News and Notes



« Fri.03.10.2000 »

I lulled you people into another false sense of timing, didn't I? Just like the last time, where I had you thinking I would only update this page on Wednesdays, I tricked you all again into thinking I had moved to Thursday updates. (Please note: This whole thing is not meant as a sick joke. It's only that those times are when I actually found a few minutes to update it, the fact that they were on whatever day of the week notwithstanding. However, it is kinda fun to make people think I'm playing a sick joke on them, when in reality I'm not.)

Half the reason I am updating after only a day is to check that Linux didn't screw everything up. Apparently, Linux's kwrite text editor uses Unicode or ISO-8859 text (not sure which one), while Winblows Notepad is only capable of ASCII. So, when I went to open the files in Notepad, I encountered all these strange characters in places I should have seen only carriage returns. From now on, whenever I have to edit my pages, I'll do so in Winblows -- it's easier to edit in Winblows and copy to Linux, rather than edit in Linux and copy to Winblows. The final changes I have to make after copying over are far less in Linux than in Winblows, not to mention that Linux is actually able to read my Winblows file system. If only Gates could see the light ...

After much deliberation over the last two weeks, I've decided to live out here over the summer. One of the big impetuses in that decision was realizing that it's actually $350 cheaper than I had originally thought. With the parents making me pay "monthly rent" (although the 'U' won't actually charge them monthly), money is a consideration, but I realized that my "monthly payment" comes out to almost $100 less than I thought it would be. Assuming I even get 25 hours a week (a reasonable assumption), I shouldn't have any problems. It's not a desire to screw the parents, or screw the house, or anything like that; it's basically two things: (a) Allows me to continue my current job, uninterrupted, and makes that very easy on me, and (b) I want to at least try this idea of living alone for the summer out. If it doesn't work, I'll just chalk it up to experience and figure out a better solution for summer 2001.