Post Something Here

It's been a while since I posted last, and quite a bit has happened since then. I've been fairly busy trying to take care of all responsibilities and only now, do I have a few minutes to write.

I was given the great privilege of attending and participating in a band concert last night. This particular concert featured two full ensembles of students wanting to continue their love for music. What makes these ensembles interesting is that students are given the opportunity to perform on a secondary instrument; one that they may not necessarily have played before.

I have been involved with band for 9 years now, nearly half of my life, and have absolutely loved (most) every minute of it. My primary passion is marching, but when you put good, entertaining music in front of a concert band, I can sit and listen to that for hours. It's incredible the ability of composers to write a piece that can attract an audience for quite some time, to tell a story during that time, to share a thought, or simply to entertain.

My favorite soundtrack of all time is the Pirates of the Caribbean. I was given the opportunity to play this music for marching band last fall and continued to fall in love with it. In that same idea, I played a concert piece by Eric Whitacre entitled "October" which is one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. It's peaceful and gentle and the baritone solo completely makes the piece.

So what makes music so amazing? I've listened to a good share of music over the past 9 years - band, orchestral, symphony, and whatever plays on the radio - and have heard quite a bit of music that I love and could never grow tired of listening. One thing that might make music amazing, is it's ability to share a story in a way that people can understand and connect with.

Country music is big on this. Just about every country song is telling a story. I wouldn't begin to know what the common theme of these stories are, but I do know that it is a story.

Another thing is its ability to relax people. After a hard day's work, or before a big assignment, or even during the day when bored, people all over listen to iPods or radios or online streams filled with music. Why? To pass the time. To be entertained. To hear something amazing.

I could never give up my love for music. It's going to be hard to give up my love for band. One of the hardest decisions of my life was to pick systems administration and information technology of band directing. I could honestly see myself in both fields and would probably be happy in both as well.

Overall, just keep a love for music and everything will be great.

One of my biggest struggles in college has been time management. It got me right from the start and hasn't let up yet. My first semester, I was just getting into the whole college mindset, and was recovering from senioritis the year before. I enrolled in many core classes to get them out of the way forever, including two history courses, math, political science, and english. Needless to say, math was the only subject I did well in. Starting out college life with 16 hours, 12 of those hours in classes I never wanted to see again, was not a good idea.

My GPA that semester was bad.

The following semester, I became involved in an organization who's primary purposes were to serve the band program. I also became more heavily involved in church activities and trying to schedule work around all of this became difficult. That particular semester became even more trying as I had to do everything I could to raise my GPA up to an acceptable level in order to keep my scholarship.

Since then, my college life has been following a general schedule of "GPA Booster" semester, "Make an 80 on the final to get a C" semester, "GPA Booster" semester, "I'm going to die again" semester, wash, rinse, repeat.

It's through these years especially that I've learned that time management is key. Now, I'm nowhere near the best man in keeping track of my time, but I'd like to think that I've gotten better since my freshman year. Since I run Outlook 2007 to store my email, I can easily add calendar events and tasks to this same program and be able to easily prioritize my needed tasks on a day-by-day basis.

The easiest way that I have found to control this is to leave emails in the primary inbox if the events have not been completed. In addition, I will create calendar events of functions that I need to attend and set the reminders for 4-8 hours ahead of time. In addition, I've set up tasks with reminders of a day in advance to make sure that I complete any assignments required of me.

When all else fails, I stop and run through every function that I'm a part of and think carefully about what we are doing at the time. For example, when I was working through my accounting classes, I would think back to the most recent lecture, determine what we were studying at the time, and use that to gauge what homework assignments were due.

This is not a perfect system.

I have put off assignments for multiple weeks because I am still a procrastinator at heart. This becomes a problem when I get to the end of the semester and I need to do everything all at once. Time management is there to help you figure out what needs to be done when so that you can effectively managed your time and get the most out of your activities. This process also helps you determine the importance of each requirement and can easily show you where you may need to cut back.

All-in-all, time management is an important process to master, but it takes years of mistakes to get it right.

One of the things that has bugged me about programs in general (for the sake of my lack of experience with *nix OSes as compared to Windows OSes, let's say that this only occurs on Windows systems) is the nasty habit of programs stealing focus when some event occurs. For example, when I'm installing a new program and it takes longer than 30 seconds to complete, my ADD mind usually turns to another application, usually Firefox. When the application finishes installing, it is programmed to let the user know ... usually by appearing on top of any other open applications.

This should not happen.

There have been several instances where I'll be installing a program, typing a message to someone, the focus will turn back to the install window because of an error or completion, and my quick typing will hit a key that acknowledges the message before I've actually read it. And I still have to go back to my previous window and finish the message while being frustrated at yet another program that thinks it is the only program that matters.

Not all programs do this. A lot do, however, and it's an unnecessary evil that needs to disappear very quickly.

Granted, I don't know much about programming and instances, such as application installers, are using applications like InstallShield to run their installer program, but this occurs with notifications inside running applications as well. What needs to happen, instead of the focus stealing, is to simply flash the application in the toolbar and leave it at that. That simple reminder that an application needs user attention is all that is required.

Again, I'm not much of a programmer and therefore do not know how difficult this is to keep applications from stealing focus. I'm just a user on the internet that would really appreciate being able to stay on one window until I'm ready to change to another. My OCD nature will not allow me to keep a tab or application waiting from acknowledgment; it just needs to happen on my terms, that's all.

Like pretty much everybody on the planet, I have a certain style to organization and how I want to have my stuff available to me at various parts of the day. I would like to share with the world a few bits of information of how content is available right at my fingertips.

First off, I currently share a philosophy of high availability; that is, I'm "online" as much as possible. While this doesn't mean I'm physically attached to my computer 24/7, this does mean that my desktop runs like a server all the time with an active connection to email and instant messaging. I like to be reachable no matter where I am or what I'm doing. I've got several email addresses that I can be reached at as well as an instant messaging account in all major mediums (AIM, Y!M, MSN, Facebook, GTalk).

Secondly, I like to be able to reach my computer at any given point in time. There are many times when I need to check email or find a file on my computer to send myself and I'm not physically sitting in front of it. Enter LogMeIn. This service allows you to remotely connect to your machine via anywhere in the world without setting up port forwarding, remote desktop, vnc, or whatever. Now, I do have port 3389 (Remote Desktop Protocol) forwarded on my router (Which I also have remote access to, thanks to DynDNS) to my desktop just in case LogMeIn goes down, or I don't have access to install the ActiveX plugin, the Firefox plugin, or Java.

Thirdly, I have my email set up so that it delivers all messages to 2 inboxes. There's one inbox online and one on my desktop. I run Outlook 2007 and have, currently, 3 accounts that download straight into it. The remaining email addresses that I own are all forwarded in some fashion to these 2 inboxes. Recently, I changed one of the accounts over from POP3 access to Exchange access so that I could connect to that mailbox via the web access offered by the provider. I had refrained from doing this for a while now because of the storage limits and the necessary VPN, but when they enabled the Exchange access without VPN, I figured that this would help me keep that particular mailbox clean as I file emails appropriately.

Speaking of filing emails, my system of filing emails or keeping them in my inbox is fairly standard. Currently, I'll keep emails in my inbox if they still need to be taken care of or I need to be reminded of something; sort of a todo list. It's the easiest thing for me to do and allows me to process the emails once the task is complete, whether that's by deleting them or filing them.

I currently download RSS feeds straight into Outlook and podcasts through a program called Juice. This allows me to aggregate feeds of information into 1 general area where I can easily access it. My podcasts download into their own properly named folder on my storage drive, where I have a fairly good organization set up for all my files. I am a digital packrat and keep most of the stuff I download. I recently reorganized the My Pictures folder, taking on a new tactic for what goes in there. Up until the reorganization, I had all image files stored in this folder. Then it occurred to me that I could have a better use for the folders if I treated My Pictures only for pictures that I took or received for various events I attended. Any other image files would be stored in subfolders of a DL-ed folder sorted by file type along with any other media (avi, mov, mpg, swf, jpg, gif, etc.).

Finally, when I have my machines on at home and am using both the desktop and my personal laptop (or even adding my work laptop into the mix), I use a program called Synergy as a virtual KVM of sorts. Synergy gives me the ability to control all of my machines with only one keyboard and mouse. This helps so much when it removes the need for me to type on another keyboard and use a trackpad mouse.

Overall, I'm constantly changing my way of doing things until I can find that perfect combination. Right now, I've got a fairly good way of organization and controlling and accessing my data, but I'm always open to suggestions and not usually afraid to try something new.

I'm not going to lie to you; I run Windows as my primary OS's. I've got a desktop with Windows XP Professional and two laptops both running Windows Vista (One Enterprise and one Home Premium). However, I do like the ideas behind Linux and have played with several distros. If I could ever get over the fact that I'd have to find an open source alternative to everything I did and could convince myself to take the plunge, I'd run a distro like Ubuntu as my primary OS. Until then, I'll stick to virtual machines.

Such is the case for today. I installed Intrepid Ibex (the latest and greatest of Ubuntu distributions) onto a virtual machine and am working on getting it set up as a machine I can play with. At the time of writing, I'm working on getting VMWare Tools installed. It's a fairly simple process, but it does take a while.

When installing applications with Windows, usually, you just double click a file, click next a few times, and after some magic, the program is installed. With linux, it's slightly different. I choose to install all of my applications via Terminal, or command line. I feel it gives you slightly more control over exactly what you want to do.

Installing VMWare Tools is decently easy though. Use the following steps and everything will turn out okay.

sudo cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz ~/Desktop
tar xvf ~/Desktop/VMwareTools*.tar.gz
cd ~/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

It reminds me of of a quote I read from bash.org, which takes funny quotes from IRC and gives people the opportunity to vote on their humor:

<@insomnia> it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
<@insomnia> cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6
<@insomnia> that's the first one

All in all, if you're interested in Linux, I'd suggest that you have a love for command line first. You can do a lot with the GUI, but it's amazing what all you can do with some well-written code. I'm currently working on learning the basics of C# and am falling in love with it. It's absolutely incredible what can be created from a few lines of text.