tasuki’s blog

My hair started turning (I wouldn’t exactly call it curly). Let me describe it more accurately – the hair (especially on my forehead) first go more or less straight down and then, suddenly, it turns… left? right? no… it turns outwards… it’s totally the most stupid direction and it makes me look even more like a total freak (I’m not sure if that’s even possible, but it annoys me nevertheless, and whenever there are people around and I think of my stupid hair I feel like hiding my head in the sand (luckily for me there is usually no sand around)).

I tried persuading my hair not to turn or to at least turn in another (any other) direction. I’ve even threatened it with violence (scissors)… to no avail…

I’m desperate: are scissors the only solution?

I stumbled upon a typing test. I chose “Fishing in Finland” and measuring in CPM (characters per minute, as opposed to WPM – words per minute, which is pretty useless). And my first result was 250 – hazah. That makes slightly more than 4 keystrokes per second, which is not bad, considering the fact that I spent quite a lot of the time looking at the screen and reading (when I want to type as fast as possible I have to look at the keyboard), also the word “eutrophication” took several seconds for me to grasp. On next rounds I achieved higher score, but I guess that doesn’t really count when you know the text already.

Then I tried just writing something from my mind (eg. I didn’t look at the screen at all) and I wrote 90 characters in 15 seconds (tried it several times with similar results), which makes cca 6 keystrokes per second (if I understand it correctly, that is roughly equal to 60 wpm).

According to wikipedia, there’s a woman who is about three times faster than me. Twice faster would be still at least imaginable, but three times faster than me? Come on… I am not that slow… or am I?

As much as I praised the beta of Edgy Eft (betas are usually horrible and this one was simply great without any flaws), the final release sucks. It replaced  [working] orinoco drivers for my wifi with [not working] prism2_pci drivers. Took me a while to figure it all out (merely a day or so, because I messed it up). The cool login/logout sounds from gnome were replaced with not so cool ones, The textbox of firefox’s google toolbar looks awfully. Uh, not sure what else they managed to mess up… but I think I will find more things…

As a side note, the bloody gaim still doesn’t write “user logged out”/”user logged in” to the chat windows, I dunno where the mistake could be… I was told that it works but it doesn’t work for me with gaim2.0.0beta3.1 (nor under my settings nor under default settings (which I tried, as my settings could have been borken)). Any ideas/experiences?

And ubuntuforums suck. Seriously. They just ignore my posts (only sometimes someone writes “I have the same problem too”).

I only very recently discovered Nightwish (their official site is also worth visiting). The trick is that they have a real singer – Tarja Turunen (well, she’s not their singer anymore, but the past albums are sung by her). I’m not going to just copy wikipedia here (go read it yourself) so I’ll add my subjective opinions about the albums:

• Angels Fall First – their first album, I really like it, the best songs are Elvenpath, Beauty and the Beast, Astral Romance, Angels Fall First, Eramaajarvi
• Oceanborn – most the songs are a bit too fast but good nevertheless, particularly good are Gethsemane and Moondance (czesc kotasz); Sleeping Sun is one of the best Nightwish songs that can be found on new releases of this album or as a single
• Wishmaster – nothing except the Wishmaster caught my attention on this album
• Over the Hills And Far Away – only few songs, the good ones are Over the Hills And Far Away and the cover version of Astral Romance
• Century Child – there are some good songs: End of All Hope, The Phantom of the Opera, Beauty of the Beast; and there is one excellent song: Feel For You (I can listen to this one on repeat over and over again)
• Once – this album was a complete hit and contains many great songs: Dark Chest of Wonders, Wish I had an Angel, Nemo, Planet Hell, Creek Mary’s Blood, The Siren, Dead Gardens, Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan

Now they are getting a new singer instead of Tarja… I don’t want to say they can’t find anyone this good, but at least it will be very difficult.

While my spelling is generally good (it was always easier for me to remember how words are written than how they are pronounced) I always had troubles distinguishing vowels. I mean, I usually do know which vowel there should be, but I just sometimes make the mistake of writing a different one instead. I always realize it immediately when I see the word on screen, but somehow I don’t realize it when writing. So yeah, recently I’ve written ‘rondamly’ instead of ‘randomly’ in a chat and they thought it was a good joke… well, it actually wasn’t…

Sometimes I write a whole word differently, like writing ‘hojo’ instead of ‘toho’ (happened to me the other day). I don’t know the cause, and it’s not particularly annoying, it’s just strange and surprising.

I vaguely remember experiencing something a bit similar in some high school classes — I was very tired and trying to write what the teacher was saying, and as I was falling asleep, my hand somehow continued writing, although it didn’t write letters anymore, just random something that looked a bit like letters (and of course it had nothing to do what the teacher was saying as I was asleep by that time).

So it might actually be the same… you are still writing because of momentum while your brain already has a holiday…

Has anything similar ever happened to you?

Wesnoth, Freeciv, Simutrans, Fillets, Tuxracer, Liquidwar, Angband/Nethack, Racer, Cube, Wolf ET… I thought there was nothing that could surprise me in the word of linux gaming.

The other day I found GL-117, a perfect action flight simulator. It’s very easy to pilot the plane, there’s a lot of action, and the best thing is that it all (usually) happens among hills (unlike most flight simulators where you fly high above the hills, which is no fun). In other words – outstanding playability.

The only problem is that I got stuck in the campaign at mission called “tunnel”. I seriously don’t understand what they want me to do (when I fly through the tunnel, I crash into a red grid (first I thought it meant “this is the place you should get to”, flying above results in about 5-7 planes attacking me, I am quite sure I can’t take them down (too many & too strong)).

So go and install the bloody game so that you can help me with mission 20

I’m changing my eating habits!

Throughout all my life I’ve eaten much more than I wanted to. What is worse – I didn’t even realize it, I got used to that uneasy feeling of having full stomach and being all tired and sleepy because of this.

When my grandma asked me whether there’s a possibility of eating at school, I truthfully answered that there’s a cheap canteen for students. However, I didn’t mention that I usually don’t go there…

I’m not changing my eating habits to be more fit, look better, spare money or whatever, I am changing them because I don’t like eating when I feel it’s too much for me.

My brand new eating rule: eat when you are hungry and eat just enough not to be hungry, not less and not more.

Hello from Edgy Eft!
Recently I got a new disk and I decided it might be a good idea to make a clean new install (I had the previous system through warty – hoary – breezy – dapper). I didn’t want to upgrade the old system to something which is still unstable and I thought it might also be good to get rid of all the trash that I don’t use anyway… (well, yeah, I copied my whole home directory with a lot of trash, but at least I got rid of the programs that I don’t use).

And the first time experience? Magnificent! I encountered no serious problems, almost everything “just worked” out of the box and the things that didn’t were pretty easy to fix.

List of “nice and surprising”:

• sounds: the default intro sound of gnome was so horrible it was almost unlistenable, the new one just rocks, gaim also has different sounds, it will take a while to get used to it but they are better I think (and now gaim also has a volume control, w00t)
• new artwork: nothing spectacular, a bit better than dapper (which was pretty good, at least compared to previous “shit brown” themes)
• firefox: 2.0beta is just better (it has one small mistake that when I search by / it doesn’t let me highlight the words, which sucks, but maybe I can set it somewhere…)
• gaim 2.0beta… it simply rulez (hey, why is everything 2.0beta?)
• a lot of things stayed the same and 95% of my ~/.something configuration files work so I don’t have to reconfigure everything.
• many problems that I expected didn’t occur at all… wifi (which was borken in the 2.6.15 kernel), nvidia, wine (particularly fonts), X server, java, etc.

But that was a clean install, I will see what an upgrade looks like when they release the official version and I will upgrade my sister’s system, but after such a pleasant experience I don’t expect any problems either.

There is something really weird about abandoned places. I personally find them very scary for several reasons. First is that they don’t necessarily have to be as abandoned as they might seem, and if someone lived there it would probably be weird enough person to kill me. The second, less childlish, is that it just seems scary to see a place that used to be full of people abandoned like this. This is also the fascinating thing about these places.

I found a few interesting sites, one with pictures (and some additional info) by a girl riding her motorbike through the Chernobyl area. One made by Polish guys is called opuszczone (click “gallery” at the bottom), it contains mostly Polish buildings, but there are photos from other places too. And I couldn’t possibly omit a great site that goes by the name abandoned places, made by a Belgian pilot who seems to spend quite a lot of free time on abandoned places; although the design is a bit, errrm, original… just click around a lot and you are bound to get to occasionally see all the great photos.

Is there any website about such places in Czechia (particularly Brno)? I couldn’t find one, and I was trying quite hard.

I went to the tearoom to play go the other day and one very talented and promising 7kyu (he’s been playing for half a year I think, that’s a very good result) asked me to play an even game with him… I offered him a handicap, and he declined, saying that he wanted to “see the gap”. It made me a bit angry… of course there’s a huge gap, duh. So I played a bit unorthodoxly to crush him as much as possible and I was winning by more than 150 when he resigned.

I also always wanted to play an even game with a strong professional playing at his full strength, to see the gap. A few times I was even quite close to asking for it but luckily I never did so. And I think I’m never going to make fool of myself in this way, now that I can imagine what it feels like. Also, I am not sure if I really want to see the gap…