School Apr 22, 2005
As I was walking away from my grad class during the break in the middle, I realized something again (most things are realized more than once before they're blogged):  I learn nothing in class.  In any class.  Ever.  Nothing.  I only learn things on my own, when I do the homeworks or read the notes myself.  No teaching is required.  This is how I felt through most of college too.  I'd sit in class and waste my time, only to learn everything on my own when I did the homework.  The only time I ever thought class was useful was when I was taking certain calculus classes and I took huge amounts of notes.  Especially if Maz was the professor.  He'd always do tons of example problems, and the homeworks were just like the examples.  I usually found the book to be relatively useless, and all my learning was done while doing homework and looking back at example problems.  Another useless (and this time completely useless) book was called "Fluid Mechanics" by Frank M. White.  Utterly useless.  It's like trying to learn Japanese from a Chinaman.  The book assumes that the reader/student already knows everything.  So it just talks about all kinds of crazy fluidesque topics without introducing them or explaining them.  I was glad to be done with that book and that class, just like pretty much every other class I've ever taken in my whole entire life.  What, would I actually miss a class?  I don't think so.  I don't really have feelings.  And I especially don't have feelings for classes that beat me and dragged me through the mud.  But anyway, what really kills me about this class I'm taking right now is that one of the books is that same stupid fluid mechanics book.  I was mildly excited to learn that I'd be getting books that were included in the price of the class (thanks to you, Joe Taxpayer).  But when I found out that it was this worthless fluids book, I was quite disappointed. #education
Free stuff Apr 22, 2005
Ever since I've been using computers and especially since this newage contraption called the interweb, I've never been willing to pay for anything that's not a physical product that I can hold in my hand or can see in real time and space.  In other words, I've always looked for ways to get software/services, or do similar things, for free.  I signed up for free webhosting.  I got my free internet mail.  I stay away from shareware and always stick to freeware.  This is how I've been since the beginning (1998).  And even now, I'm totally into open source programs and stuff like that.  Firefox, Thunderbird, Wiki*anything.  I love it.  That's why it amazes me that I've actually been paying for some things recently.  I paid $5.99 for a domain name because I finally came to the realization that you just can't get a domain name for free, no matter what.  I bought Bible software for my Palm because I didn't feel right downloading it from "somewhere."  The last thing I bought that wasn't hardware was when I was a freshman in college (2000) and I bought Carmageddon TDR, probably the most disappointing game ever created.  Maybe that's why I don't buy things.  But either way, I'm increasingly looking at ways to do things for some small fee because I'm finding that there's almost no way to do everything for free.  This makes sense, of course.  How can anything be free?  The reason most things are free on the internet is because of stupid advertising.  But some things are just plain free.  Like FreeWebTown and Atspace, which offer free webspace.  The catch is that there are ads on their homepages, which is what you use to login.  However, there's a way around it:  FTP everything, which is free.  So essentially, there's no catch.  The shortcoming is that you can't host PHP and Perl and stuff like that.  That's where I'm at right now.  In order to use cool things like Movabletype or Wordpress, you need to be able to host PHP.  So this is where I am right now.  Although I have no idea how to use things like PHP and Perl, I'd like to have a webhost that hosts them so that I can find some cool, free, open source stuff to use on my site.  The geek journey continues... #technology