curtis07

I have had friends with boyfriend problems like you have experienced. I can only offer the same advice: he's not good for you. I'm a guy, and I know that guys are capable of being wonderful people. You can do better.

Okay, some of these are not facts (some of them say things like "listen to him"). Others are absolutely true (I'm a guy, and I DEFINITELY love my mom). Others are horribly inaccurate (but not many). I think most of these are blanket statements about a certain type of guy. For instance, I am a melancholy introvert that is VERY good at keeping a girl's secrets, and I am NOT open about myself. Maybe I'm just not "most guys".I still think many of these are very well stated. Well done.

Lets see....Firefox, gParted, Audacity, Songbird, Amarok, Rosegarden, VLC, Handbrake, Schoolhouse, OpenOffice, Nexuiz, Scribus, SciTE, phpBB, Wordpress MU, Gimp, Metamorphose, 7-zip, Spybot S&D, Clamwin, to name a few on the top of my head.Sourceforge all the way, baby! I love using open source stuff (though some of these aren't open source). I am always looking for a free and less bloated alternative.

When writing, one can EDIT. It's so nice. I can write a bunch of nonsense, then go back and write larger and more effective language. I can hide anger, sadness, happiness, and even ignorance behind a facade of text. I can take two hours and think of a better answer than what I would say to a friend in the same room. I can reread everything, rewrite everything, and pretend I'm a leprechaun if I want. Nobody will know me. If we all were comfortable talking about anything to anyone, we would all be out talking to real people all the time and forums like this would be empty. This forum provides a wonderful conversation place for everything under the sun.All that being said, I try to be myself. But I don't seriously speak like this all the time. One can be much more eloquent in writing than speaking, or at least more flowing.

I have spent countless hours and done extensive research on this topic: quad-booting a MacBook with OSX, Win XP, Win Vista, and Linux. Yes, it is possible. Yes, it is a long process, but it is not too advanced. Anybody with a MacBook, an interest in computers that goes beyond Youtubing, an external hard drive, a rudimentary knowledge of Linux and filesystems, a certificate in T3KN0-5P33K (if you can't read that, you probably aren't nerdy enough), a tremendous amount of patience and troubleshooting ability and many other small things can accomplish the status of a quad-booter. Exciting, really. 1. Apply all of the latest updates for Macespecially any concerning firmware. You will need to do this to avoid a lot of hassle (including inability to update firmware) later down the road. 2. Format your external hard drive using Mac's filesystem (HFS+). 3. Download and install rEFIt (open source and free). This is an amazing tool to boot much more easily. 4. Use Carbon Copy Cloner (a free download, in case you don't already use this handy piece of software) to clone your MacBook disk to the external drive. 5. Reboot from the external disk (there's the option in the rEFIt menu). 6. In Finder, go to Applications, then Utilities, and open the Disk Utility. Repartition your MacBook hard drive using the MBR system (GPT will not work; nothing but MBR). Make a DOS filesystem partition at the beginning (you will reformat this for Win XP later). Then add another DOS partition directly after it (only about 5-10 GB for your Linux root; you will reformat it later as well). Make a Mac (HFS+) partition next, but leave enough space for Win Vista, a Linux home partition and a Linux swap partition after it. You will leave the rest of the partitioning for later. 7. Clone your external drive back to the newly created Mac partition on the laptop's hard drive. Shut the computer down and remove the external disk. 8. Boot with a Linux live CD (I would suggest researching for a distribution that works well with Mac; I have tried SimplyMEPIS, which is okay, and OpenSuSE, which is not okay for Mac). You can choose the CD option from the rEFIt menu. 9. Using a partitioning program in Linux (such as Qparted or Gparted), reformat the first DOS partition into NTFS. Then reformat the second into ext3 (a Linux filesystem). Use all of the remaining space at the end of the disk and make an extended partition. In this, make several logical partitions (as many as you want, really, but for my purposes, this is easiest): First, an NTFS partition for Vista, then an ext3 partition for a Linux home partition, and finally a swap partition for Linux (3GB should easily suffice). 10. Install Linux on your three Linux partitions; the root system should be installed on the first Linux partition, the home folder should go in your logical Linux partition, and of course you need to activate the swap partition. Make sure that when you install the GRUB (not LILO, it is more difficult) bootloader, DO NOT install it in the master boot record! Install it in the Linux root folder. It should have an option to do so. 11. Reboot with a Windows XP disk. Install it on the first partition. It's that easy. 12. Reboot with a Windows Vista disk. Install it on the logical NTFS partition. It will need to install a boot manager on the XP partition. This is okay. Don't worry. 13. Have fun (haha, right...) looking for drivers and tweaking your system! It can get interesting, believe me. By now, you will either be screaming in the vent forum or elating over your newly acquired status of Quad-Booter Extraordinaire. Install Compiz-Fusion on Linux and you can show off even more to your non-quad-booter friends. Some notes: rEFIt currently does not have an option to turn off recognition of extra partitions yet, so you will see about 20 bajillion options when booting. You only ever need to use the first three. A lot of this is trial and error. Do not erase your external disk until you are positive nothing else will go wrong. Read up on all the software I've mentioned before installing them. For the sake of conciseness, I have left out details on some pieces (like advanced rEFIt settings). I have only done this on a MacBook (not Pro), but I would imagine this would work on any Intel-based modern Mac. I am not to be held liable for anything you do. Don't PM me angrily demanding reparations. This is a do-at-your-own-risk project. For me, it was worth it. It's great for not only showing off, but for cross-platform development, gaming and pure thrills. I am sure you can do even more with this idea, so go have a blast doing whatever you very well please with your beautiful MacBook. Just be sure to post back here when you've become the icosa-booting king (icosa = 20, just for clarification). Best of luck, Curtis

I do have it set up perfectly (or at least that's what it says). I have finally moved over most of my site's files to Xisto's hosting server now (and my domain's nameservers are all pointed correctly). It was up earlier today, but it seems to have gone away again. Perhaps the server is down for repair (does that happen often? I hope not). When it was up it was much faster than my last webhost. I wanna know why there is a menu option to go to cPanel in the forum's hosting menu. It doesn't even work. I have to go to https://support.xisto.com/ and login from there to access cPanel. It's not that difficult, but there shouldn't be a broken link in the menu. It's slightly annoying when you try to access it for the first time and have to figure all that out.

I never got an email with login information. I closed my browser before it had finished processing, so it never emailed me or gave me a message with information on how to login. I also registered with a domain name: openhisword.org, not the traditional (username).trap17.com subdomain. The account would seem to be set up, but it never finished for me. Even after 48 hours.

I joined the forums here a week or two ago. I worked my credits up to about 39 and applied for an account (I became completely approved). However, when I tried registering my account, my browser was stuck on the "Xisto" page for about 48 hours. It just kept telling me to wait (it could take a "long time"). Eventually, I had to close my browser because it was using exorbitant levels of RAM. I lost all my credits anyway. I'm wondering how to fix that.Does my application require human input after being approved? I thought it was completely automatic, so I applied on a weekend. Maybe I shouldn't have applied on a weekend, but I saw no warnings. I would like to have my credits back so I can reapply.I would make this an admin email, but I feel this is a topic that merits discussion or at least attention. Perhaps it should be addressed in the starter FAQ. I don't remember seeing anything about the wait in the FAQ (and I read every word of every beginner FAQ). Maybe I missed something. Maybe it does take more than 48 hours, but that will just cause my ancient desktop computer to crash.Thanks for any help,Curtis

Oh, House, M. D., Teachers, Psych, Monk, MASH, MST3K (Mystery Science Theater 3000, a grand old show with a few guys making fun of terribly made movies), The IT Crowd (British), and most of all, Chuck.Chuck is great. It's the ultimate nerd flick TV series. Can't wait for season two to start!

In academy, my physics teacher was also the IT administrator for the school. He was always into open source stuff, and had some advanced server stuff goin' on with Linux. We had Windows NT 4.0 (I think) and he wanted to try something new he'd been researching for years. He built a rather nice server and put Mandrake Linux (before Mandriva, back when Mandrake was better than many alternitives) on it. He made all the computers on campus into thinclients and waited to see our reaction. Most people were quite noob-like and asked what was wrong with the computers. I heard wonderfully hilarious comments like, "you deleted the Internet!!!" The more nerdy types (myself included) found the Firefox icon and the OpenOffice suite and set to schoolwork immediately. Then we'd go through the KDE games. I thought it was awesome to have such a nice-looking desktop environment. I was very impressionable and open to new operating systems, and Linux just reached out and grabbed me. I still use Windows XP for many things (too much software that I need). I also have a Mac, which is also quite nice. I rarely use Linux, but only because both my computers have weird incompatible hardware. My next build will feature Linux, though.

Just quad-boot a Mac, like I do. Seriously, I have Mac OS-X Tiger, Windows Vista (yuck), Windows XP, and Linux (OpenSuSE 11.0) all on my MacBook. I may write a post about how I accomplished that, but in the meantime, I'll just enjoy it.Mac is the easiest and most user-friendly. Windows has the most software. Linux offers the most stability and gadgets and prettiness. I would love to get rid of Windows because of all the problems with it, but then I'd lose 2/3 of the programs I use on a regular basis. I would love to get rid of Mac, simply for price (it's outrageous!). I would love to go all Linux, but it's too much work. I still love showing it off though, with my Compiz Fusion and KDE4....For a noob to computers or someone serious about media, go Mac.For a "crowd-follower" and business person, go Win.For a truly rewarding experience and a wonderful community, go Lin.For all the features, quad-boot with rEFIt on Mac hardware like me.For everything else, does MasterCard have an OS?

Well, at least you were somewhat "honorable", in that you DIDN'T go out running and screaming profanities, and didn't embarrass her in front of her friend, and actually paid for the dinner. It seems like she was nice. It's too bad she conned you. Maybe she thought she was helping you take the relationship to the next level of commitment....Anyway, sorry for your loss. May your pride rest in peace.

That was said beautifully, my friend. I've always thought that about movies, too. The characters that keep their cool and don't swear incessantly seem more intelligent. Ditto. I believe that an owner has the right to do whatever, but when I have to scroll down the page when someone walks in the room while I'm typing... I just think we could do without. What would a 13-year-old have to vent about on a computer, anyway? When I was 13 and wanted to vent, I think I pretty much yelled and vented to (or at) whoever was closest to me. What has the world come to...?

On a typing test, I get about 60 WPM. However, like some have mentioned, coding takes more accuracy and thought. In a normal human English sentence, one could do this: "inn a normol humen inglis sentance" and get by with 99% of English-speakers comprehending it. Funny thing is, It took me forever just to type that example of flawed language. We have more experience in English than any computer language, and a computer doesn't recognize semantics. If I said "yo, wassup comp? Could ya say 'hello world' for us?" in Python, I'd get a long string of red text shouting at me that I was the most stupid coder in the world and that I just made more errors than words. "print 'hello world'" gets much better results in the IDLE, by the way.Sorry for going off on a weird tangent.Yes, coding does affect typing speeds negatively. And no, when you type at 60+ speeds, I don't think it helps significantly in coding. You have to think a LOT. I'm not the world's best coder (I'm quite amateur, really), but I know even good coders take more time thinking than typing.

I am a sophomore in college now. I have yet to date. No, I'm not a loser (maybe at football; I suck at American football). I have just been waiting. Not just for the right girl. No, I'm waiting until it will be more fun TO date than NOT to. When I started high school, I planned on waiting until I was 16. When I was 16, I noticed that nobody that dated had fun after the first three dates or so. I also noticed that ONLY going on one or two dates was impossible for my academy friends. So I waited. I decided to wait until I was 18. It's nothing my parents said (they told me I could date at 13). I simply had foresight.Actually, my first school was in a church basement with seven girls and me, the only boy. I was the youngest. Then I went to an elementary school with more boys than girls (for third-graders, it was the most immature group of elementary boys you could imagine; I feel sorry for the teacher). Then I went to a very small academy, the only guy in my class again. Then, on to another academy, with something like 2/3 of the student body being girls. Now I'm going to a university with an excellent nursing program (I'm business and mass comm, in case you care), so, as stereotype would suggest correctly, there are more girls than guys. So I've had opportunity.Well, this waiting is actually not bad. It gives me a chance to actually have good friend relationships. I became great friends with my roommate, had a study group going, and had a blast on choir tours. It's cool to be able to play chess with your business major buddy one day and go to the gym and play volleyball with your nursing friends for three hours the next. So many people see dating as "interminable togetherness" (get out your wiktionaries). It would be nice if dating could mean playing chess one day and volleyball the next. Sitting together during school assemblies just doesn't sound like fun. My advice (look at this: someone with no experience giving advice! the nerve!) is: date someone you can be friends with. Not the "just friends" type, but someone you are not just "lovers" with.So far, I don't regret not dating. I'm not going to wait too much longer, though, because I go to a wonderful university with a lot of nice girls. And they aren't 13 and looking to show off to all the 11-year-old girls that they're dating.

I can't hate on Sony. I have had only wonderful experience with them. I will say that their higher end stuff is overpriced (it's good, but not $bajilion good). I needed a stereo a while back with a $200 budget (US$), and I checked out every stereo at every store I went to, but for a low-to-mid-priced bookshelf stereo, my $170 CMT-HPZ9 is amazing! I love the sound quality for the price. I have more recently purchased some MDR-XD200 headphones (about $30 I think) and could not be happier. I mean, who puts 40mm speakers in $30 headphones?!I don't own anything else from Sony, but when I go shopping at a mall in a bigger city, I can't help but be drawn into the Sony Style shop (not to mention the Bose store). All I can say is that for a small budget, you can get better than just an illusion of crisp sound.

Just so I'm clear, there IS global warming. Just like I DO discriminate between skin coloration. Global warming simply means a rising temperature trend on a worldwide level (and I'm not colorblind, so I can discriminate, or tell the difference, between skin tones). (I hope you caught the analogy and don't think I'm racist!)However... the pace is so ridiculously slow that it's amazing anyone actually took notice. Blaming ourselves is not going to help anything. People cannot possibly create enough carbon dioxide to affect the globe on a catastrophic level. In fact, active volcanoes produce more air pollutants in a year than all the factories in the world. Maybe we should blame the dwarfs for digging too deeply into the earths crust! And that's not to mention the CO2 released by evaporating oceans--more than 90% of all the CO2 released yearly.On a side note, have you seen all the great video clips of ice chunks falling off Antarctica's sides? I mean, if you showed pictures of all the 80-year-olds in America to an Egyptian or something, they would think we were all dying of some grave disease over here (I'm not saying all 80-year-olds are ugly, they just don't look like 15-year-olds)! The misrepresentation of seasonal melting is unbearable.It's sad when people are having a conversation, just making small talk, when someone mentions the dreadful heat. "Why is it so hot out here?" they ask. All too often, the reply is "haven't you heard of global warming?!" Well, when I was in first grade, I was under the impression that the SUN was what made it hot outside. I mean, at night, when the sun is hiding out on the other side of the planet, it isn't quite as hot. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the present global warming theory doesn't say anything about daily CO2 fluctuations causing midday heat and midnight lows. Perhaps if those "scientists" (if they can be called that, with such poor scientific methods) thought outside the box (the earth, that is), they might start looking toward the sun as the source of our problems. I remember watching a documentary ("The Great Global Warming Swindle", a wonderful film) all about discrediting the current theory. In it, one gentleman was describing his method of determining long-term weather patterns. Every year, he makes a bet with the United States Weather Bureau (or whatever it's called) about the climate one year in advance. Every year he wins. He counts the spots on the sun. Apparently this has led to very accurate predictions for a couple thousand years. So far, predictions based on CO2 conditions on polar caps have come up with planet-destroying hurricane seasons for several years. But it's been a couple years since the last bad season, and nobody has thought to check on the methods they use to calculate future climate conditions. That's science at it's greatest [moment of stupidity]!Another thing I like about the film is when it talks about the commercial benefits of global warming. One guy was talking about how if you wanted grant money to research breeding habits of gray squirrels, you'll have an interesting time begging for funds. If you want to see how global warming has affected the breeding habits of squirrels, people hand you the proverbial blank check!One scientist (an actual one) was talking about how he was put on the "consensus of scientists for global warming" list without being asked. In fact, he went so far as to threaten legal action to have his name taken off the supporter list. He says that original list of thousands has been cut down significantly just by people trying to get off of it. Very good science, indeed!Now, I'm not saying I'm against electric cars (have you heard about the Tesla Roadster? It's awesome!!!); I love the idea of environmentalism. I don't climb trees or protest industrialism of developing nations, but I think we ought to care a little bit for our future earth. I used to live in Halifax, NS, Canada, the "City of Trees". I liked it.Curtis

Eggs are not the best source of protein for you. Meat is even worse. The fat and cholesterol are not worth it for the small benefits.You can get plenty of protein other ways (and not just soy products, beans, and nuts). Pasta has significant amounts of protein. Even an orange (yes, that round fruit) has about one gram of protein.Also, too much protein can lead to digestive problems. A majority of Americans get too much protein. We shouldn't be worried about whether we're getting enough unless we're trying to gain significant muscle mass in the gym.