Stupid Foreigner ばか外人

Applied in Flower Mound last Friday, and tomorrow is my test and physical agility test. Looking forward to it, somehow. I want this one to count. It's been a slow week, been playing Final Fantasy VIII now that I finished Final Fantasy IX, and afterwards I may end up trying VII again...VII frustrated the hell out of me when I somehow managed to get my game stuck in a place where I could not continue. Don't ask how it happened, according to everyone I asked, I should have been able to continue but the game was not doing what it should have been.

Recently, I tore down my whole home network and rearranged things, including changing from a desk to a table, since having two monitors makes having more desk space a must, provided you lack flat panels. These old Trinitrons are huge. aoi-chan (my Athlon T-bird) is now under my table, and instead of being on the right of me with amy on the other side of it, miyuki (深雪, my file server, an HP Kayak 400MHz Pentium II with 1 processor, 2 once I find a matching one) is now on the right-hand side of my table, with my old switch-box on my old desk next to it. To my left is Amy with puddleglum (her Athlon XP) on her desk. Aoi-chan now has the monitors running at 75Hz, which is a nice upgrade since it wasn't working out previously thanks to the switch-box. It turns out that my switch-box did not support 1280x1024 at a higher refresh rate than 60Hz. Amy now has a 5-port switch on her desk, and over on top of the switch-box by miyuki there is a Netgear modem router, with a 5-port 10/100 switch, on top of which I placed a wireless b/g access point with four 10/100 ports. My old monitor is attatched to the switchbox, which rests atop an old Belkin surge unit. Miyuki, mahoro (まほろ, a Dell Pentium III 500, our token Windows box) and two openings for computers I am working on are attatched to that setup over there. I left half the desk open for use as a work bench.

Physical layout aside, the cool part of what I did was I made Miyuki the print server and the scanner server. Print-server stuff is normal, which most people are probably used to seeing. My black-and-white laser is now run through miyuki. My scanner, on the other hand, is different...my entire network goes through miyuki for scanning now too. I have the Epson flatbed scanner hooked up and configured to be used by any box on the network, which is something cool that I ran across as an idea one day on google. Turns out Linux loves it.

I read an interesting column on Townhall today by Col. Oliver North. While in Heidelberg, Germany doing a documentary on Gen. George Patton, he encountered a group of students in an internet cafe. Hilarity would ensue, were it not for the fact that these kids are serious:

«Though hardly a scientific sampling of European public opinion, these students' perspectives on the U.S. role in defeating fascism, communism, in bringing down the wall, of standing up to Islamic terror were both shallow and twisted. According to them, Germany would have rid itself of Hitler without "terror bombing German civilians"; the Americans "created the 'Red-Scare' to divide and punish Germany; the wall would have come down decades earlier but for the presence of U.S. bases in Europe; the Sept. 11 attack was concocted by the Bush administration; German troops should never have been sent to Afghanistan, and -- because this is much on the news here right now -- U.S. troops in Iraq routinely commit atrocities and human-rights violations. They were unaware of this week's forceful presidential speeches, press conference and question/answer sessions -- perhaps understandably, because they have been little covered in European TV and newspapers.»

These students did not know who Col. North was, or I doubt they would be so open with him. It's well worth a read.

In other news:

I am studying the Japanese language.

日本語を勉強しています。