The final payment to my big credit card posted today. So I am left now with my monthly expenses and my car note. I really wish the old car hadn't freaked out but eh.. it happens. Upcoming expenses will be wrapping up this second associates degree and then whatever expense is attached to whatever I end up doing about a four year degree. Oh, and a couple of Cisco tests.

The goal when I started going after the balance was to be done by the 2008 election. Not really anything special about the election.. it was just a time point. Well, I managed it and picked up a degree on the way. I think the thing that helped the most is I was able to do a balance transfer for most of it to a credit union card at 3% interest for 18 months. The difference in 20% and 3% interest on a five digit balance is just amazing.

Don't expect to see any near-term LJs about new computers though. The next six months or so will be building up my savings account. I want a functional cushion there in case my job goes poof or I reach the point where regret for waking up in morning exceeds the loyalty threshold.

Now back to work.

Amazing how much a change of half a mile, ten minutes and the presence of some hot chocolate can do for a mood. Now it is time to do a couple of hours of work for my C++ class.

.... trying to find a good way to implement something that I don't even particularly think is a good idea.

Ninety minutes and I can go visit the hot chocolate goddesses.

After the jump is a heart warming tale of a geek and his computers coming together to try and prevent the geek from deleting part of his fragging homework again.

( A Tale )

Corpse Craft on whirled.com is delightfully demented. This is what you get if a Bejeweled player, an RTS player and a zombie freak have a threesome.

My brain is wondering about a switch failure earlier
My brain is at Starbucks, doing homework.
My brain is in Winterspring, taming a new pet
My brain is on to the weekend seeing people

My brain is not here where I am trying to come up with a UI and supporting code for a system where groups within the same database can individually decide to require or not, relabel or not, 200+ individual form fields.

Well I was going to be good and get some homework submitted tonight but so far the Distance Learning system has been offline since 6pm. I guess I will go watch a couple of Babylon 5 episodes and then try again.

Last week a friend posted an LJ about how she should approach her prof about a bad grade and my argument was that if the grade isn't going to break you to just let it go rather than get an unfortunate rep with the prof this early in the term.

Well, this time, its my turn. Heh.


1. Suppose that x = 5 and y = 6. What is the output of the following Java statement?

System.out.println("Sum of " + x + " and " + y + " = " + x + y);
A. Sum of 5 and 6 is 11 C. Sum of x and y is 11
B. Sum of 5 and 6 is 56 D. None of these

The instructor's answer is B. My answer was D. This is a case of do you grade based on what you mean or what you actually gave the student's in your quiz. In my opinion he chose poorly but arguing it with a prof I don't know just isn't worth the trouble for 2 points on something that is 20% of 20% of my final grade.

EDIT: looked at it again... thinking I might selling the prof short but there is no way to phrase a challenge that doesn't look like rules lawyer whining so.. screw it. If that 0.08 points is what keeps me from an A at the end of the semester I obviously have larger issues.

*sigh* One hour and I can leave work

Sometimes when I go to a Flash heavy site like YouTube it causes the Flash plugin on Linux to insult the sound engine's mother which then blackmails Firefox into just whole killing itself. Or something like that. End result is a browser collapse. This is annoying when it wipes out six or seven tabs. The short version of why this happens is because by default all Firefox windows run in one process. Piss off the process, you lose it all.

Since Google's Chrome isn't (last I checked) a reasonable option on Linux I got to digging around and found that you can instruct Firefox to launch in a new process with a new profile. So now I have my normal Firefox, with my default profile AND I have a launcher that fires up in a new process with a different profile. I'll use the new one when I'm doing anything risky like going to YouTube or websites that I know are Flash advertisement fiends.

For those curious here are the launch commands for the two items on my Gnome panel.

firefox -no-remote -P default
firefox -no-remote -P FlashVault

-no-remote is the key.. that tells firefox you want a new process instead of running under the existing one. The -P specifies the profile. Two processes cannot operate on the same profile as best I can tell.

This won't stop Flash from killing my main FF process if I happen to go somewhere unhappy by accident but at least its a workaround for the intended swimming in the Flashy pool.