Wednesday, January 21, 2004

I'm getting a Fluke Meter, they are fun.

Date: 1/21/04 at 12:44AM

Trouble has gotten me again – in school – I’m short of credits. I need one more credit to be a half-time student at WITC. I saw that life as been disappointing this week. Students there aren’t getting to know me too well, and above all else I couldn’t download anything. I have a minor speech disorder but I am not effected by it. I love to download programs, and mp3s off shoutcast.com. I download techno mostly. I use Ripcast at home and Quintessential Player 4.11 at school. I discovered “QCD” 2 months ago finding it can rip from any streaming radio station on the web. The college’s firewall doesn’t block it which means it totally rocks! I am still with those “people without a care.” It’s mostly a computer geek deer hunter crowd. I got stuck in this crowd because I had two choices: Go to UofW or WITC. I picked WITC. Only thing I missed about the University is that I will never again be able to burn videos to DVD. I’m too cheap to buy my own video editing software. If you know what I’m talking about when I say uncompressed video data is absolutely huge! Then I have to take that data and compress it in MPEG which takes a long time anyway. It would be nice if Mom got a digital video camera. Apple makes a solid ‘video editing’ software called iMovie. iMovie is not for PC which makes me angry.

It’s funny that people prefer Apple OSX over Windows XP. OSX is pretty stable but by the same time there aren’t any FAT32 Emulators for it. Windows is awesome, many users would agree. I’ve been on a G5 with Intel Pentium 4 and 512 MB RAM. It was super fast. Did you know that it was Apple that came out with the firewire port first – the fastest transfer port available on the PowerPC/IBMPC? The university has twoG5s for video editing I remember. The Media room I had as an intern for had 12 G4s. I found that those computers had small hard drives. That’s all the University could afford. It was my only experience with an Apple. Apple makes it so it’s nearly impossible to run OSX on a PC. I know because I copied a installation disc myself and it didn't run.

I was running Halo on my pc. Halo runs better without the patch then it does with it. I know I installed the 1.02 patch and the game crashed. I downloaded v1.031 hoping that it would fix the bug. The game requires high specs to run anything higher then 800/600. The patch is suppose to speed up the physics engine which runs at 30 frames all the time and slow downs are possible. I bought the game last November, and haven’t played it until today. Very noticeably Bungie / GearBox added to the original single player game and made it longer. There is a tutorial in Halo now. I like tutorials though because they help a lot. The game looks very clean and crisp like it does on Xbox. The game does support anti-analyzing/anti-buffering which makes it look even better. The Internet says gamers will not see Halo 2 on the PC for 2 more years. Halo is not the best looking first person shooter, but it’s really easy to copy! The game play is good. The game does have GameSpy as an online server with support up to 16 players which adds to the longevity of the game. I’m not interested in Halo because I’m into Morrowind. I’ll play it because it was on Xbox (I also own the Xbox version) and got very good reader reviews.

Tomorrow I’m going back to the videogame store to pick up some used videogames. It’s a hobby of mine. Should I pick up racing games or an action game like Blood Rayne? Or should I spend money on none and get another 64MB thumb stick. Thumb sticks are fun but pricy. That’s why I should buy an external hard drive. I spoke of getting one before – why didn’t I? I blew the cash on a Gameboy Advance SP. Tomorrow I won’t be able to do much because I’ll be home reading college books, taking notes, doing math. We all have been there – extra long hours on homework. I’m not the lucky one; there are Youth Options students there now and they are full time. Some adults are going to get their network specialist A++ certificate when they graduate from high school. When I was in high school, my choices were limited to two classes: Intro to DOS and Intro to Linux. Why even get started in Linux when you’re not going to use it in my field which is Industrial Neworking Technician. I am taking this field instead of network specialist because I don’t like taking Cisco 3 and 4. It would be nice to have those on my file, but it’s going to be hell from what I heard. I would be more likely be hired by someone. Companies are looking for the best and I have to have good grades to compete. Cisco Corp. is always making revisions on there online website and books. And they really are technical in their books. It is Cisco that I hate, not the whole Industrial Networking field. ]
Check out these websites:

http://www.quinnware.com/news.html home of QCD
http://www.xoteck.com/ripcast/download.php

I may be negative in the upper paragraphs, but my week, my life for that matter, hasn’t been bad…it’s been good for the most part. One thing cool happened this week though after all the treacherous introductions for back to school. I’m going to get a Fluke amp meter. When you go into this field, you gotta have one of these. They are highly durable. I will have this meter my whole life, and Fluke has a lifetime guarantee on it. I will need it to measure leakage in horizontal data cables (shielded twisted pair / unshielded twisted pair, and patch cable)

I hope everything turns around in college for me…it is a little ugly right now. My friend Bob is sick so I couldn’t see him this week, plus he now works at 3:30 to late, and I won’t see him later. I need someone to hang out with, and he’s seems to be the only person right now. Revisions to this entry soon…

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