONE AT MOZILLA REALLY DOESN'T WANT ME TO READ THAT.

CAPS LOCK.

Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to use email

Who thought it was a good idea to let students be able to write mass emails to everyone in their program? For that matter, I think I've gotten a few from students not even in my faculty. I'd like to check to see if my TAs or Profs wrote anything pertinent but my inbox is cluttered so full of spam I don't even want to look at it.

No, fucker, I don't want to study with you, go find some friends. I also don't care that you don't understand question 28 on assignment 2, ask your fucking TA, that's what you're paying 10k per term for. Finally to you, aspiring chartered accountant who managed to fucking email everyone in chem eng, go die in a fire.

My personal email is now full of crap as well, maybe the after the first 25 people did it, the next 150 of you should have realized replying to all on a residence mailing list is a dumb thing to do.

I also love how quickly I'm getting telemarketers now that I actually turn my cell phone on. For fuck's sake, no, I don't need hydro, stop calling me from fucking area code 623.

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.

I'd like to talk about Resnet

Somehow this slipped my mind during the last post, but my residence has its own wireless network called Resnet. There are a group of upper years who maintain this network collectively termed the "Resnet guys".

Their heads live on my floor.

Basically they are exactly how you would imagine them to be like. You would walk by their room on the first day, see 3 monitors on one side, a 30" screen on the other, a plasma tv in the middle and cords everywhere,

"Are these the Resnet guys?"
"Yup"

One of them dropped the term "symmetrical docking" in during a Smash match and I was like "I see what you did there." He also has a figurine of Fang-tan. We also had a conversation about how Genesis does what the Nintendon't. I think I'm going to get along just fine with him. Another is like the manifestation of every geek stereotype you can imagine, down to "I got to go, I have a raid to attend right now." Well, except he's not fat, unclean or unemployed, so it's not too bad.

When I requested that they download Ikaruga on Live Arcade it turns out that they already have it. Not on 360 mind you, or even Gamecube, they had it on the fucking Dreamcast! Better yet, they have an open door policy where anyone could just go into their room to chill regardless of whether they're in or not.

"I think my productivity this term is going to approach zero"
"Why not zero?"
"Because I've done some work already"
"Have you handed anything in?"
"No"
"Well, there you go"

Since Hilldawg has been sharing her geeky stories...

Today I found someone who watches Battlestar Galactica, and it isn't a guy. How wonderfully unexpected.

Just a moment ago I walked down the hall and into someone's room on the left. Lo and behold, there was a ~25" monitor with Chouginga Gurren as the wallpaper. That made my day, but I feel bad now for not knowing that guy's name.

It took a million years for me to find a chat client, because none of them had a skin that fit my shell theme. I downloaded Miranda, Trillian and Pidgin in turn. I ended up using Live Messenger. I'll just talk to people without .Net accounts on Adium.

I often talk to Crobert over MSN despite being in the same room. He often responds by shouting "shut up and throw away your fucking soup!"

Hey lady, I need a yank!

So I got hospitalized on the 3rd day of frosh week. First thing right after my don told everyone to play safe, no less.

I jumped off the top of an inflatable maze and dislocated my shoulder in a race. Despite that, I won the race by an enormous margin. The first responders called it the "Thunderforce" in the cause of injury section of their report. The paramedics were puzzled.

It turns out life is not like Trauma Center, because I'm pretty sure I could've beaten the game in the time I spent in the waiting room.

Nurse: So tell me how this happened.
Me: It's a stupid story.
Nurse: It's frosh week, we're used to stupid stories.

Whatever they injected to put me asleep is like a miracle drug though. I was out and awake without ever knowing it and just found my arm fixed magically, didn't even skip a beat in my thoughts. I'm sure it would fetch a high price on the secondary market, AKA drug dealers.

I am now known as the "guy who supermanned off the slide".

Better yet, sometimes people ask me if I was the guy injured during ultimate frisbee. To which I can truthfully respond, "no, he was in the stretcher in front of me".