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Roommates, plural? Yes indeedy.

I, Vivi, who can’t bear sleeping in a room with another person in it, am going to be inhabiting a triple located in Room 330, Next House, with my fellow roomies Di and Kelechi.

… Ick. Triple. Triiiiiiiipleeeeeee.

I’m not sure what kind of reverse psychology I accidentally injected into my housing app: I emphatically expressed the fact that I just -can’t sleep- (acute insomnia?) when others are in the room, and reading over the facts about myself that I placed in the 500-words text box doesn’t seem to point to the fact that I enjoy sharing my space; I’m actually rather paranoid about things like room arrangement, have always hated sharing things with others because they usually never give them back, and just dislike not having a private place to call my own. I’m not accusing my future roommates of being potential kleptos, but I guess that’s just that’s the kind of environment I’m used to.

Surprisingly, there are a few people out there who are seemingly disappointed to get singles; how I wish I was in their shoes! I wasn’t even expecting a single, but not even a double? And not in any of my top choices, but in 4th-ranked Next?

Hm. MIT seems like it’s dead set on making sure my optimism is challenged in every way possible before I start classes or even arrive on campus, haha! Well… bring it on, because while my enthusiasm for the tempting arrangements is slowly dwindling, it’s still going to take quite a bit more than -that- to make me extremely pissed off! ;D You want me to prove my adaptability? I’ll show it to ya.

… do I win an award for being the most tolerant pre-frosh yet?

Warning: extremely long entry ahead!

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. In the Beginning
II. The Cast of the Play
III. A Typical Day in APCS 8th
IV. When We Actually Programmed
V. AP Test Prep
VI. Why I Enjoyed APCS
VII. At the End of the Day
VIII. And the Future Draws Near

I’m not a nerd. I swear. I just love my CS class way too much.
This one’s for you guys.

Read the rest of this entry »

That is the question. This is Sparta.

So I was browsing through my beautiful 250GB palm-sized external HD yesterday and noticed that I have backups of my Livejournal entries from 2004-2007! I’m rather miffed that I didn’t have the common sense to back up some of the entries I had written in Cutenews from 2007-08 (some excellent pieces of rhetoric are now lost forever to the deep dark abyss of the Intarwebz), but I was still delighted that some my thoughts from as far back as 2004 were still in my posession!

I contemplated transferring all of them from the 10+ proprietary .doc files onto this blog, just so that anyone who was curious could easily look back and see how immature I had been as a feeble high school underclassman, but then I also thought about how much UTTER FAIL I had committed back then and started feeling queasy about admitting to the world how retarded I had been.

Not to mention I used to sound like a broken record inflicted with ADHD. And yes, I realize that sounds contradictory; trust me, it makes sense when you read my entries.

D’oh. You can’t. I haven’t archived them yet =D

On a slightly unrelated note, I’m going to start Project Properly Tag All Music today. That is, I’m going to tag all my music appropriately, and make sure that all of the artist and song names are in their native languages. No more romanized or translated Chinese/Japanese!

… but will it blend?

Memes aside, excuse me the language but.. what the hell is this?!

Well, I guess I’m supposed to answer my own rhetorical question. That would be the alpha of Amarok 2. Supposedly it’s going cross-platform with the version 2 release, and there’s a ton of new flashy stuff (integrated networking, like the ability to pull artist information from Last.fm and such, nicer artwork, etc.) And naturally, I have to go around being a pessimistic cynic and raise an opposition to the so-called “intuitive” interface. Because you know what?

I hate it.

Sometimes I really wish I could say things in a nicer tone of voice, but I guess bluntness bestows a certain kind of charm to my blog - I don’t look to be controversial, it just sort of happens. Either way, I usually try my best to explain the reason behind my spite, so I guess I owe you all a reason why I believe the new interface sucks, reason(s) being:

It’s cluttered, it’s extranneous, and it pales in comparison to the previous one.

There’s a reason why I picked foobar2000 as my audio player of choice for Windows: it was simple, it was minimalist, and it gave me exactly what I wanted - a playlist. If I want artist information, I’ll look it up on Wikipedia. I don’t want all five of those frame-like panes present in the Amarok 2; I want ONE main pane open that shows whatever the heck I’m listening to, and I want one small side pane to show whatever I want it to show (tab window). Can someone explain why there are tabs along with five panes in Amarok 2? Isn’t that a little extranneous? Which pane (and I use pane to mean one of those iframe-like windows) would the tab open itself in? If only the left pane, why is there a need for three more to clutter up my space? For heaven’s sakes, where is the damn playlist on that thing? I don’t want to construct my own playlists because my tastes are constantly changing day by day, nor do I want to go search for songs indiviually from my collection one-by-one as I finish each of them. I want a large, open area to where I can click-and-drag my files and have them play in rapid succession.

Oh, and have I also mentioned I hate that theme? I first had my run-in with that style when I got KTorrent 3.1 and nearly gagged myself. Am I the only person who thinks it looks like a disgusting cheapass imitation of the Mac OSX style?! Surely there has to be a way to mod the UI. If not, I’m going to stab myself in the eye every time I open or alt-tab over to Amarok. Which, you know, is quite frequently, so I hope I don’t die of an optical hemorrage.

Unlike all the Ubuntu zealots who seem to place attractiveness of their desktop over usability, I must say I favour the minimalist approach - it makes things easier to use and more efficient. The current version of Amarok gives me that efficiency without sacrificing a clean and satisfying interface.

In all seriousity, I hope either the final release ends up being a lot more flattering, or that there will eventually be an option to mod Amarok 2 to look like the current version - not just the style, but the setup.

Aaaaaaaaand there’s my daily dose of spite. Blend well before consuming.