So when I heard about the new Terminator: Salvation movie, I wasn't that excited. I saw the original two movies as a young kid-- watching them with my pops as some of my first R rated movies. I thought they were pretty darn cool then-- the time travel was iffy but the production design and overall feel of the movie was pretty sweet.

I also saw the third one, which was good in a generic action movie sense. Lots of explosions and badass robots and shaky scifi elements were good enough for me, not to mention the blast from the past. But seeing a sort of lame trailer for a fourth one was intriguing enough to make a mental note that "sometime" a new Terminator is coming out, but nothing to get worked up about.

That all changed when I saw the latest extended trailer for the movie:

Pretty much amazing. It looks much more gritty and personal than the previous movies, and hopefully it can add a huge amount of depth to the story. It is to be considered a "reboot" of the series, taking it a new direction. And Christian Bale is definitely one of the best action stars that can not only look like a hardass but pull in audiences with his compelling acting.

This movie will be SICK.

So I finished this post about 2 minutes ago and hit back instead of 'post' and I'm having to rewrite it. What a bummer. Anyway--I haven't updated my blog in over four months-- so much for maintaining an up-to-date website!

I have always had a "round-robin" approach to my hobbies though, so this isn't entirely unexpected. I seem to choose about two of the ten or so things I could be wasting my time on every 4-6 months... and stick with those. Sometimes I'm really into blogging, web design, and web programming (marked by frequent website design changes or blog posts), and sometimes I'm into photography (though it's been a while)... and sometimes I just enjoy wasting my life by being a nerd and playing computer games.

I also recently purchased a motorcycle (expect riding-related posts soon), and I'm getting ready to graduate from UT and work full-time at Dell. However, unlike a lot of people, I won't use the excuse of "I don't have time", because I feel like 90% of those people that say that really mean "I don't feel like making time" but don't want to take responsibility for not doing something.

So to motivate myself to keep posting (or set myself up for more quantifiable failure), here are a few topics I hope to post about soon:

• Personal web presence
• Motorcycling
• Free will and faith
• More high school poetry
• Modern physics for dummies
• What makes a good movie
• A few of my weird dreams
  

Like always, only time will tell if I will actually get around to doing this!

Nicolle recently brought to my attention that searching for "Marty McFly" in Google will not only return the expected slew of websites about the famous time traveling teenager, but also a handful of images... including one of ME.

My Halloween costume for sophomore year shows up for some reason as one of the top four images IN THE WORLD... according to Google (I'm in the fourth image).

Wild.

ONE-POINT-TWENTY-ONE GIGAWATTS!!!

I fucking love BTTF.

A few weeks ago, I thought I'd give Linux a legitimate try. Having spent a huge amount of time working with Linux machines both on campus and remotely, I felt I was pretty comfortable with the environment and the operating system overall. I was attracted to the power of the command line, the extraordinary modular design, the flexibility, the amazing file system design, and of course, the overall nerd factor. I started out with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), but eventually switched over to OpenSUSE 11.0.

So I setup a new partition on my system drive... and away I went.

The Fonts Look Like Ass

The very first thing I noticed when my computer booted to the Linux Gnome desktop is that the fonts look like booboo. At first I wasn't very concerned, because it wasn't until Vista that TrueType (a subpixel font rendering engine from Microsoft) was enabled by default. But even after messing with the settings and trying Linux's version of subpixel font rendering, the results were still less that pleasing. Horrible gamma correction, shitty hinting options... etc.

The most common advice when trying to find a solution was to download Microsoft's fonts (especially the new Vista fonts). Kind of ironic, huh? Even then, the fonts still looked like vomit to me. And what was worse, the overall font sizes had to be larger to remain clear, when on Windows I could lower the size and still maintain legibility. Everything in Gnome had to be bigger... effectively reducing my screen real estate.

Free Software Blows

There are exceptions, of course. Firefox, for example... is a great browser. But there are NO true alternatives to the Microsoft Office Suite, the Adobe Creative Suite, or Microsoft Visual Studio.

The Gimp (the shitty GNU image editor/Photoshop replacement) is under featured, buggy, and slower than Photoshop. I tried to give this app a chance, but it's pretty horrible. OpenOffice looks and feels like Office 95 or worse, and is less stable than Office 2007 SP1. It's also slower to open, with a lot of rendering bugs from my existing documents.

And there is NOTHING comparable to the ease of use of Outlook 2007. I use it to seamlessly check my email from my UT account and my Gmail, as well as synchronize my calendar and contacts via Bluetooth with my phone, and keep up-to-date on my friends via their shared Outlook calendars. Nothing on Linux can do that... without a horribly complex and counter-intuitive process that half-assedly works half the time (25% efficiency?).

None of the billions of music apps that are out there even remotely compare to the stability, speed, and aesthetic appeal of Winamp or iTunes either... so hopefully you don't like listening to music much.

Of course, there was nothing even remotely as powerful as the SONAR 8 + FL Studio 8 combo I have running under Vista. With Vista, my latencey for my outboard sound hardware was about 5.9ms, with Linux (and lmms), it was around 320ms¹.

And I don't care what everyone else says, VIm is not a replacement for Visual Studio.

You can't really blame them... of course a nerd-run project that is in perpetual beta is not going to hold a candle to the products of multi-billion dollar companies like Microsft, Apple, and Adobe... but the Linux fans need to stop acting like this isn't the case.

Anyway...

Technically, Linux is a great operating system. This website is actually run on a Linux server and is extremely reliable... but I think that's as far as it goes. Sure it's fun to geek around with compiling all your own shit and what not, but most people (even most geeks) will just want an OS that works out of the box.

Linux is NOT a consumer-level desktop OS for a power user, home audio enthusiast, productivity geek, digital artists, film producer, songwriter/music producer, or most average people.

Maybe for old granny, who doesn't need to do anything but check her email and look up cross-stitching patterns on the internet, Linux is good because you don't have to buy the Microsoft products. But... what if she needs to print something? Good luck getting the drivers to work.

Or maybe old granny knows how to download custom drivers and compile them herself?

So I'm sitting here at work (tutoring) and since no students are coming in... I'm getting some work done. Well, was getting some work done until I decided to update my shit blog for the first time in over a month.

Anyway, so I'm reading up on the MAX5154 12-bit DAC chip that I'm planning on using for one of my labs and I decided to bust out my 80 GB Zune. The Zune, by the way, is a seriously underrated MP3 player; I like the interface better than the latest iPod. Also, the display uses a highly reflective screen background with white text, so even in the horrible glare fest that is a Texas afternoon, the display is perfectly legible.

Back to tutoring-- the tutors sit at a huge 30-person conference table and wait for students to walk in and sign up. Even with only 20 people or so, the room quickly gets VERY loud.

So I queue up T.I.'s latest album (Paper Trails) and unroll my headphones. As I bring the buds up to my ears, the buzz of activity... tutors talking to students, some guy drawing on the whiteboard, and a few frustrated freshmen all instantly disappear... replaced by the phat production of 'Paper Trails' slamming into my eardrums at 761 MPH. I ceased to be part of the room.

I no longer have any ability to effectively interact with anyone else... all I can do is look around the room and imagine what is going on. Like watching a TV show... everything is so one-way and inaccessible.

After a few hours of listening to music... it's time to leave. Popping the buds out of my ear, I return to being part of the world. Turns out the token stoner EE guy has been bitching about not getting a sandwich he ordered an hour ago from Jimmy Johns... and of course those frustrated freshman are 10% closer to switches their major to liberal arts.

And so for two and a half hours, I wasn't part of their world. Nobody talked to me... I couldn't hear them anyway. Their stories and interactions served as nothing more than a slightly-out-of-focus backdrop to my life while I starred at this screen.

I wonder if I really missed anything?