Exams, Conferences, War, Peace and other events

My secondary school education has finished. At 11:45, Monday November 26th, I finished my last exam. I won’t be getting my results until mid-December, but I am happy with my performance over the past few weeks. The conclusion of the exam has meant that I can now devote more time to organising the Gentoo Mini-conf.

Plans for it are going well. Interesting talks have been lined up, just in the stages of adding them to the schedule at the moment. It is likely that there will be a 25 or 50 minute slot still available due to changes in the timetable, but another Call for Presentations will be put out if that is the case. Besides talks, I need to find some local producers of shirts, stickers and other cool merchandise 😀

The extra free time has enabled me to start reading for pleasure again. I decided that if I am reading it may as well be something of epic proportions, so I chose Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Only through one part of the first volume, but I am liking it already.

Also decided to try out KDE4 from the overlay yesterday. First impressions are not very good, since Plasma in RC1 is very much unusable. The applications however seemed stable, and at least as usable as their KDE3 counterparts, if not more so. I will test it out some more this weekend and write a more thorough review.

Long due update

I have been neglecting my blog, but felt that I should try to keep it current with happenings in my life…

  • Bought a D-Link DI-524 wireless router, and am happy to say it worked perfectly out of the box.
  • Entrusted with Administrator powers on our forums. Now spammers have more to fear :>
  • Became a member of the Proctors, which was certainly an interesting experience.
  • Found a 3GHz P4 box with a gigabyte of RAM and a nVidia 5700 video card, but not much else. Still needs some work, and it isn’t playing nice turning on at the moment, but it soon should.
  • Managed to get my older 2.66GHz booting, but am having trouble getting Gentoo/FreeBSD working on it.
  • Finally, today is my birthday, eighteen years young 😀

Rest in Peace, WAG54G

Seems the modem/router I had been happily using for months decided to give up the ghost while I was trying to get a wireless network running in my house.

This annoys me hugely, because yesterday I spent about 12 hours trying to get wifi working, only to discover tonight that the hardware was broken, so it wasn’t a problem I should have spent all that time on :-/

So, tomorrow I need to go buy a new hub/switch, so that I can have multiple computers on my LAN.

RIP (20062301):
Linksys WAG54G v2

My Head Feels Like a Frisbee

I got the results to some of my year 12 exams back; and they weren’t exactly what I was hoping for. It is a strange experience to realise that your efforts were not rewarded as you might have hoped.

My head feels like a frisbee; twice its normal size. Feels like a football and someone’s moved the goal posts. Everything is slightly out of joint and weird; disconnected. I had to hold onto the walls.

Such is the state I am in. While thinking about my results go through phases of:

  • depression
  • denial
  • apathy
  • anger
  • acceptance
  • contempt

Well, I will try to look on the bright side of life, and take each day as it comes. Luckily, I should have plenty to distract me with over the summer holidays. That and the prospects of next year should keep me somewhat happy.