Long time no post. Winter break is good. I have logged over 40 hours on Final Fantasy XII in the three days that I have been playing it. My attempts to beat this glorious game before the next semester starts seem to be futile.
In other news, the GRE was annoying. I didn’t do well enough on the math side, so I’m taking it again. Apparently I need a 700 to meet the CoC’s requirements. I hate standardized tests.
I am officially finished with school for this semester. Well, except for all the administrative tasks I have left to do like finishing my PURA paperwork, writing a research proposal by Friday so I can graduate, and studying for the GRE that I am scheduled to endure on Monday. It’s been a very hard 18 hours this semester, and as much as I complain about it I’m doing it again next semester. But the next one is the last one, so I’m going to go out with a bang =).
I drove my car to the TSRB yesterday so that I could study for my first final and be connected to the world via this wonderful thing called the Intarweb. I parked it in the usual spot on 8th street. Although it’s decently shady I have parked there for a whole semester without any troubles — largely due to the fact that no one really wants a 91′ Ford Mustang that has logged over 170,000 miles, and I don’t keep anything valuable inside it. Many people, including the occasional remote controlled Porsche, have parked on that street all day with no problems whatsoever. My roomate and I left the TSRB at around 11:00pm and walked to my car to be greeted with a wonderful surprise. Apparently a not too bright thief had attempted to steal my car. The passenger side key hole for the lock had been mangled by a screwdriver and my ignition switch spun like a top when I tried to crank it. I called the cops and filed a police report, and then had the officer call a tow truck for me because there was no way I could start my car with the switch destroyed.
To my advantage, this thief wasn’t very good at boosting cars — but they still did a number on my door lock and broke the ignition switch. I’m stranded in Atlanta until I can figure out how to fix the ignition or get the car cranked so I can take it home so Dad can fix it. What an amazing beginning of finals week.
I have a bit of a metal streak in me. There’s something about the drive and energy of a Metalcore band that I find simply irresistible. However, I usually have the requirement that the front man must be able to sing melodically; and very few bands pull that off effectively. One obviously good execution of these requirements comes from Christian Metalcore’s Demon Hunter, but recently a friend gave me End of Heartache by Killswitch. I was floored. So much that when I heard they had another album dropping soon, I was giddy. I finally have finished listening to it, and here’s my review.
Apparently there is a lot of controversy over this album because it sounds to “emo” for the hardcore fans. I simply call that being close minded. People should expect bands to change and evolve based on their genre and musical motivations. Yes, I am one of those who liked Metallica’s Load and Reload albums. I’m not a fan of a genre, I’m a fan of intellegently composed music. This album has alot of lyrical emotion, drive, and darn good innovative riffs in it; so it fits quite nicely.
The second trait of a good Metalcore band is good guitar tone. KsE punches you in the face with dark foreboding drop-C and drop-D growl. I love it. I dare say they have the best hard guitar tone I have heard since Chevelle.
The album’s title track As Daylight Dies has all the typical Killswitch pinch-harmonic squeal and character, but songs like My Curse remind me of End of Heartache’s character. Truthfully the whole album sounds and feels alot like End of Heartache, and that’s probably a big reason why I like it. Both are very elegant and well composed albums. Other tracks like Still Beats Your Name, Eye of The Storm, and Reject Yourself are in your face Metalcore filled with plenty of double-kicks and rolling arpeggios. One track that stands out to me is Desperate Times, which has a Deftones experimental twist on it reminicient of Change (In the House of Flies).
As Daylight Dies has plenty of good riffs, harmony, and blazing rhythms coupled with some End of Heartache style ballads. Alot of the songs sound like they should have been on a double disk EoH release — a complaint of some reviewers on Amazon — but to me is still definitely worth an 8. Rock on KsE!
Linux is a pretty darn cool operating system. First off, it has the best plural ever. Second, the progress that various distributions have made in the past couple of years is amazing. I was first introduced to Linux my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I thought it was pretty cool, mainly because it was hailed as the ultimate Geek operating system–a title which has been ripped away by Mac OS10 recently. But when the novelty wore off I found myself rebooting the lab machines into the more familiar safe zone of Windows XP.
Recently, I installed SuSE 10.1 on my machine as a second operating system mostly because my research for Mother Tech involves cross compiling for a router and Linux–a task, to my knowledge, next to impossible to configure or too marred in buggy cross platform libraries to accomplish on Windows. Along with SuSE 10.1 came my chance to install and configure a nifty windowing system called XGL/Compiz. It took me forever to get my Nvidia 6600GT and my Samsung monitor set up and working, but after installing and configuring XGL/Compiz to run with Gnome was minimally painful.
I couldn’t really take enough screen shots to demonstrate the features and perks of XGL. Those of you running SuSE should install it via YaST and try it out, and everyone else should download the KDE based Mandriva Live CD (requires a bittorrent client) and run it. Don’t worry, it won’t install anything unless you tell it to. SuSE users running two monitors may have some issues with window decorations disappearing, but the problem was remedied when I switched from dual head to a single head display and reconfigured my xfig.conf via SaX2. No dual monitors, but XGL has enough desktops to keep me satisfied.
My favorite feature is the ability to hold a hotkey–set to the Windows key on my system, and be able to click anywhere on a window and drag it. It’s much easier than having to hone in on the title bar of a window dodging menu bars, resize hot spots and whatnot. I also enjoy the magical F9 key from Mac OSX–Mac nerds, you know what I’m talking about, and the ability to set the transparency on any window by holding CTRL and scrolling the mouse wheel.
Overall, XGL/Compiz had greatly increased my enjoyment of SuSE Linux 10.1, despite the fact that I spent an hour trying to install VLC and gave up due to RPM dependency hell, the extra buttons on my Logitech mouse don’t work, and my sound card isn’t supported. We’ll revisit this topic in a couple of weeks after the XGL glamor has worn off.