Friday, February 15, 2013
Alternate History Inquirer
I have created a new blog called the Alternate History Inquirer. I plan to post alternate history scenario there regularly. I also want to restart the ah.com podcasts, which I would then post on the blog...probably with links to the video on youtube. So yeah, check it out.
Monday, January 21, 2013
MLK's "Beyond Vietnam" Speech
I did not wake up today thinking about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. I might have forgotten today was the day dedicated to remembering him and his accomplishments had I not stumbled across this video of his Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence speech delivered in 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. This is not the MLK we were taught about in school, the carefully crafted Civil Rights Leader whose greatest accomplishment was delivering the I Have a Dream speech in Washington, D.C. four years earlier. No, this is the great man in all his entirety, the crusader against social injustice in all its forms; racism, yes, but also the inequalities of poverty and militarism. This speech is not merely an injunction against our conduct in Vietnam in 1967, but a sweeping call for an end to military adventurism and a reorganization of national priorities. As the Reverend said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death." That message is as relevant today as ever, and you would do well to listen to the speech in its entirety. I recommend reading the transcript while you listen, which can be found on A More Perfect Union.
Monday, December 31, 2012
December in Review
It has been an entire month since my last post here, so I thought it would make sense to do a recap of the month. For the first two weeks or so I stayed away from my computer as much as possible, as switching from Windows to Linux was a bit of a shock, made extra annoying for me by the fact that there apparently are no drivers for my wireless adapter card written for Linux, so I have to restart my connection every ten minutes or so.
But all is not lost. In fact, I have some good news; I got my first job this month. I'm now making $8.25/hour as a grocery store cashier, which means I don't have to go around looking for freelance writing jobs. And that means I can dedicate all my creativity to writing about what I want to write about. So, I've started two new projects:
Speaking of New Years resolutions, I've committed myself to intensively learning both Spanish and Esperanto throughout the entire. Specifically, I joined what is called the Total Annihilation Challenge, which got it's start on the How-to-Learn-Any-Language forums, though I will be mostly active on Reddit's emulation of the concept.
I really need to be fluent in Spanish for college. This spring I'm going to take the Spanish CLEP exam which, if I pass with a high enough score, will let me exempt four Spanish classes. That will give me enough credits, combined with what I already have, to make doing college in three years possible. That would really help keep the cost down (I realllly don't want to take tens of thousands of dollars of debt on just to get a Bachelor's degree).
Esperanto is more of a fun experiment which I started the week before Christmas, but I've found that once I got into, it's actually kind of fun. How can learning a language be fun, you say? It's easy! Really, really easy, and there's the incentive of a lot of literature which has been translated into Esperanto but not English to motivate me. The other thing is, I would like to be fluent enough by the summer to attend an Esperanto conference which is being held in Raleigh, NC, which sounds like fun.
That's really everything worth talking about. I'm looking forward to a fun 2013!
But all is not lost. In fact, I have some good news; I got my first job this month. I'm now making $8.25/hour as a grocery store cashier, which means I don't have to go around looking for freelance writing jobs. And that means I can dedicate all my creativity to writing about what I want to write about. So, I've started two new projects:
- What if Reagan managed to win the presidential nomination on the convention floor in 1976? The idea is that he gets trounced by Carter in the general election, and then we explore the effects of not having Reagan in office in the 1980's. Lots of butterflies, I can tell you. I'm thinking about posting this one on alternatehistory.com.
- Inspired by this Io9 article about recent technological breakthroughs in animal augmentation, I started writing a short story about a well-intentioned, if obsessed scientist who moves to the Congo in order to uplift a chimp, and the consequences seen through the eyes of the chimp. If I think I sidestep the clichés well enough, I might try shopping this one around.
Speaking of New Years resolutions, I've committed myself to intensively learning both Spanish and Esperanto throughout the entire. Specifically, I joined what is called the Total Annihilation Challenge, which got it's start on the How-to-Learn-Any-Language forums, though I will be mostly active on Reddit's emulation of the concept.
I really need to be fluent in Spanish for college. This spring I'm going to take the Spanish CLEP exam which, if I pass with a high enough score, will let me exempt four Spanish classes. That will give me enough credits, combined with what I already have, to make doing college in three years possible. That would really help keep the cost down (I realllly don't want to take tens of thousands of dollars of debt on just to get a Bachelor's degree).
Esperanto is more of a fun experiment which I started the week before Christmas, but I've found that once I got into, it's actually kind of fun. How can learning a language be fun, you say? It's easy! Really, really easy, and there's the incentive of a lot of literature which has been translated into Esperanto but not English to motivate me. The other thing is, I would like to be fluent enough by the summer to attend an Esperanto conference which is being held in Raleigh, NC, which sounds like fun.
That's really everything worth talking about. I'm looking forward to a fun 2013!
Monday, December 3, 2012
My Computer Ordeal
This entire past week I have been without a computer. Monday, I think it was, SYSTEM PROGRESSIVE PROTECTION popped up onto my desktop, proclaiming my computer was filled with viruses and trojans of all sorts, and the only way to save the computer was to purchase their antivirus service. An obvious scam.
I shut the computer down, and then rebooted in safe mode with networking to back up my files and try to remove the virus. I found an easy to follow tutorial on Malwaretips to get rid of it, and after completing all of the steps it seemed to be gone, except for one thing. Every time I turned the Windows Firewall on, it was turned back off. Evidently, the rootkit was still hiding out somewhere.
I tried everything I could think of. In my desperation, I downloaded all sorts of scanners and programs to try and quarantine the trojan, none of which worked. Somebody recommended Advanced SystemCare, which is great at cleaning and speeding up your Windows PC, but not even it could find the damned thing.
Unable to fix the problem on my own, I decided to reformat the drive (reinstall Windows). Being the genius I am, I never made the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED backup of the system (my Acer Aspire laptop did not come with a disc) so I had to borrow a disc from a friend. The installation went smoothly, but right away I knew there were going to be problems. The resolution on start up was way to low, and when I went adjust the settings, the highest resolution available was still to small for my screen; everything appeared blurry and stretched horizontally. Worse, the computer could not find any wifi networks, in fact it could not even locate the (built-in) network adapter card (or the drivers, I'm not clear on that, but regardless there was a problem).
Fed up with Windows, I decided today to jump the gun and install Ubuntu. That was a challenge in and of itself, as I had to download it on another computer and then transfer it to my laptop. I tried burning it to a CD, but all of my blank CD's are slightly too small. Luckily I had a flash drive lying around that I was able to use. So I'm typing all of this on Ubuntu, my very first Linux experience.
I'm equal parts impressed and annoyed. It all looks very nice, aesthetically pleasing (I think I was ready for a change from windows). Unfortunately, I have already noticed a few quirks (hopefully these are just problems on my end, rather than with Ubuntu itself). Sites will randomly not load, even though my connection claims to be working. That is fixed easily enough by resetting the connection, though having to do that every ten minutes or so is grating. Also, often times some pictures on websites will choose not to load. And it's only some pictures, on some sites, sometimes. Seemingly no rhyme or reason.
Hopefully those issues (and the others I am sure to run into) will be resolved soon enough; I would like to do a more neutral and thorough review of Ubuntu at some point in the future. For now, I'm just glad to finally have a computer back; I have a lot of catching up to do.
I shut the computer down, and then rebooted in safe mode with networking to back up my files and try to remove the virus. I found an easy to follow tutorial on Malwaretips to get rid of it, and after completing all of the steps it seemed to be gone, except for one thing. Every time I turned the Windows Firewall on, it was turned back off. Evidently, the rootkit was still hiding out somewhere.
I tried everything I could think of. In my desperation, I downloaded all sorts of scanners and programs to try and quarantine the trojan, none of which worked. Somebody recommended Advanced SystemCare, which is great at cleaning and speeding up your Windows PC, but not even it could find the damned thing.
Unable to fix the problem on my own, I decided to reformat the drive (reinstall Windows). Being the genius I am, I never made the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED backup of the system (my Acer Aspire laptop did not come with a disc) so I had to borrow a disc from a friend. The installation went smoothly, but right away I knew there were going to be problems. The resolution on start up was way to low, and when I went adjust the settings, the highest resolution available was still to small for my screen; everything appeared blurry and stretched horizontally. Worse, the computer could not find any wifi networks, in fact it could not even locate the (built-in) network adapter card (or the drivers, I'm not clear on that, but regardless there was a problem).
Fed up with Windows, I decided today to jump the gun and install Ubuntu. That was a challenge in and of itself, as I had to download it on another computer and then transfer it to my laptop. I tried burning it to a CD, but all of my blank CD's are slightly too small. Luckily I had a flash drive lying around that I was able to use. So I'm typing all of this on Ubuntu, my very first Linux experience.
I'm equal parts impressed and annoyed. It all looks very nice, aesthetically pleasing (I think I was ready for a change from windows). Unfortunately, I have already noticed a few quirks (hopefully these are just problems on my end, rather than with Ubuntu itself). Sites will randomly not load, even though my connection claims to be working. That is fixed easily enough by resetting the connection, though having to do that every ten minutes or so is grating. Also, often times some pictures on websites will choose not to load. And it's only some pictures, on some sites, sometimes. Seemingly no rhyme or reason.
Hopefully those issues (and the others I am sure to run into) will be resolved soon enough; I would like to do a more neutral and thorough review of Ubuntu at some point in the future. For now, I'm just glad to finally have a computer back; I have a lot of catching up to do.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Procastination
If it's not one of the Seven Deadly Sins we'll have to call it the Eighth[1]. Right now I've got a huge English project due in 13 days which I know I won't start for another week, at least, and a small paper for Economics due Tuesday that I really ought to be working on right now. I'm supposed to have three posts written for the Alternate History Weekly Update by December, which I just realized starts a week from today. Oh, and to top it off, I've gotten myself involved in a group writing project, a restart of a really neat Round Robin I was involved in this past spring. Now how am I going to get all of that done?
It's not as if I don't have time, I'm writing this afterall. No, what is I think, is too much time and too little self-discipline. I never have a problem meeting deadlines, I just usually spend the entire day before working at a frenetic pace. Which is dumb. Today I was reading a thread on a forum about other people's progress with the NaNoWriMo and I thought to myself "I ought to start on that soon." But no, only a week left in November, no time to write a novel. Where did November go? This might have been my most unproductive yet least eventful month of the year.
So here I am, writing this blog post, wasting even more time, while writing aspirations and obligations creep closer and closer to real and imagined deadlines. The only thing to do, I suppose, is take things one at a time. I will start on the economics paper now. Perhaps I can use this blog to hold myself accountable.
---
[1] Eighth? Is that really how that's spelled? English is such a strange language...a topic for another blog post, perhaps.
It's not as if I don't have time, I'm writing this afterall. No, what is I think, is too much time and too little self-discipline. I never have a problem meeting deadlines, I just usually spend the entire day before working at a frenetic pace. Which is dumb. Today I was reading a thread on a forum about other people's progress with the NaNoWriMo and I thought to myself "I ought to start on that soon." But no, only a week left in November, no time to write a novel. Where did November go? This might have been my most unproductive yet least eventful month of the year.
So here I am, writing this blog post, wasting even more time, while writing aspirations and obligations creep closer and closer to real and imagined deadlines. The only thing to do, I suppose, is take things one at a time. I will start on the economics paper now. Perhaps I can use this blog to hold myself accountable.
---
[1] Eighth? Is that really how that's spelled? English is such a strange language...a topic for another blog post, perhaps.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Hello World!
Excuse the title, but the nerd in me couldn't resist.
A blog seems like a useful thing to have. This way I have one place to compile links to all my work, to post sample work for potential employers, and to blog about whatever. I do not expect anyone to follow this blog, but that's ok because it's my personal thing.
So, that all said, this is a test post. Let's see what happens...
A blog seems like a useful thing to have. This way I have one place to compile links to all my work, to post sample work for potential employers, and to blog about whatever. I do not expect anyone to follow this blog, but that's ok because it's my personal thing.
So, that all said, this is a test post. Let's see what happens...
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