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December 25, 2006
Resolution tracking
Last year:
--Grad School AND THE FUTURE: Over the course of the next year, I need to narrow down my focus and start sniffing out realistic and enjoyable job opportunities.--Activism: Also, focus down on a few topics/causes for real activism. Give the ACLU and EFF some money, and make this more of a priority than it has been. Of course, continue occasional blog/rants filtering through BBC, DailyKOS and similar.
--DC: If I stick with international dev, DC will probably be a decently important city in my life, so I need to make peace with it and find more things about it that I really and truly like.
--Travel: I also want to get out of the country again, I've been gettin itchy. There are still-nebulous plans to head down to Nica this summer, and I need to work with my job and find a travel grant or two to get that to work out.
--Keep in better contact: a LOT of people have kinda fallen off my radar. Basically everyone not on LJ or IM... I need to be a bit better about staying in touch.
--Fitness: The last month of finals and projects and cold and thanksgiving really didn't do much good for me. I've been good about staying active in DC and walking a lot, but I need to work on eating less and maybe getting some non-walking exercise in.
Grad School and FUTURE - some limited progress on future. Still mostly a process of elimination, a few leads. I've made some peace with DC - living in Granola Park has helped, and finding a few gems of DC life on my own have also helped. I still haven't made it to any good protests, but gave the EFF some cash and tried to give the ACLU some, too, but their credit card system was b0rken, and I never got around to it.
As for travel, I made it out to Cali in May for a wedding and Nica in August for 2 great weeks of hard work and great exploration. That scratched the travel itch enough for... well, not very long, really.
I kept in some decent contact. but that faded out as I got buried in books during the semester(s). Caught up with lots of Peace Corps folk at the May wedding.
Fitness came and went. I used the weight bench we had in my old place on occasion, but didn't really do great. I recovered from last T'giving/xmas, but then the spring semester really dragged on me. Summer was good and this fall I've been reasonably active, too. Having more control over my kitchen has led to better eating habits and grocery lists, and my new neighborhood is much more walkable, all of which help.
So all in all I did OK on last year. Partially because I set reasonable goals :) All the more reason to keep that up. Y2k7 resolutions coming soon!
Posted by griffjon at 10:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 24, 2006
Looking dapper
So, I finally took the plunge and continued the upgrade process on my Linux laptop. As background, I don't have the space or the time in any one place (since y2k, I've lived in 10 different places in 2 different states and 3 different countries!), so I own 2 laptops; one is a 2Ghz machine I run Win XPsp2 on, it's a Dell Inspiron that's caused me enough despair, and is heavy enough that I don't lug it around much, and the other is a 300mhz Dell Latitude CPi that is lightweight and low-power, and I drag it's indestructible box around everywhere (I've seen a similar CPx laptop be run over by an SUV and still boot - no screen, but everything else worked, even the touchpad!). The CPi has had a variety of Linux distros on it (it was bought with Win2k), and I've settled on (k)Ubuntu. Ubuntu is definitely too heavy for the thing, but it's the only debian-based distro I've found that has the right magic dust to work with the sound card. Every major DSL release I download a LiveCD and try it out, but not luck yet.
Anyway, it was stuck on Hoary Hedgehog for a while, but for a variety of reasons, most of which I'll admit center around usability, I finally brought it to Breezy Badger and this holiday season I've upped it to Dapper Drake. The move to Drake took for.ev.er - almost 24 hours, admittedly with a few very long waits for me to decide on overwriting config files as I walked away, went to sleep, etc.
However, it's happily purring along, with a few improvements that have been visible - the Synaptics touchpad drivers are better, and they feature a quick diasble-annoying-tapping option. Suspend has been amazingly improved, no more scary-screens, or instability (that I've noticed). It sucked a lot more of my HD usage, so I had to clean up some packages that have no business being on here (Celestia? Yeah, that'll work well with 300mhz and 128MB RAM!).
This is all in training to move whole-hog to Linux on my next computer purchase. I have zero interest in Vista, and while Mac is nice, it's a bit pricey. 'sides, I like this whole OSS thing.
Posted by griffjon at 07:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 06, 2006
WTF?
The Dept. of Health and Human Services, on behalf of the president, would like to ask you to not have sex if you're single and under 30.
...Can we figure out some secession plan now?
Update:
From the NYT, via CNN, 95% of Americans are doomed to burn in hell, er, I mean, engage in premarital sex:More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past. ... "The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government's funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds," Finer said ... "It would be more effective," Finer said, "to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active -- which nearly everyone eventually will."
The Bush adminstration has responded to critiques on their HHS anti-premarital-sex report and their absintence-only sex-ed:
Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defended the abstinence-only approach for teenagers."One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity," he said. "The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease."
He insisted there was no federal mission against premarital sex among adults.
"Absolutely not," Horn said. "The Bush administration does not believe the government should be regulating or stigmatizing the behavior of adults."
...So is this a new policy about not regulating adult activity, or do you not consider homosexuals (or, say, terminally ill patients wishing to end their lives) "adult"?
Posted by griffjon at 07:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack