Man was this a tough semester. Physics 1 Calc 1, Chem 1, History of the US and Intro Computer science. That coupled with 22 hrs a week of Math tutoring paid by the school, and maybe 10 hour a week of personal tutoring, made it a pretty tough semester. I guess you can throw in having taking care of my fiancee( although I'll admit I did neglected her a little). After it is all said and done, I kept my 4.0.

I didn't know it worked this way, but at my school you cant actually get more than 100% in a class(that was news to me) I seem to have gotten 112% in calc 1, 127% in chemistry and 130% in Comp science intro. Physics 1 I didn't do that good I only got a 95%, but I didnt know that the grades could go over 100%. Now I know.

I do realize that I'm at a small, private, liberal arts school, in the third world colony of the US, Puerto Rico, so naturally, the clases were much easier than at many other more advanced schools. Don't matter. All it means to me is that I'm at a higher level than they can teach at that instititution. I wish I could go to a better school were clases were actually challenging, and the students were at the same knowledge level than me, but money wise, its still not feasible for me. Hopefully I can keep shurning out profits here and there( tutoring and software) so that I can afford a better school in the not so distant future.

My hope is that I don't fall behind the knowledge curve so when I reach the masters levels I dont have to start all over again with basic science concepts. I hope that all the reading and I do on the side will help me keep up until a better school is feasible.

Anyway, Im very proud of my achievement, it was a pretty bad semester in terms of morale and mental state and I still squeezed out some great grades. I firmly believe that if I can fix some character flaws and some bad habits, I can go as far as I want to go. Reaching my limit terrifies me

Before my linux exploration, I have a comment about slashdot tags system. One of the reasons that attracted me to slashdot was the quality of the discussions and the independent thought that could be read in slahdot's discussions. That was until the Tag system started.

I believe that having ultra condensed opinions in the form of tags, makes you enter the discussion with a preconceived notion. FUD, Not FUD, slow news day, all that influences in a subcontious manner the thoughts of the readers and posters. When I enter a discussion with a FUD tag then I will enter thinking that what I'm reading is not true, or when I enter a slow news days I enter already with the notion that this news bit is somehow not important. But what if it is? What if someone can make a really important connection between the "unimportant" news and a very important one?

Maybe is just me, but when I enter a discussion I don't want to have my opinion influenced by a tag. I think the tag system needs to go away. But I dont think it will since it is good for the short term traffic on slashdot.

Well here I go, the first time for two things that I've been curious abaut. Linux and to lesser degree the slashdot journal feature. I've been interested in the software world for a while, and slashdot is my main source of acknowledge gathering . In a place like slashdot I have become used to the idea tha linux is somehow better than windows, and since I'm taking my first software courses next semester, I thought I start getting used to Linux. Reading around slashdot I got the opinion that ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/ was a good place to start.

To be honest, I don't particulary liked the download page(way to many options), but it had good balance between ease of use and information availability. But as soon as it is downloaded and burnt to a CD I noticed a big difference with windows. It's actually really easy to get it up and running with just the cd. It din't change anyting that I could notice on my windows installation, and I'm using it right now. Lets get to the interesting part, I'm really itchy to talk about it.

As soon as the desktop loaded I notice a diference. I instinctivly looked at the bottom left hand corner and noticed the big start button missing. Instead I noticed that in Ubuntu you are not immediatly led to believe that the OS is the center of the computer. Once the desktop loads, I started using the computer, so there is no need for the OS to suggest what software I should begin using first. This OS abstain from suggesting software. Instead the aplications I've loooked for, are placed very cleverly and relativly aptly named. The Internet Browser and the e-mail app are the only applications that have a distinctive place. Good thing too, the first thing I reached for was firefox, to conect to the web, which Ubuntu did flawlessly.

Ubuntu's interface is really neat. There is very little clutter, and there are some cool things that windows don't have. The first one I discovered while typing this entry was the workspace system. It is extremely cool and efficient way to organiza the work place. While I was typing this in open office, I was searching the net, for information on HTML formating. When I do this using windows I usually run into the problem of my navigation bar gettig full of all the applications that are runing, but I'm not necesarily using. with the workplace system I can keep my current work(activity) hidden enough so it doesnt interfere with my current work, but accesible enough for easy switching between tasks