On the matter of a really long vacation
By now I’ve lost count of how long ago my last class was. The strike has begun immediately after passover, and is certainly beginning to take its toll. For one thing, I have no homework deadlines - a rare situation indeed for the Technion student. Furthermore, contemplations are rising about whether or not this coming summer semester will be held, as the current semester will most likely leak into it. This is of special interest to me, as I’m behind on my degree, which is problematic because of my military scholarship. This is shaping up to be the second time in which, while I’ve been authorized by the military to take a summer semester for completion, I am not able to. However, one cannot trivially dismiss this strike; in a country which is known worldwide mostly for its technological exports and frequent bloodbaths, one shouldn’t take the matter of tuition lightly.
The vacation was not, however, boring - I got to spend a lot of time with my lovely girlfriend, a chance to see friends I have not seen in a long time, and a lot of posts racked up in various forums. The vacation actually expanded far enough to contain independence day, so I managed to experience the closest thing to a hangover I’d ever had (But that was some great scotch). Actually, independence day could have been truly superb; the whole thing got me thinking about what the perfect night out would be: It’s obviously best with my girlfriend. It would probably start with a rock show of sorts, continue with food and beer, and end in my girlfriend’s bed. Better yet - if I’m in the show. Better still - if there’s no reason to get up early the following day.
Another item of interest is that I’ve joined a band. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up the 3-hours-on-Saturday rehearsals. It’s a “Trash Metal” band which has evidently had really bad experience with bass players. Unfortunately, we seem to have a myspace page. It looks… myspaceish. However, I really think the group has potential, as well as excellent influences. Furthermore, I’m an attention whore :D. Hopefully I’ll be able to help influence the band into more of a heavy-metal direction by harassing them with melodic basslines.
Very little geek news this time, other than the fact that Feisty Fawn is out. My verdict - get it. It’s awesome. Period. Suspend works much better, NetworkManager is now installed by default, a lot of things have really been polished, and - can you believe it - Sudoku :)! If you already run Ubuntu, I’d advise against using the update manager - it works, but it takes a long time, and cannot run unattended. Also, a word of caution to server admins though - sqlite3 is the new default, so if you have sqlite2 databases you’ll need to convert them (use the sqlite and sqlite3 binaries to do this) - otherwise you’ll get “file is not a database, or is encrypted” errors.
Whew - that’s much better. My thoughts have been depleted into the bits and bytes before you. I’ll just plug a friend’s blog and hit the publish button now ;)