Yesterday I was once again privileged to enjoy Mindy's company for a few hours. First, we met up for a religious meeting that is held each Tuesday on our campus. Afterwards, I walked her to her apartment so that she could change into more appropriate clothes for the following activity. I went to my place and changed as well and picked her up again. We stopped by the store to get some supplies and made our way out to "R" mountain.

"R" mountain is actually a butte (or something along those lines) with a huge white "R" painted on it (signifying "Rexburg" I suppose). It was quite a hike up there in the blistering heat, but we made it to the top. I feel bad, though, because Mindy isn't exactly the world's biggest fan of heights. That didn't even occur to me when I invited her to hike it with me. Blast.

Anyway, once we made it to the top, we had a nice little "picnic" of sorts. Then we just sat there for a while, enjoying the wonders of nature and each others' company. I feel like we had some pretty good conversations again. I really enjoyed spending the time with her.

The hike down was pretty interesting because it was rocky and slippery most of the way. Thankfully, we both made it down alive and we came back into Rexburg. I have been a bad influence on her the past few nights--I kept her out too late. She had some homework to take care of, and we both figured it would be a wise decision for her to do that instead of being a rebel with me. Pretty satisfying day in my opinion.

Ok, I have to say that I had suspicions of what I last posted about being a dream. Honestly! I was not quite sure that it had actually happened, since it's not exactly an everyday occurrence. Somehow it just seemed like one of those dreams that are so pleasant when you experience them but that are also just temporary. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a dream now, but there are still suspicions lingering (it all just seems too good to be true!)...

So last night, I had the opportunity to see Mindy again. At first, it appeared as though it was all my imagination driving me crazy. Nothing seemed to really be different than before the previous night's dream. Then we started talking a bit and we talked about a few things we had discussed the night before (or in the previous dream). That's what comforted me--that she was conscious of the evening before (perhaps it wasn't just in my head after all).

We went for a nice stroll again, and we ended up at the campus stadium. We hiked up to the very top and just chilled for a while. It was nice to be able to just chat as we did. She started to get shivers, so I started thinking of things that we could do to warm up a bit. Mindy loves to dance. It is her most favorite thing to do, according to another conversation that we had. With that in mind, I asked if she wanted to dance a bit. Heh...you should have seen the confused look on her face. It was classic! Anyway, when she saw that I was serious, she agreed to dance a bit. Now, you all have to understand that I do not know how to dance worth beans. Lucky for me, Mindy knows how and actually likes to teach people how to dance. I'm afraid I may be a lost cause though. Mindy tried to teach me how to do a simple waltz on top of the stadium...aahh brotha. Let me tell you... As simple as it may seem, it sure did confuse me. Perhaps I just need a little more practice (I hope).

Eventually the chilliness of the evening breeze became a bit too much, so we walked back to Mindy's place. Once there, we happened upon our good buddies Matt and Kara. They seemed to be having a jolly time together, but Mindy and I thought it more appropriate not to interrupt their bliss for too long, so we took off again. This time we went to a nice park thinger away from all of the city lights and looked at the stars until the cold became too much again. We got to see a fabulous shooting star or possibly even a meteor. That was Mindy's first time to see a shooting star, and it was probably the most amazing one I've ever seen. It was rather large and not exactly fast-moving. There wasn't a tail on it until after we both saw it. Then the tail grew to be pretty long until it all disappeared. It was fantastic!

That is about the time that we walked back to Mindy's pad and said good night. I also seem to remember setting up a time and place for us to meet a bit later today. I suppose that if Mindy is actually there then all of my suspicions of these experiences will be put to rest. I will then accept the idea that it's not just my whacky imagination playing sick and drawn-out tricks on my mind. For all I know I'm actually just dozing off at work right now and dreaming that I am writing all of this. Weird.

It appears that the dates that Matt and I went on with Kara and Mindy have good effects! Mindy was gone most of this past weekend at a wedding. She returned home last night and said that we (Matt and I) could come over and hang out if we wanted to. I figured that it would be good to give her a little bit of time to unwind after all the travelling she had been through, but she didn't seem to need it.

So we went over to their pad and right as the door opened and we stepped inside, Mindy comes up to me and hugs me! I was like, "Wow...that's cool. I can deal with that." It was a little unexpected but definitely welcomed. Anyway, we had some good times playing card games and making cookies and whatnot. They even let me use their 'scrumptious'-smelling soap that they bought from Bath and Body Works on our first date. Amazing.

The card games were getting a bit involved, so we decided to move it outdoors. Mindy's knees were bothering her from sitting down as long as she had been that day, so we went for a nice stroll around campus. I quite enjoyed it. Eventually, the others (Matt, Kara, Cyndra, and Athena) decided to join us in a pleasant walk, but we were devious and decided to go our own way.

Mindy and I took a nice walk in the gardens on campus and we found a nice spot to chill. We talked about a lot of things, but eventually we started talking about more serious matters. All I have to say about that to the world is, "Yes, I am a happy man." As we walked back to Mindy's place we had a nice, cosy chat. I repeat, "Yes, I am a happy man."

When I got home, I came across Matt at his computer. He seemed to be having a blast! He was chatting with Kara online and things seemed to be going well with them. Matt was a little confused when he decided to go back to our apartment, but his little conversation with Kara afterwards cleared things up quite a bit. I guess the actual condition of their relationship is still pending, but it's looking pretty good. I'm sure Matt would join me in proclaiming, "Yes, I am a happy man."

And this is what becomes of a surprise date for all but one involved. Grand, isn't it?

Crazy Firefox Propaganda

Heh... A certain individual (who will remain nameless beyond Rug Burns) enlightened me as to the existence of this grand video clip. I think you should all partake and enjoy.

Enjoy. Yes.

In case you don't think to click on the title of this post, here's the link.

My brother took me out fishing with him on Wednesday. The picture is of my brother fishing on a really sketchy log... It was a really cool little hike that we had to make to get to our spot. The sad thing was that we didn't really catch any fish. Neither of us really likes to eat fish, so we would just catch-and-release anyway.

This is the first time that I was fishing since I was probably like 7 years old. Wow.

So, I recently started this blog thing, right? To my surprise, the "dashboard" or control panel has a special spot for one to add Google Ads to their blog with great ease! I, after having heard of others' successes with Google Ads, decided to give it a go. My very first post (which has been removed already) mentioned how I would be joining the c h a o s of bloggerdom. Google Ads saw the 'C' word in the previous sentence and put ads about hurricanes and natural disasters all over my page!! It wasn't until I removed that post that the ads changed to something about blogs.

Over in my links you'll notice that I have one to a blog called "Rug Burns." All of the Google Ads on his page are about burns and first aid. It doesn't matter what he posts on his blog--the ads always seem to talk about the title of his blog.

Very strange. Let's see if my ads change now that I've mentioned his title in this post. :D

20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista

I happened upon this article whilst glancing through my daily Slashdot update. From what I was able to read so far, I agree 100% with this bloke who wrote the article.

I had the opportunity to play with a Vista beta a couple of months ago, and I was pretty impressed by certain aspects of the new OS, but in the end, I went back to my Linux. One thing, for example, was the new hardware rating system that's integrated into Vista. It's an excellent idea--Windows will rate your system to give you some rating on an arbitrary PC standards scale from 1 to 10. The higher the rating, the better your computer is. Armed with this rating, a PC user can then go to a store to purchase a new piece of software. They can compare their PC's rating with the requirements of the application and be a happy camper when the program actually runs when they get home. Absolutely wonderful concept. The problem is this: my laptop was rated at a 2.0, if I remember correctly. Here are the related specs on my laptop (HP Pavilion dv8000 series):

• Processor: AMD Turion 64 ML-40 (2.20Ghz)
• RAM: 1.1GB DDR PC2700
• Video: ATI Radeon Xpress 200M (128MB dedicated RAM, along with 128MB shared RAM)

Now, to put things into perspective, I have done a few benchmarks with my laptop up against my computer at work. Please note that these benchmarks are very limited in scope and are mostly for my personal satisfaction. My computer at work is a HyperThreaded Pentium 4 at 3.4Ghz with 1GB of RAM. As to the flavor of RAM, I'm not sure what to say, but I'd imagine that it runs at least 400Mhz compared to my 333Mhz. On several occasions, I've booted up both systems simultaneously. They both booted up Windows XP SP2, though my laptop has Home and the one at work has Professional. After logging in and letting everything settle down for a minute or two, I started up the NetBeans IDE in which I spend oh so much of my time. My laptop had the IDE up and ready to use (classpaths scanned and everything) 50 seconds before my work machine was to the same point. And this all happened before I upgraded from 512MB of RAM to 1GB in my laptop. I haven't tested since that upgrade.

So if my laptop, which beats out a HyperThreaded Pentium 4 running at 3.4Ghz with a gig of RAM in certain uncontrolled conditions, is rated as a 2 on the scale, what does that say for my 3-year-old desktop? How would that fare with Vista installed? I'm not really prepared to drop another grand or so on a new computer to meet Microsoft's anticipated hardware requirements once Vista is released, which is one reason I'm glad I love Linux.

I've been using SuSE Linux 10.1 on my laptop ever since the day it was released, and I have to say that I'm quite satisfied with it. I'm usually a Slackware man, myself, but SuSE has become one of my new favorites.

Ever since I first started using Linux some 7 years ago, I've kept an eye on SuSE. I came really close to actually purchasing a boxed copy back around version 7.3 I think. This was mostly because SuSE is so visually appealing. Once openSuSE came about, I was super excited and downloaded the 5 CD set for version 10.0 immediately. To my disappointment, this version didn't play well with my brand new laptop. I didn't feel like finding out why, so I just gently tucked the CDs away in the drawer with all of my other Linux CDs. As soon as the 10.1 CD set was publicly released on May 11th, I grabbed a torrent to get all of the 5 CDs plus the non-OSS add-on CD.

The same day, I popped the first CD in and began the installation. To my surprise, SuSE 10.1 had no qualms with my Radeon 200M, whereas almost all distros that I had tried on this laptop up to this point would lockup once they did anything outside of the wonderful console (besides Fedora Core 5). SuSE 10.1 was 1 up on all the others, especially after seeing the splash screen. Absolutely beautiful. The installation went really smoothly. I opted for the KDE install, as I'm not a big fan of GNOME. And this is despite the fact that the folks at SuSE spent a lot of time and effort making GNOME mesh well with their distro.

Once the installation finished, I began tinkering around in my menus just to see what there was to see. I have to say that things are set up pretty intuitively in KDE to begin with (or maybe I've just been using it for a long time), but SuSE makes it even better. Device recognition is actually beyond my expectations for Linux. Just about anything I pop into a USB port will be recognized within seconds and I will be asked what I want to do with it. Even my HP All-In-One printer/scanner/copier works without a hitch!! This is the first scanner that I've had function in Linux! Excellent. My media reader doesn't seem to be compatible with Linux yet, but that's fine since I rarely use it anyway. I was able to get my Radeon to play well with the proprietary drivers from ATI, and my FPS jumped from around 100 to 1100 when running glxgears. Nice improvement.

One thing that did take a long time to figure out was my wireless. I had only played with wireless one other time in Linux and that was on some generic PCMCIA wireless card in a past roommate's laptop. That seemed to be simple enough to setup, with the help ndiswrapper. However, finding the correct drivers for my internal wireless adapter, and finding them in the 64-bit edition proved to be quite the runaround. Eventually, I was able to get in touch with someone who graciously emailed them to me as an attachment. To my disappointment, however, ndiswrapper didn't seem to do wireless with these drivers either!! Wow. I put wireless tinkering away for a while, but came back to it amidst my boredom. I came across some forum that had the answer to my quest: a file link. The drivers I had received through email were the correct drivers, only they were linked up to some other device identifier. All I needed to do was essentially make an alias of my device identifier and make it point to the identifier used by the drivers. As soon as I did this, ndiswrapper worked like a charm. I was able to see several wireless networks in my area. I did (and still do) have a problem connecting to certain access points, however. For some strange reason, I cannot figure out how to connect to my own wireless router, nor the university wireless. It's rather frustrating, but I can live with an ethernet cable.

Ahh, yes. Linux.

So, today we did a follow-up date. We hiked around up in the mountains around Kelly Canyon. It was super fun, I thought. I took a few more pictures while we were out there. It was fabulous!!

Say hello to my good friend Mindy! Today I tricked her and her roommate into going on a date with me and my roommate. It seemed like they had a good time, and I can only hope that they really did. I recently acquired a Fujifilm F470 6.0MP digital camera, and I've been going crazy taking pictures of all sorts of things. Among the pictures taken in this frenzy are the ones below.