Thursday night me and "Diamond Joe" Rozzi (the BSD Master of Earhart Hall, not to be confused with "Diamond Joe" Quimby, mayor of Springfield) made an attempt at installing FreeBSD 5.1 on my desktop.

A recap: I got my new hard drive earlier that day, the 80 GB, which was in fact manufactured by Western Digital. I will say this now, but probably forget it later: I will never buy from Western Digital again. I set the hard drive to Primary Master, plugged it in, and the BIOS recognized it... but the POST and afterwards was so slow and clunky, I was starting to think I had knocked something loose on the motherboard in my installation. Paul "PMarks" Marks told me that he had had a Western Digital with the same problem, but when he put it on cable select and put it on the end of the IDE chain it worked fine. Voila, he was right.

So anyway, I decided that FreeBSD is cool and 1337 and I just had to have it, so after installation I had of course the EXACT SAME PROBLEM that I had when I installed Debian: XFree86 does not like my GeForce 4 Ti4400. Everything else on my computer works perfectly except for that. Well, "Diamond Joe" Rozzi told me last night he'd found out that instead of using the "nv" driver (which is the driver for nvidia cards), we should have been using the "nvidia" driver. I have no idea what the difference is, but I hope it works.

I won't get to test it out until Monday when I return to Purdue. So, wish me luck...

It's another lonely insomniac night. For no good reason.

Looks like I'll be getting a new digital camera for Christmas (hopefully). This will mean I will start posting to my deviantart space again. I can't wait... I've wanted a digital camera for months now. I can't count the number of times I've stopped on my way to class or something and been like "Damn, that would be a GREAT shot."

Also been listening to the George Winston album December. It's the best piano music ever, especially for December of course. If anyone wants a copy, give me a holler, I just might be able to hook you up... wink, wink.

(Over && Out)

I stopped that download just in time!

Go mad resnet-beating skillz.

My C drive made a suicide attempt the other day. I'm quite concerned. I just restarted, and it told me that there were bad sectors all over the place, and it had to correct them. So in the process it deleted almost 75% of its stuff.

That's what you get when you buy an IBM Deskstar. I ordered a new Maxtor 80 GB last night, should be here by Freitag, and I'm currently thinking about installing some Open-Source OS on it, maybe FreeBSD. Of course, I'm doomed to failure in that attempt, but so it goes. I'll keep on pushing that rock...

I just got back from Thanksgiving break. It was a blast. Spent plenty of time in Steak and Shake, and the movie theatre, with my comerades including (but not limited to, void where prohibited): Greg, Jay, Colin, Louis, Dave, Jozef, Ben, Sean... and of course we had fun with a Jehovah's Witness at the Steak and Shake Thursday night. "Hey, gentlemen, want to hear a parable?" In retrospect, we should have ran then... What's up with preaching in restaurants anyway?

Saw Master and Commander. What a good movie. Also saw Timeline. Uh, what was Michael Crighton smoking when he wrote that shit? There are many questions raised by this movie, including:

• Why was there a physicist [not only that, a wormhole expert] permanently employed at an archaeological dig?
• What's the real reason they couldn't take back moderm weapons? It was just assumed that we understood this.
• Why were they unable to take back any weapons or armor at all? Were the people who found the elaborate peasant's costumes unable to find swords, chain mail, bows and arrows?
• If you found the glasses on the floor and did not replace them, how can you then conclude that you would then not ever find them? If you never found them, you'd never move them!! [If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go watch the movie, please... or just download the bittorrent. Actually I encourage downloading the torrent because I relish the thought of the makers of this movie losing money and being stolen from.]
• etc...

But, more to the point, I want to have more Thanksgiving Break. But, only three weeks left, then I get three weeks off. Here's to counting the days until Christmas.

Oh. My. God.

...in other news, the city of Los Angeles ruled that black is white and up is down, citing past discrimination against African-Americans and the directionally challenged.

After a good week of high temperatures in the upper 60's, this morning I wake up and it's snowing. And weather.com tells me the wind chill factor is 11. Well, good thing I'd planned ahead so I can skip 2 of my 4 classes (CS180 being cancelled before hand, luckily).

So, I'm just hanging out here today, studying for my math exam which is tomorrow morning. Then right after I get to go home for Thanksgiving.

I can't wait...

So, on this lovely morning/evening, I took a trip down to the lobby to get some M&M's. Upon my return to the wonderful fifth floor, what do my wondering eyes behold, but a little sign on the bathroom door! "Do not enter", it reads. My curiosity piqued, I enter, and am immediately blasted with a stench which recalls memories of frog dissection in 10th grade biology... then I see some poor student pratically swimming in his own vomit, lying face-up on the floor. And of course, I think, "What would Jesus do?"

Jesus would obviously turn his vomit into wine so everyone can party a little hardier. Not being of the magical persuasion, I decided that perhaps I should take some other action.

My Basic Aid Training course from 3rd grade suddenly flashed into my mind. Being unsure how I could help him with diagrams of my house and the best fire escape routes, I then tried to think of something else. Aha! CPR. Well, let's take a pulse. It's there. Good. Is he breathing? Looks like it. Sorta. But then when I poke him with this here cattle prod he doesn't respond... I'd better hurry up and do something, cause I hear alcohol poisoning can kill you so bad you can die from it.

So, I run downstairs in an attempt to find Somebody with Authority. They'll know Standard Operating Procedure, as I'm sure this happens on a weekly basis while I'm sleeping. Sure enough the staff resident handled it in a cool manner, calling up the paramedics, who promptly arrived and dragged off the unconscious mutton-head hanging onto their shoulders.

So, uh, alcohol is bad for you... mkay?

Mkay.

I didn't put that sign on my door just for kicks! Well actually, at first I did. But now it's like you're not even reading the sign! Please, Mr. Rap-Loving Individual on the floor above me, turn down your 'music'. For the love of christ.

Note to self: Linux sucks.

A couple weeks ago I partitioned off 30 gigs to play around with Debian. After a week of it I had had enough (could only get Gnome working after hours of fiddling, no 2.4.x kernel support for my GeForce 4, etc etc). Anyway, the other day I decided to reclaim the 30 gigs for Windows, cause Bittorrent is a greedy mistress.

I expected some trouble because I didn't (was unable to with the worthless XP installer disc) format the MBR, but had no trouble until this morning. XP slowed to a crawl, and so I had to hard-reboot, and then the screen just spewed garbage (but, to my relief, it was getting past the BIOS screen). Call up Paul Marks, ask him for a 98 disc, and fdisk'ed the MBR (and FPROTTED THE TARBALL) faster than you can blink. Troubles over.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Well, it's a Thursday, and as such I'm bored out of my mind. So I'm gonna establish a little blog here for the hell of it. Why not?

Introductions are in order. I'm Matt Kramer, a Purdue student. I have a web site at aynrandmcnally.com. Also, there's my Purdue University space. If you hadn't guessed I'm currently a first-semester freshman, majoring in Computer Science (and maybe Math double major) at Purdue. I decided to go there after being rejected by MIT for being a white male (no, I'm not a racist, but I know that MIT is big into affirmative action), and by Rose-Hulman for being middle class. I was technically accepted to Rose, however I would have graduated with $80,000 in debt. Yeah, no thanks.

Purdue's an OK place, though, for sure. It's not like I'm not being challenged or meeting people smarter than myself. I'm not meeting many friends here, though... not that I haven't met people who are friendly, but I haven't met anyone that I really find it worthwhile to talk to. It took me a while to find such people in middle/high school, and it'll take me some time here.

I'm really into reading: fantasy, classic literature, and historical non/fiction are my favorites. I'm currently in the middle of The Plague by Albert Camus. It's quite good, I think I like it mainly because I can so relate to the isolation Camus describes. I'm also currently in the middle of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, an awesome book if you're interested in Rome, I highly recommend it. How and why the Roman Empire fell has always been a subject of fascination to me... but I digress...

My religion has been a matter of some confusion to me of late. I was raised a Roman Catholic, and went to grade school in a private Catholic school. This affected (effected?) me greatly, and at the age of about 12-13 I decided I did not believe in God, and renounced the Church. Up until that time I had been the most devout of Catholic kids... I went to confession and mass once a week. That's the result of the schooling. But when I got into private schools, I started thinking a lot on the issue, and realized that a lot of what the Church taught me was bullshit. Unfortunately (as I now see it), my rejection of the Church came packaged with an utter rejection of a belief in God. It was, in retrospect, just as irrational as my belief in the Church, but I believed that there was no God.

Years have passed since then, and I went from being a socialist, to a communist, to an "Ayn Randroid" (what an effect The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged had on me!), then finally I stopped believing in Ayn Rand and became what I was up until a few months ago: a rationalist, an atheist, and a Libertarian (big L!). But recently I have given a lot of thought to the issue of the existence of God, and I have a lot more thinking and reading to do on the issue, but I now think thus: The Universe had to be started by something. All this something we see around us didn't come from nothing. Let's call whatever something that created all these other somethings God. It's like Aristotle's explanation for the existence of God -- which I have yet to fully read and comprehend. But I'm working on it.

I've been talking to my cousin Ryan a lot about it. He's two years older me, and studying philosophy with the intention of being a Catholic priest (though to me he seems somewhat doubtful as to what path he wants to pursue in life). Anyway, as he explained it to me from his extensive reading, he believes that it is possible to prove rationally that a God or gods exist (as, like, Plato did). But then the rest of it, what you believe about that God or gods, is a matter of faith. And I believe that no real answers can be reached through faith. I have no faith. So I conclude that we cannot know the nature of God, but he exists. I suppose that makes me an agnostic theist.

Anyway... what else about me. Physical appearance. I'm 6'4" and 335 pounds. I've been working out more and more, just this morning I ran a mile in 13 minutes, 24 seconds (new personal best). I've gotten this heavy by sitting on my computer, doing things like typing a blog on slashdot (and playing CS and Morrowind...) for most of my life. It's a real shame, and I'm trying to reverse the effects of 19 years of an unhealthy lifestyle.

Well, that's about all I have to say for now. If you want to contact me you can email me.

This is the first post. I may turn this into a permanent journal, I am not sure yet. In any event, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.