Social Interactions with Friends and Family

Today, I had the pleasure of visiting much of my family. I was able to visit my cousins, my aunts and uncles, as well as my grandparents. I stopped by each of their respective houses after being picked up from the airport. While I was able to see each of these people over Christmas vacation, I was not really able to have a decent conversation with them.

It seems to me that whenever there is a large gathering of people, no deep conversation happens. With many people, if such a conversation begins, it is inevitable that it will be interrupted. Thankfully, there weren't too many people today to have some good conversations. Now that I think of it, I hadn't had good conversations with my family for quite a while.

The same holds true in conversations with friends; if there is a large group, conversations between subsets of the group will inevitably be interrupted. The most vocal of the group seem to end up being those who direct the conversation. Actually, this semester, I have not even spent much time with friends; I always seem to have things to do. The other day, I did hang out with several friends; we had a ?smoothie movie night,? where we had smoothies (made of fruits and ice cream put into a blender), and we watched a movie. It was a rather enjoyable time.

The Dvorak Keyboard Layout

In the final week of Christmas vacation while I was waiting for the pieces of my server (about which I shall soon write) to be shipped to me, I happened to come across the Dvorak keyboard. This was not the first time I had heard of it -- I had previously seen mention of it in some Wikipedia user pages, but dismissed it as irrelevant at the time.

At any rate, somehow, I came across the Wikipedia Dvorak article. I found it intriguing and decided to look further into it. I imagine that the reader will have never heard of the Dvorak layout, so I will give a brief description. The Dvorak keyboard layout is an alternative to qwerty. The keys are laid out so as to minimize hand movement -- the most commonly used keys, including all of the vowels, are on the home row. Dvorak was designed for efficiency. DV Zine is a comic-style introduction to Dvorak and its history, in addition to its use.

Now, theoretically, one can type faster an a Dvorak keyboard than on a qwerty, but I'm not too shabby at typing qwerty -- I can, when concentrating on 100% accuracy, type 62 words per minute. This switch was going to cost me some time, as well as serve to make each keystroke several times more expensive -- from instant messages to Google searches to blog posts (which, granted, I don't do very often). About an hour after I started the endeavour (before I had learned more than the home row), I decided to see how fast I could do on a typing test. I scored a blazing 6 words per minute. It was a couple of days before I had nearly memorized the new layout, by which time the pieces for my server came, and I was distracted from this endeavor.

It wasn't until I came back to school that I picked up the effort again. I have since been using Dvorak exclusively, and have been taking hand-written notes in class so as to be able to keep up, and to not fall back into using qwerty. About a week ago (the last time I booted into windows, to be exact), I re-tested my speed. This time I was up near 20 words per minute. I am certainly improving, and hopefully, I'll be up to my old typing speed so that I can declare this endeavor a success.

There have certainly been some struggles in learning Dvorak. Some of these follow in no particular order. First, now that I am programming again, I frequently press the wrong keys for curly braces, the equal sign, and other such keys. Second, I often use the command-line text editor, vi, which has the entire keyboard mapped to special commands. It is annoying, for example, when I mean to save and close the document, but mistakenly delete the current line. Third, for some reason when I tell Fedora to use Dvorak by default, the volume control buttons stop working on my ThinkPad. Finally comes just the expected pains of switching layouts -- making many typos trying to use the qwerty key locations instead of the Dvorak ones.

I cannot yet fully recommend the Dvorak layout, but I will say that it's definitely worth a look. Once I have fully mastered the layout, I may at that point fully endorse it, but not until that day.

The two sites I used in my initial training were dvorak.nl and ABCD: A Basic Course in Dvorak. (And, of course, I typed this entire post with the Dvorak keyboard.)

The Story of My Adventure on the Way Home for Christmas

The Day I Was Supposed to Leave

I told this story of my adventure-of-a-trip-home several times to my family during the holiday, and apparently, people found it interesting. I am therefore, recounting it here.

I was initially going to come home on 13 December -- my flight was scheduled for that day. So it happened: I had all my stuff packed, and headed out the door. It was snowing heavily outside, so my wheeled suitcase was acting as a snow plow, and was therefore quite difficult to pull. As I approached the bus stop, my bus was just pulling away. I chased it for about half a block before it stopped to let me on.

At this point, it was snowing pretty hard, and all the buses were running late. About ten minutes after getting on the bus, I realized that I had left my wallet, which had my ID card in it, back in my dorm. The bus driver let me get off at the next bus stop. I waited an hour before a bus came that would take me back to RPI. In this time, I found out that my flight had been cancelled, and that the later flight was full. This turned out to be a good thing as I had forgotten my ID card, and probably would have missed my flight otherwise.

Eventually a bus came that stopped relatively close to RPI. After getting off the bus I made the trip back to my dorm, but in the process, lost the belt clip for my cell phone. After eating dinner with my friends, I then called the airline and arranged to take the first flight out the next day. It looked like I was going to have to take a cab, but my roommate kindly offered to drive me to the airport. I called my mom to work out the logistics. She couldn't pick me up since it was going to be a Friday morning, and she was going to be at work. We worked out that I would take public transportation from the airport to my grandparents house, and my grandmother would drive me the rest of the way home.

At this point, it was getting late, but I decided that since I was at RPI, I would do some of my laundry. I ended up getting less than an hour of sleep that night.

The Flight

The next morning, my roommate drove me to the airport. I got there with enough time to get my baggage checked as well as to get through security. Southwest Airlines works differently than others. Instead of choosing a seat when one books the ticket, he chooses when he boards the plane. Boarding order is determined by the order that passengers check in. Since my original flight had been cancelled, my check-in time for my new flight was much later than it otherwise would have been. I still got a window seat, though it was pretty far from the front of the plane. Flight time was almost exactly an hour from the wheels leaving the ground in Albany to touching the ground in Baltimore.

The Bus and Train

After landing and getting my luggage, I went outside the airport to try to catch the bus. I had no idea where the bus was going to stop, so I just kept my eyes peeled for any sign of it. It eventually came, but stopped several hundred feet from me. I had 4 things I was carrying, but ran toward the bus with all of it since the next one didn't come for another hour. I tried to pay the $3.00 fare with a $20 bill, but the driver wouldn't break it. I therefore had to use 3 $1 bills that I had been holding on to because of their crispness and the fact that their serial numbers were sequential and ended in 001, 002, and 003 respectively.

The bus ride was about 20 minutes to the train station. I got off the bus, and bought a fare card for the amount that the chart said that it would cost to get to the station close to my grandparents house. The route I had gotten off the Internet the previous night told me that I would switch trains one time. Upon entering the first train, I was looking at the route map and noticed that I could travel a shorter distance if I made 2 changeovers. I did so, but with the overhead of the changeover time, I arrived at the destination station the exact same time as if I had taken the original route.

When I arrived at the station, I tried to call my grandmother to pick me up, but by virtue of being underground, the train station didn't allow cell phone signals to penetrate its walls. When I got to the exit, the machine wouldn't let me through. It said that I didn't have enough money on my card. I initially purchased the card with my credit card, but the machines by the exit only accepted cash, but wouldn't take cash. I was $0.70 short on my card, but only had $0.60 in change. At this point, I thought I was stranded. My only apparent option was to go back to an earlier station and hope that I could find a machine that would take a credit card. I asked a security guard if he could break my $20 bill for the machine, and he couldn't. I then asked him if he could give me a dime, which he graciously did.

The Rest of the Trip

Once I was on ground level, I called my grandmother. About 15 minutes later, I saw her car approaching, but it wasn't slowing down. Thankfully, she had her window down, and heard me when I yelled "Grandma!" She stopped, and I loaded my stuff in her car. We had nice conversation (which, incidentally, included this very story) on the way to my mom's house.

When we got to my mom's house, I had a bit to eat, and I talked to my grandma for a while before she left. She left around 2 in the afternoon, and I crashed (fell asleep) on the couch. I woke up around 2 in the morning, and since I had just gotten a night's worth of sleep, I stayed up. So began my entire vacation with a badly skewed sleep schedule.

P.S. I sporadically wrote this post over 3 weeks using the Dvorak keyboard layout, which I am now using exclusively. Also, I hope you enjoyed this anecdote of mine, and am surprised you lasted through it.

Coming Home for Thanksgiving

I got my plane ticket a little over a week ago. This morning, I was waiting for a shuttle to the Airport that was supposed to leave the school at 8:00. It was not there at 8:00, so I asked the person in the transportation office if it was coming. She assured me that it was. I asked her again a couple times in 10-minute intervals. Finally at 8:30, I asked her to call and get an ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) for the bus. She called, and they claimed to have been there at 8:03. There were 6 of us waiting for the shuttle. My flight was at 9:30, so I had to get there very soon.

I called my friend who had a vehicle, and asked him if he had left yet, and if he hadn't, if he could drive me to the airport. He was just leaving, so he drove me. I got to the airport with little time to spare. I checked my bags, from which I had to remove my laptop computer to carry on since it made the bag too heavy, and went through security. I arrived at my gate 15 minutes after the boarding process was supposed to start, so was quite concerned as the the door was closed when I arrived. I asked the lady at the counter if my flight had boarded yet, and she said that it would be in a few minutes.

I flew from Albany, connected in Philadelphia with a 3-hour layover, finally arriving in Baltimore. The flight from Albany to Philadelphia was an hour long on a propeller plane, and the flight from Philadelphia to Baltimore was only 20 minutes on a small jet.

I actually spent more time in traffic getting home from BWI than I did in the air. Anyway, I'm happy to be home. It's good to see my family.

Time

My how time flies! I only have three weeks left until I have to head off to RPI. I am no doubt excited about this, but there are some things that I wish to accomplish first.

Firstly, and probably most importantly, I want to finish off my work on the NHS web site. The work that remains to be done consists mostly of completing the system for updating the site via a web interface. I have done virtually no work on it so far this summer.

The next thing my queue of things to complete is a Beowulf cluster that my friend and I have been working on over the summer. We have been gathering older computers, and are attempting to get them to work together in parallel to perform computing-intensive tasks. We are doing it as mainly a proof-of-concept and to gain some additional experience.

Less importantly, but possibly unwisely high on my list, I am re-reading the first six Harry Potter books. As I type this, I am paused at the end of the fourteenth chapter of the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I am re-reading the first six books so that the story line will be fresh in my mind when the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows comes out tomorrow. I have ordered a boxed set of the entire series in hardcover, but it won't arrive until October according to Amazon.

Getting back on topic, I have recently noticed that there is too little time. There are all of the things mentioned above that I want to do, and more, but time seems to be flying. It is already Friday, and it feels as if Monday were yesterday. I notice that I am probably about a quarter of the way through my life, supposing I live to be seventy-six years old. There are several other things to be done this summer. For one, I need to start getting in shape for next month when I will go up to Rensselaer for the ROTC program. I also want to, some time in the future, watch the entire series of Star Trek Voyager. I watched an episode of it the other day on television, and it reminded me of how good the show is. I have watched the entire series of the following shows: Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, 24, and Smallville.

Anyway, back to reading Harry Potter -- if I don't fall asleep first, that is.

19th Birthday

Today was my 19th Birthday. My best friend stopped by as did my cousins. We socialized and ate cake. A few people gave me cards and gifts. I gave my aunt a tour of the house, as she hadn't seen it yet. This was unexpected, and my room was cluttered for the occasion.

Anyway, I decided to go back through my old posts in this blog and fix spelling mistakes, and add tags to some of them. I only did this for the past year. I made corrections back through the post about my 18th Birthday. I haven't yet finished adding tags yet. Many of the posts even older than that don't even have titles because I was too lazy at the time to title them.

My Christmas Day

My sister who was very excited about Christmas decided to get everyone up this morning. I managed to ignore her until about 9:30 when I got up. My three younger brothers and my younger sister got an Xbox 360 with enough controllers for each of them. If I were to get a console, the Xbox 360 would be the one I would get. I like the PC with a keyboard and mouse better. My mom gave me a Cruzer Micro flash drive with 1GB of memory. From my older sister, I got a mug that says "Proud to be a programming, upgrading, network supporting, surfing, internut Computer Whizz". On the other side, it says "World's Greatest Computer Whizz". My uncle gave me an Adidas hoodie with an Adidas hat to go along with it.

I and my family went up to my grandparents house to celebrate Christmas with the extended family. Before we opened gifts, I was talking to my uncle and found out that he already had an MP3 player. This is significant as I bought him one for Christmas. He said that he uses it almost every day. He says that he is going to see if the one I got him is better than the one he already has. I still have the receipt if not, but I can only return it within 15 days of when I bought it.

Searching for Christmas Gifts

This morning, I had swimming practice. Afterwards, my sister wanted me to take her shopping because she doesn't have her driver's license quite yet, though she has met all of the qualifications to do so. I took her (she drove) to several places including Border's book store, Michael's arts and crafts store, Wal-Mart, and several other places. When my extended family celebrates Thanksgiving, we draw names and get the person whose name we drew a gift for Christmas. If everyone were to get everyone else a gift, Christmas would become very expensive. I got a gift for my uncle from Wal-Mart. I got him an MP3 player. They are generally expensive, so I got the lease expensive one that they had, and even so went slightly over the spending limit.

On another note, all of this political correctness with "Happy Holidays" is getting on my nerves. Most people celebrate Christmas anyway. I do recognize that not everyone does, but a very large majority does. I don't see why anyone who isn't a politician needs to be politically correct about the Christmas Season.

18th Birthday

Monday was my 18th birthday. Now, I can do lots of stuff that I couldn't before such as voting, getting a Google Adsense account, being out after midnight, and other such privileges. Monday, I played paintball from around 11:00 am to 4:00 pm. I had a blast. The first game my team won "capture the flag", and I fired off a few rounds. The second game, my team won again, though I didn't fire a single shot. The third game, my friend Jaren and I and one other person stuck together and went into enemy territory. We were discovered, and were holding off at least 5 people when I ran out of paint. I had to surrender. The final game, we played what they call "downed pilot". In this game, one person who is the pilot goes into the woods, and hides. There are about 8 people on the special ops team, and everyone else is the indigenous population. The object is for the special ops to rescue the pilot before the indigenous population captures or kills him. Since it was my birthday, I got to be the pilot. My team rescued me, and got me back to the base. We decided to let the game continue with the indigenous population hunting my team down. We held them off pretty well, and only 1 or 2 of our guys got shot. The others who got out did so because they ran out of ammo or CO₂. There were 4 or 5 of us left, and we made our way to an easily defendable position, but we each only had about 75 rounds left. At that point, it was declared that the game would end in 5 minutes. All we had to do was to keep off the enemy for that long. In the end we did so. Afterwards, I found out from Jaren that even though his team had more than 25 people, they weren't good at following orders. When they would say "Charge!", only about 7 of them did so, and therefore were killed. If the indigenous population were organized, the special ops team wouldn't have a chance. That is my story of my 18th birthday