Damn you, EZproxy!

January 31st, 2008 • chatter

Like most academic institutions, FAU uses EZproxy to allow remote access to various journals and academic databases. It’s easy to use right? Hell, it has to be, it’s got “Ez” in the name! Well I’ll be damned if I couldn’t get it to work in 4 browsers (well, 3 if you really count flock as Firefox) across 2 computers and neither one got me signed into JSTOR. Which sucks because I really need to access JSTOR for two particular documents for Monday’s Anthropology of Islam class. Their EZproxy page has some nice but ultimately useless directions, no wonder the kids at my old job (which was another University) hate trying to use this junk and opted to come on campus. Looks like I’ll be delaying my Monday paper until Saturday when I can go to campus and print my journal excerpts.

I mean, how difficult is it to actually get EZproxy to work remotely? I like to think I’m fairly computer literate given that I’m a systems administrator and I run various proxies throughout the day but this is the only one in years I’ve never gotten to work. I can set up servers and complex wireless networks but this simply escapes me.

What gives, dammit?

UPDATE: Turns out you have to actually go to the library at FAU first and activate your library card before you can use EZproxy. It’d be nice if they explicitly stated that somewhere. Even the librarian I spoke to tonight stated they “get a lot of calls” from people not able to log on, presumably with the same issue. Also, thanks to Chris Zagar for contacting me for further assistance, what a nice guy!

How the hell did I get two weeks behind?

January 30th, 2008 • 1 comment chatter

Since last Monday was MLK day, we didn’t have class naturally. And according to our syllabus, we didn’t have any mandatory reading to do either so how did I end up not reading the material for last night that, according to my syllabus, I wasn’t supposed to read until last night? I still remain confused about the whole ordeal. Now I’ve got probably 200 pages to read over the weekend not including the Clifford Geertz-based essay due in two weeks which I need to start as well. I’m starting to remember why I only wanted one degree and not pursue another one, which obviously didn’t work out.

In other news, I’m plowing through The Ancestor’s Tale faster than normal which makes me worry that I’m not going to retain as much information as I normally do when I’m only reading one book at a time. Since I won’t be selling the book back, I can of course read it again at a later date but geez, I want to remember this stuff NOW! I also heard that McCain took Florida, by what means of absurdity I have no idea. He’s pandering to a (non-existent) fear of radial Islamic attacks on Florida and all the older population worrying about their Social Security checks every month. I was floored by his offerings in the debate from last week because he’s clearly stuck in the past and without his advisors, would have no idea it’s 2008 and not 1988.

Everyone was pegging Romney to take Florida and I’m glad he didn’t but I didn’t want McCain to take the primary at all, he’s seriously out of step with many Americans — but not Floridians I take it. Since I’m not registered to vote in FL — yet — I have no room to complain about the results. I’ve got my absentee ballot for my home state rushed off to the Circuit Clerk and should have my primary form early next week only to have to do it all over again in March when my state votes again. After that I’ll be registering to vote here and bidding farewell to my forlorn old precinct of voting.

Tonight’s dinner was a delicious little farfalle pasta salad with sun-dried tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, delicious Kalamatas all topped off with a nice Greek Feta dressing. It was our first of two vegetarian dishes we’ll be having this week, I just need to plan out the other one. Yesterday, I found out I’ve now lost almost 21lbs in just a few short months, I’m now down to 195.5lbs. I weighed about 190 when I moved here nearly five years ago so it’s very exciting for me to lose this weight as I spent my entire teen years another 30lbs lighter than I am now, hopped up on who-know’s-what supplements and mandatory weight training for sports. I won’t be dropping back down to that weight again, although in doing so I’d be able to wear about 10 pairs of awesome boot cut jeans once more, because I can’t imagine being rail-thin again especially without any muscle mass to back it up.

I need to get to sleep and break in our new memory foam mattress topper, hopefully we’ll sleep better on it tonight than last night, where I felt like I was going to roll off the bed all night because of the bulge in the topper due to packaging.

Culinary delights and absentee voting

January 28th, 2008 • chatter

What a busy night it’s been! I’d been cooking, on and off, since about 5:30PM and trying to find the appropriate absentee ballot for the Super Tuesday voting going on in my home state. I made a succulent dinner of pan-seared chicken and lamb, organic snapped green beans with sugar, tasty baby carrots and what was supposed to steamed broccoli but turned out to be broccoli for geriatrics. It was my first foray with our new pressure cooker so I was disappointed by the broccoli –which I’d hyped myself up to eat all week– but floored by the carrots. One out of five dishes isn’t a bad screw up, I’ve done much worse in the past! We’ve got enough chicken and green beans for leftovers tomorrow and I think my girlfriend will be cooking up the carrots with a honey glaze or something similar.

I’ve also been on the search for the proper absentee ballot for my home county which has resulted in me finding two ballots: a sample one and the actual absentee ballot. I find the absentee ballot odd because it lacks any candidates, only straight party voting. So how am I going to vote for Ron Paul when I check off “Republican”? Or should I be sly with some magic of photoshoppery and merge the two to make a useful ballot? I’ve got my dad in search of the real ballot so hopefully I can actually exercise my right to vote properly.

Tomorrow means I get to finally return to class after a week off due to MLK Day and the debates from Thursday. I’m not looking forward to going right now but it’s also 12:30AM and the only thing I’m looking forward to is sleeping. Luckily, I’ve got my paper written and I plan on plowing through my chapter of The Ancestor’s Tale Tuesday night if not tonight. But I’m just not terribly in the mood to drag my laptop into bed to make notes and I can’t seem to find my pen so I could write my notes, a problem indeed.

I think I’m going to go to bed, I lost all train of thought.

Homophobic church to picket Heath Ledger’s funeral

January 24th, 2008 • 2 comments idiocy

They say it’s because he “promoted homosexuality” in Brokeback Mountain. I guess the line between the escapism of film and promotion of hatred is very thin. The Westboro Baptist Church made a horribly stupid flyer announcing their new scene of a hate crime. Why is it that I can call a group of drag queens a “bunch of fags” and it’s a hate crime but these people get away with it without any fear of legal retort? If God hates America, I surely hopes he hates ignorant people like this even more for “doing it” in his name.

Why can’t these idiots put their time to better things like feeding the homeless (instead of admonishing them) or doing something “good” for a change. It goes to show that humanists care more about humans than these Christians do about their fellow man.

I’ve dumped flock…again

January 23rd, 2008 • chatter

This is now the second time that I’ve dumped Firefox-cum-social-integration browser flock, this time for reasons other than “it needs a lot of work.” It still needs some work when it comes to various extensions and the UI is still kind of stuck in the Netscape field but mostly, over the atrociously tiny font used by default. Luckily for users, this is not changeable by any option available to you in the Options screen and why it’s set to something as tiny as 9pt (or whatever it actually is), it’s too damned small for anything smaller than a 15″ screen.

I also dumped it because of all the background services that I never use, like its integration with Flickr or Twitter. Some of this is based on the fact that the default size of the sidebar for integrated services is too large and cannot be made smaller –which looks great on my already cramped 12″ screen– but because I haven’t used them since I installed flock and configured the services. I posted to my blog once from flock, never uploaded any pictures to Flickr from flock, and used the built-in Twitter client perhaps three times. All of these background services only served to suck up precious battery life and RAM. Battery life is less of an issue now that my 3rd party extended battery is here but I’ve been noticing a lot of slowdown in generally using flock now. Page loads aren’t slowed but page viewing was getting slow and at times, tab switching was slow. Flock solved many of my memory leak issues with Firefox 2 but with Firefox 3 fixing a huge number of those, I can’t see any reason to continue using a browser chock full of services I don’t make use of.

My use of Firefox 3 was nice and snappy, with the memory usage to match pre-1.5 FF so I can no longer continue using a battery-sucking-but-RAM-freeing browser any longer. I’ve got enough battery for hours and I can kill Firefox to reclaim that memory. Too bad I can’t kill flock to reclaim my precious battery life!

Green or light green?

January 20th, 2008 • 1 comment chatter

In the last 6-8 months, we’ve really ramped up our efforts to go as green as we can feasibly afford to, financially not physically. The steps are simple enough that just about anyone can do it: use CFLs (compact fluorescent lights), recycle/reuse what you can, buy sustainable/Fair Trade certified/certified organic products (from furniture to foods), reduce energy usage or use sustainable energies. Things like going off the grid and complete sustainability is far too impractical for most people but it’s what is typically called “total (or heavy) green”, doing what you can do is “light green”. We’ve chosen the latter with huge success. Tonight alone we threw out 50gal. of trash, 14gal. of which we did not or could not recycle so we simply reduced our disposable waste output by 75%, which was my lowest prediction on what we would end up doing. Recycling 36gal. of waste only cost us $8US for two large 18gal. bins which we had to buy since we cannot be provided new recycling bins by the city.

Going light green is the most feasible option for people, financially, because it requires such slight changes. Going total green is a heavy cost in both time and money so there’s a much bigger trade off between doing what you can and doing everything you can. Just converting to more sustainable energies will cost you at least six figures for a moderate to total conversion and doesn’t even take into account the lifestyle changes you’ll have to enact just to do it. When going light green, you barely have to change your lifestyle so it’s easy for anyone to do it. I mean, $8 for recycling bins is very cheap compared to purchasing solar panels and wiring your home for an alternate energy source even with a grant or assisted funding (you’ll easily run up a $20,000 bill just on materials alone). I’m going at this a bit more gung ho than my girlfriend as I’m looking at every little thing in order to cut down on excessive waste, from water to electricity. I’m now taking navy-style showers and cutting power to as many devices as I can during the night so this can help balance out when she takes a long shower or leaves the TV on.

We’re now working to take this to a larger scale, outside of ourselves. It’s going to be a challenge but we’ve got some ideas cooking that will at least help other people if we can’t affect the segment of the population we’re hoping for. We just have to start making time for these projects which, in my opinion, can be far more important than our current schedules include activity-wise.

Dammit Dell

January 17th, 2008 • chatter

I ordered a new laptop battery on Friday the 11th and the order was never approved so I emailed their Sales Department (I’ll get crappy support by phoning or emailing, I’m not wasting my time on the phone) and after 4 days of waiting, they say I never ordered anything. Interesting, I have a purchase ID and I can dig up the purchase receipt so I know I damn well ordered something. I’m just going to go buy a 3rd party battery now for half the cost of an OEM battery since I’m tired of pissing up the wrong tree.

This was more than likely the death knell for me as I doubt I’ll end up purchasing any more Dell products from now on. Their steady decline in quality and rapid increase of useless tech support has long since soured myself and many other people who once praised Dell products.

Another MacWorld come and gone

January 15th, 2008 • chatter

And all us power users want is a 13″ MacBook Pro not this frilly little MacBook Air. Apple has still neglected to fill the role the 12″ PowerBook once held and more than likely will until next MacWorld — let’s face it, WWDC 2008 will probably bring updates for the MBP line but not what we want. It’ll bring sexy new multitouch trackpads and fancy new illuminated keyboards and more environmentally-friendly screens but it won’t cover up the crushing feeling of being let down for another year in a row.

The battery in this Dell is waning fast, they still haven’t approved my order for a new one (“we don’t have record of that order”, that’s funny because I do), and Apple dropped the ball. I won’t pony up money for the over-priced Sony laptops, which are crap, maybe I’ll start looking at HP again, which are crap as well.

I just wanted a new laptop, Steve. God dammit.

The first week is OVER!

January 12th, 2008 • chatter

So I’ve survived my first week of college classes for the first time in two years and boy, was it a yawner. My Monday class is Anthropology of Islam which is basically being taught to educate the almost overwhelmingly ignorant masses about the Islamic faith. Out of a class of approximately 30, 4 of us actually knew anything about Islam that didn’t come from mainstream media and I suspect at least half of the 4 read up on things before the class but didn’t delve into much detail, merely trying to brown nose through the first class. I haven’t read up on Islam in about 5 or 6 months, barely cracked my free copy of the Qu’ran, but I’m still heads above the rest who think all Muslims are out to kill us. I actually imagine I’d see a similar disconnection if it were a class on Christianity or Judaism and since there is one offered on the latter, I’m going to take it and see especially given the huge Jewish population of FAU and Boca Raton as a whole. We ended up discussing mostly how little we knew about Islam and its early history for the bulk of the class and then the professor whittled away at putting us to sleep with a rather detailed history based on previous discussion. I’m now trying to plow through approximately half of Rethinking Islam by Mohammed Arkoun in order to write a paper due on Monday. I need to re-read most of what I’ve already read considering I’m reading the book like a regular book, expecting each successive chapter to build on the first. Much to my chagrin the book truly reads like a 140ppg. questionnaire and must be read as such. It’s a very dry read.

My second class –which is required for my major– is Human Evolution and the class itself feels like trip back to my senior year of high school, during lunch. I can count the number of people over 21 on both hands, including the teacher. It’s going to be a standard evolution class although instead of Darwin, we’re reading Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale. The professor really clings to Dawkins for some reason, I know the man’s a great biologist but this is to the point of fanboyism and it’s kind of scary. There’ll be 15 weeks of doldrums and me attempting to make a cladogram that doesn’t suck and plowing through From Lucy To Language because it’s got awesome pictures.

I overheard that Forensic Anthropology is a waste of a class since it was “more CSI than anthropology.” My guess is these kids don’t see how intertwined forensics and anthropology really are and that’s why they said it was a waste. What were they truly expecting from a forensics-based class, Indiana Jones-style field work? If they question why a class was a waste and why getting their degree in Anthropology is a waste, it makes me wonder why they’re even majoring in the damn subject to begin with. There are much much easier majors at FAU to waste your time and money on, let us who care about science go on and learn.

Who to help: cancer patients or the environment?

January 9th, 2008 • chatter

For almost 2 years now, I’ve grown my hair from a short 1″ buzz to about 14″ of headbanging mess. I was originally growing out my hair to donate to Locks of Love for cancer patients who need wigs and I’ve yet to donate the needed 10″ of hair. But last night I found something new, something that threw me for a loop, it’s oil soaking mats made of hair from Matter of Trust. I’m now having a real moral dilemma: help someone regain their self-esteem and improve their self-image or help potentially thousand of people and sea creatures.

In the last year I’ve really turned a lot of my personal focus to sustainability and going as green as I can which has put a real hamper on my helping-chemo-patients agenda. By now I could’ve donated twice and helped two people but would that outweigh helping clean up oil spills, reclaiming dirtied waters, and doing so in a wholly biodegradable way? I’m very torn on the matter as of now. I’ve done quite a bit around the apartment to try and make it as energy efficient as I can, same with our vehicles, but should this long standing endeavor (I’ve been rather environmentally friendly since I was 12 or so) outweigh something as simple as helping someone simply feel better about themselves?

For the first time in years, I’m truly torn over a choice.