GITI’s Biggest Problem

GITI’s biggest problem as far as development and module completion is my inability to create an effective and useful UI. I can’t see in my head how things should look and outside of the first few modules I don’t really know how I would really want to present things anyway.

Cookbook is the present module that is being created. The first few ideas for the module called for something very similar to the way the other modules presently look, with an intention to change the look later. The problems are that the module ends up looking very empty when implemented that way and also, I have a habit of giving modules my intentions and then not remembering to go back and complete what I intended (see about 4 attempts at ToDo and Schedule). I am having a hard time with cookbook because I am making it more graphical and I have many ideas for what I want to see in it, but those things are not as simple to create as the things that I have done many times on other modules. This module is different because it has to be both a GITI module and a useful individual app, and I am also trying to make sure that things I create are not too hard to port into a desktop application as well (if for no other reason, then just to defeat the cloud concept).

The Scope of a Blog

This blog began as a way for me to record events during my college career. I began as a very frightened freshman, and had a lot of anxieties to expose to myself and to my readers. I have grown out of my anxieties and have become more of my own person since then. Things still bother me, but those things are no longer a limitation. I now am faced with this blog and its purpose for existence. This blog was originally supposed to reach a conclusion when I graduated, but having taken a somewhat different academic path and my academic career being longer than expected, that may no longer be the best indicator of the longevity of this blog. Through this blog I have learned that I am not in a bubble and that my world is more than just mine. I suspect there are less readers now than when the blog began, because I have a lot less friends, but as Maslow concluded, self-actualized people do not have a lot of friends, they keep very few, who are also actualized or are constantly close to it.

This blog has seen a lot of changes in me. It has seen me go from being a psychology major to an MIS major to an SIS major and now back around to being a psychology major. Our lives place us in a lot of strange situations when we are young. My youth has not entirely left me and I am still figuring out who I am. I have not failed the self identity crisis (Erickson), I am still working towards resolving who I am. This blog has helped to ensure that. For a blog that has helped form who I am, do I choose to retire it, or do I choose to simply let it go on as it is as a public record of who I am? I am comfortable with who I am now and I feel that this blog reflects that.

For now the disturbing thoughts continue and so do I, Curtis.

500mm Moon Pictures

DSC_4616

Here is a shot of the moon I took tonight using the new 500mm reflector lens. The new lens is interesting. It puts a haze over everything that I photo except objects that emit their own light or have a substantial glow about them. This shot is a little blurry, but that is a result of not using the most stable tripod for the photo. My other lenses are lighter and also have their own stabilizers, this one is more basic and heavier, so it needs something more stable at the shutter speeds I am using it at. I love the lens, it is good at being what it is, a simple, straight forward manual focus lens (I like being all primal with the most modern technology sometimes). The above image is uncropped, the moon appears as it does in the image sensor, filling about 1/10 of the sensor.

The Joy of Psychology

This evening while preparing for a quiz in Theories of Personality I discovered (or brought to consciousness, depending upon if you are a Freudian or not) that I really like Psychology because it is a very modern thing. People who wrote the theories I am learning about are still alive (most of them) and the theories are still being tested and expanded. In completing a degree in mathematics, a person might only get to the things that were discovered up until around the 1500s or so, and for the average student, about 300AD is the newest material you will find in your curriculum. The theories of personality I am learning are new, some as recent as 2005, since I graduated from high school (and since I took my first psychology course). Even computer science doesn’t really see material that new. A new language sometimes, but the concepts are all fairly old. Graduate students get to learn the absolute newest, but undergrads are seldom that fortunate. There are worse topics for that I suppose, such as Art, where learning old stuff first and then new stuff later is encouraged and is the standard operating condition (you must learn how it was done the old way before you can learn the new way), and well… History.. they play a different game altogether.

Aside from the more modern material, it is also kind of fun to explore something that is so versatile. Psychology spans the area of artificial intelligence, art development and so many other areas, especially as an extension of Cognitive Psychology. Cognitive psych proves that psychology is bridging between social science and actual science. As knowledge progresses, the bridge between social science and pure science will become wider.

The biggest disadvantage to psychology is that there is very little history. In art you can call back to what has been done before and put it into cultural context and determine how we got from there to here, but in psychology, that just is not very easy, brains only last as long as people and once they are gone, so is the record of what was. All that remains is filtered notes and of course a few social relics (music for example).

Warm weather

The snow has melted and it is as if we have gone straight from winter to summer in just a few days. Luckily the nights are still cool and the weather is not too unbearable yet, but 80 degrees in March has me not looking forward to what the weather will be like in June.

With this warm weather I have gotten in the mood for planting and preparing for my summer garden. Earlier today I transplanted the last of the strawberries in the AeroGarden to different containers to finish maturing their root systems, and then I planted my tomato and pepper seeds in the starter tray as the next batch. With a little good weather I should have quite a nice garden this summer. I do not know what I am going to do with 46 tomato plants and 24 pepper plants.

Unfortunately this weekend’s weather will not hold and therefore I am stuck with 20 strawberry plants sitting on the kitchen table until the last frost (traditionally signaled by the blossoming of blackberries).

Problem with Mini Windows

I have had a less than fun day trying to install Windows XP on the Mini 9.

First, had to image the system so I could restore it, that required:

  • Getting GRUB to boot a USB key
  • Managing to make Xubuntu Intrepid Ibex Live run
  • Figuring out a terminal application that does not fit in my desktop size
  • Managing to mount an SD card to the right spot to make the app save the image

After that, it was time for the Windows install. I had prepared my installation media a few days ago, or so I thought.

First try ended up not working because of missing components (had nLite take out too much)

Second attempt began failing because the utility that is supposed to write the files for the installation was unclear about drive assignment. This was corrected by a Boot.ini edit. This install ended after it was completed and it was realized that nLite had still truncated too much, and COM+ could not run.

Third attempt ended with a mostly functional system that identifies itself as a “standard PC”, which means no ACPI. An attempt to swap HAL ended not so well.

Fourth (and hopefully final attempt) is running now. HAL has been set to the ACPI PC and all of the required OS files are present. Drivers are included and otherwise, this should be a fairly small OS installation.

Chris has been patiently working on this with me, he seems almost excited about the Mini 9 as I am.

Entering Mini World

In keeping with my mother’s tradition of strange gifts for my birthday, she has this year decided to give me the world’s smallest computer, a Dell Mini 9. It is almost like a laptop, except it only has a 4GB Solid State Drive and 512MB of RAM (although a 16GB SS D and 2GB RAM module have been ordered). Compared to my Dell 5150, which is nearly 7lbs, this thing is about 2lbs and is very easy to physically move around. I am not entirely sure what I think of the device yet.
Today I found that it is physically easily to maneuver and can be very handy for moving between sitting locations. My uncertainty comes from the part where I can not really find anything to do with the thing other than web and email. I added my blog utility (BloGTK), but it doesn’t like the wide display area of the monitor, it hangs off the bottom. Additional problems include difficulty typing on the small keyboard, which is more because of the weird layout than the size, Dell has a funny interpretation of Querty. I like the movement of the F keys to being subordinate to the Fn button, but things like the apostrophe being beside the spacebar make me a little uncomfortable.
I am also having a hard time picking an OS for the system. I thought Ubuntu might be smaller on the tiny drive (since thats what ships with it), but a custom Windows XP ends up being about 1/2 the size. I only have until the new drive arrives to decide what to install on the system (I have one more week, as the drives are backordered).
Overall, an interesting new toy.

Forbidden Sex

“Discuss, based on your own and other’s experiences, how kids learn about sex.”

This question was posted as part of the assignment for my Theories of Personality course for this week. I found myself wondering about  why sex is such a forbidden thing in society and why sexuality is often obscured and euphemized. Sex is often grouped with drugs, why is that? What is so absolutely horrible about sex that children are protected from it for so long that they feel they must experiment to find out about it?

Mid-term Grading

I used to hate mid-term grades, but that was because they used to be such a negative thing. At all institutions I attended before Fayetteville State University, mid-term grades were assigned by instructors only when a student was doing poorly in a course, such as in the D or F range. FSU makes mid-term grading mandatory for all instructors for all students. I find this to be helpful on many aspects, including the as a booster to keep me motivated for finishing off a course strong, or in the case of situations where I may have a B at midterm, it helps to see the letter in the grade system, so I can see exactly how ugly of a grade it is so that I can be motivated enough to improve that grade, no matter what it takes.

Grades are not a matter of fate, they show how hard we push ourselves academically.

Snow Cntd.

11PM – Power Fails

2AM – Fall Asleep

5:30AM – Wake up for no reason

7AM – Power Restored

8AM – Breakfast

9AM – Outdoor photos

10AM – Driveway is cleared

12PM – Time for bed yet?

2PM – Boredom

3PM – Nutrition test

4PM – Things are melting

5PM – Dinner

6PM – Dinner finished

7PM – I’m tired

7:30PM – This is where our journey ends…. Goodnight.