It's a well known fact that for modern ATI video cards, that is for cards with chips R300 and later, the open source driver that comes with Xorg does not support them. The only driver that does, is ATI's proprietary closed source driver. The driver has new releases about once a month and supports all of the modern ATI cards. However, it does not hold the same quality as most linux drivers.

In the first place, support for new cards lags way behind hardware releases. I have a Radeon Mobility X1300 card, which was released in October 2005. According to ATI's site, the first version of their driver which supported this card was 8.24.8, released in April 2006. How would you feel if you bought a new car, but when it was delivered, it had no seats, no steering wheel, and no pedals? Then the company made you wait 7 months until you could actually drive the car?

Secondly, the driver just isn't very good. The Xorg open source driver for radeon cards, which I used for years in the past, may or may not perform as well as ATI's driver when it comes to 3D acceleration, but it does support the features I use perfectly well. ATI's driver, however, has certain deficiencies. For instance, X-video support for my card was only introduced in version 8.30.3 last month. Even so, it's buggy. When playing movies in mplayer with X-video, I see symptoms that never surfaced when using Xorg's driver with an older card, like the video will start to lag and framedrop, cpu usage will spike, old frames in the movie will reappear less than a second after they have been shown, zooming the video to full screen and then back to windowed will freeze parts of the last frame in full screen mode onto the desktop wallpaper etc. I doubt this is supposed to happen, and over a year has passed since this video card was first sold. Another thing is 3D performance. I was concerned with how low my framerate was in glxgears, for what is supposed to be a fairly modern video card. I was getting about 100fps. After installing version 8.31.5 released a few days ago, this has now jumped to 850fps, so I'm guessing whatever the problem was, it's now fixed.

But in any case, it _should_ be possible to buy a video card and use it from day one. The fact that you can buy an older card, which by now is well supported by Xorg, is positive, but new computers are sold with new cards, so if you want a laptop, you're stuck. I wonder just how long it will be until the X1300 card is fully supported and the driver is as good as bug free..

So this week I started another course and I was pretty excited about it. The subject sounds interesting and it's definitely something I want to know more about. In a sense a regret from my previous college that we barely touched on it. But in fact, I'm rarely this excited about starting a new course, so I wanted to take the opportunity to get right into it. The course website lists a total of 17 books, one of which is the textbook, 4 of which are locked up in a special room and not-for-loan and 2 are in Dutch. That still leaves 10 books that are supposed to be in the library, not bad. I never do this, but I thought that for once I would do some extra reading aside from what is assigned, just to satisfy my own curiosity on the subject.

So I print the list and head down to the library. The building has seen some major reconstruction the last few months and they library has just reopened, which shows. The book shelves look normal, but the reception area is a bit of a mess. I get stuck behind some person trying to borrow an overhead projector, which easily takes 15 minutes of chit chat, interrupted by phone calls to the reception desk, trying to find stuff and figure out how to do that. When it's finally my turn, the distressed librarian, with a hint of impatience, tells me I don't have to ask at the reception desk, I can look the book up myself. So she walks over to one of the computers, marked "staff only" and moves the mouse. The screen remains black, even though the machine is on. Beside the linux machine is a Windows box, also marked "staff only". She moves the mouse, a login window appears. She logs in and waits. After about 30 seconds of the login still being processed, she turns back and looks it up on her own computer at her desk. The book I'm after turns out.... not to be in the library. In between more phone calls to the reception desk. I ask if there's a web interface for this and apparently there is. The whole process of trying to find this one book took about 40 minutes and accomplished nothing.

When I finally found the web interface for the library, it turns out only 3 of the 10 books are actually in the library. They can be ordered online, but again I couldn't log into the library system, it's not accepting my password. :lazy:

Btw, what is with those not-for-loan books? It's like visiting a prisoner in jail. It's not even that much of a problem when the library is a big building and you just can't take the book out. But in my building there's a little room where all of these books and and it's locked, possibly open by appointment only. It's like a doctor's waiting room. Who would sit in that little room for hours on end reading a book of hundreds of pages? And you won't be done in a day, you'll have to keep coming back, like a doctor visiting his patients.

Last time I went up, I forgot my pencil case coming back and so right now I'm rather low on stationary. Not that I use it much, I so rarely write by hand anymore. But for school it's nice to have the most basic supplies just to take a few notes or what have you. So I made a special point of taking a 40 minute detour coming home from school via the city center to stop by the biggest bookstore in town. How the hell does a bookstore not sell stationary?!? :wth: It's bizzarre. In Norway bookstores are the place to go for all kinds of paper goods. They sell books, magazines, all kinds of stationary, wrapping paper, organizers, office supplies, greeting cards, even movies if they're one of the bigger ones. But here, not a single pencil. So I go to two _stationary stores_ and walk out with nothing there either. The stationary here is seriously crap.

Norway has a fairly rich stationary culture, kids get all excited about new pens and stuff for school, there's a wide selection and they usually have what you want. Over here, meanwhile, the closest thing I found today was a selection of fancy pens, which is just the furthest away from regular stationary. Those expensive pens belong on the list of the most useless articles in retail. First of all, what kind of sucker will buy a fancy, expensive pen and expect it to last forever? Secondly, they're usually less good for writing than the regular pens (because they're 'designer' pens, focusing on the look not the function). A fancy pen is the kind of thing you get your dad for his birthday when you're completely out of ideas. Then you pick up a Hallmark card and say "happy birthday, dad! I hope you like this paperweight pen." You have to write that, otherwise he's gonna wonder who lost the pen that somehow found itself into his gift by accident.

I've never liked cooking and home ec was my least favorite class in school, probably of all time. So I don't make much of an effort, but every once in a while you want to do something more interesting or make an effort just for the sake of eating healthy. I'm very far from being one of those health crazed people and I couldn't make myself eat for some long term goal. But after a decade of coincidental and unhealthy eating, I'm migrating towards eating in a way that promotes short term well being. I'm just not excited about food, so why not just eat whatever makes me feel good, right? While I haven't exactly knocked out a firm diet for this yet, the idea is just to eat food that doesn't get in the way of anything that I do. Obviously, overeating does that, large amounts of trash food does it too etc. I'd also like something that promotes good sleep, or I wouldn't be writing this at 5.30 in the morning. The lack of good sleep is very annoying, but it might be more of a mental problem for all I know.

Anyway, back to making the occasional effort. What bugs me about recipes is that they have to be so complicated. Half the ingredients on the list I've never even seen in the store, I've no idea what they look like and it's just a wild goose chase. A few years ago someone gave me cookbook of a 1000 Chinese recipes, and I tried a bunch of them. Hunting down the ingredients (after translating them from Polish) took a long time, and not really knowing what I was doing in the kitchen made some of those efforts come out weird. But there were some success stories as well. Still, doing one recipe was a big commitment, it took rigorous shopping and implementation of the recipe. It wasn't exactly a lot of fun, even though the food was good in the end.

Now, I can understand that adding a quarter of a teaspoon of something slightly enhances the flavor, but they really make it hard to cook these dishes. Meanwhile, if you go simple and cut everything that seems like an accessory, it ends up tasting very... plain. Good thing my home ec teacher isn't reading this (or is she?).

They

• laugh at stupid jokes, accepting a low standard of conversation.
• tell stupid jokes.
• are slow to catch on to things that are being said, and once they do they don't just keep quiet, they say 'oooooh' every two minutes.
• ask you to repeat what you said. Again. (A keen observer would realize that they're not getting this particular point and just let it go.)
• understand about 30% of what you said, but insist on having the remainder explained in every little detail.
• hang on to some little expression you used and when you explain it in different words [to give an equivalent statement], they still make you explain the expression.
• constantly mix languages in a conversation for no reason (because they need/want an expression they often use).
• switch languages in a conversation for no reason.
• make what they think is a witty comment that makes no sense at all to the context and when called on it insist that 'it was a joke, lighten up'. [this one seems to proliferate lately]
• try to make you laugh and when failing accuse you of not having a sense of humor.
• are so loud you can't not hear them in the other room if you try.
• engage you in conversations about the most pointless issues.
• have their own 'signature expressions' that they insist on using in just about every sentence.
• use common expressions, incorrectly.
• completely dominate conversations, even those involving a group of people.