codergeek42

It took two years of hard campaigning, lots of FUD-debunking, and countless sacrifices of time and labor, but we did it. Here at last, Barack Obama is officially the president-elect to serve as this country's 44th leader. This election brings to the White House the first African-American leader. As his victory has thusly overturned one aspect of our traditional government, my hope is that he as a leader can overturn the setbacks and failures of the past several years and bring this once-great nation back on the road to prosperity and civil freedom.

This victory for Senator (now President-elect) Obama comes only decades after various civil rights laws were enacted to enhance the civil and legal equalities for African American people. That said, many leading polls for Prop. 8 are not looking good: It's likely to pass with about a 52-55% “Yes” vote. Just when I thought we had learned from the mistakes of our history, we go and restrict one of the most basic civil rights of people: to marry the person they love. How is it then, that we as a society emphasize tolerance when we cannot even show such a fundamental right to our own citizens?

Up until this point, signs and ads for Prop. 8 have held a myriad of slogans, such as “Prop 8 = Protects Marriage,” “Prop 8 = Free Speech,” and “Prop 8 Protects Our Children.” These are all absolute hogwash, except for one, which reads: “Prop 8 = Civil Rights” - and that is exactly what this is. While current civil union and domestic partnership laws do give these couples most of the benefits of normally given to a marriage between a man and a woman, it lacks many important aspects of marriage, such as proper employment and insurance benefits for one's spouse (among other things).

One of the main arguments for it was that it passed in 2000 and was wrongly overturned by the State Supreme Court. But just because people agree to it does not make it fundamentally a correct idea. Was slavery wrongfully outlawed? Were the Jim Crow laws wrongly overturned, too? Were the laws denying women suffrage also wrongly overturned? I know what you're thinking, probably: “Oh, but that was different. That was racism and sexism and stuff.” Oh, come now; don't give me that load of crap. This is exactly the same thing, only against another group of people. I, for one, am ashamed at how closed-minded we can be as a society, and even moreso at how dumbfounded we can be to believe the outright lies and scare tactics that were used in advocacy of this proposition. Are we as a people so apathetic that we can simply be spoon-fed this nonsense and believe it so unquestioningly? Can we not think logically for our own selves and realize the idiocy of this?

One thing that strikes me as odd with it is the Judeo-Christian (and similarly-believing) religious groups who advocate against gay marriage and this proposition, but then proceed to preach about tolerance and love to they neighbor. Many (such as the Mormon Church) even went so far as to raise several millions of dollars in support of the “Yes on 8” groups...Why did they not spend that amount on, I don't know, things like feeding and housing more homeless? Hah!

As a final sentiment, to those of you who voted “Yes” on Proposition 8: I pray that you can one day forgive yourself for such irreverence. Until then, live forever with the guilt that you helped directly restrict so many loving couples and their families the happiness of taking their love just a bit further in the eyes of the law. It was you who helped directly remove the simple right of so many millions of people to marry their beloved. And it is you who keep them separate but equal.

(And now that the rant is done...) Fedora 10 (Cambridge) Preview was released today! Go try it out and help make it rock-solid for its full release ! :)

Recently, Fedora turned 5 years old; and Google turned 10! How I have missed such awesome passings until now is probably due to schoolwork and job-hunting. (Or it could be due to sheer laziness.) The numbers on the Red Hat news page are quite astonishing:

• "More than 13,500 Fedora Account System members [...],"
• "About 6,500 total source packages in Fedora with more than 10,000 binary packages in the development branch," and
• "Over 550 volunteer representatives in Fedora’s global Ambassadors program."

I am excited to see the Fedora community so strong, and continuing to grow steadily. In fact, the Statistics wiki page shows many strong metrics figures. With Fedora 10 set to be released in November (and the Beta of which is slated for release tomorrow!), I am so thrilled to see so many people - not only using it - but contributing back to it and helping ensure that for each of their contributions, Fedora is that much improved. Keep up the great work, everyone!

On the Google side of things, It delights me to read about Google's official position on California Prop. 8:

"[...] While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love." (Emphasis mine.)

I am hopeful that, with such extensive support as theirs, along with that of Senators Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (among many others), this stupid proposition will fail miserably, and the State Supreme Court's prior ruling in In re Marriage Cases will be upheld. This would mean that same-sex couples in California who would like to marry have ample opportunity to do so without such daft and staunchly conservative-religious beliefs precluding them from it.

Edit: Changed text referencing Statistics wiki page; was misinterpreted in the original post. (Thanks, simo!)

So my brother and I recently splurged on some new toys, and they have since been reason for my general lack of availability over the past week or so...




Along with Wii Sports, they've kept us pretty busy. 8)

I'm shamelessly stealing this sciathan_file...

Send me about with my camera!

Ask me to take a picture of any aspect of my life that you're interested in/curious about - it can be anything from the house I live in to my favorite books, etc. Leave your choice here as a comment, and I will reciprocate by taking the pictures and posting them as an LJ entry. That way you get to know a little bit about my life. =]

I just briefly explained the etymology of the 言 (words, to say), 時 (time, hour), 間 (interval), 本 (book), and 森 (forest) Kanji to a visiting neighbor...in Spanish.

I'm quite proud of myself for being able to accomplish that. However, I'm a bit embarrassed that I needed to ask my mom about some Spanish vocabulary that I at the time forgot (especially "mouth" and "to ring a bell"). This is stuff I should know already.

I hope my Kanji-a-week study is not making me forget Spanish! Ack!

Hmm. I had been tweaking my mail server's junk filter recently and inadvertently made it too strict, it seems. Unfortunately I have it set to auto-delete anything older than a few days and only rarely do I check it for false positives.

I believe it is now fixed. So if you sent me an email within the past week or so and were expecting a reply but never received one, please re-send it. Thanks!

We just came back from an El Torito restaurant nearby, where I took my dad out for Father's Day, and I cannot help but to think, "What the heck is up with El Torito's chefs?"

My dad and I both had to get our orders switched twice because the dishes they gave us were too spicy, even though we had explicitly told our waiter that we did not want any spices on them at all - which he seemed to comply with at first, since the dishes came with the sauces and salsa on the side, and those are normally the significantly spicy parts of the meal - but this was not a good kind of spicy. This was just spicy for the sake of being spicy. Even the meat had tiny pieces of Jalapeño or something in it.

I can definitely understand adding spice, even very strong if necessary, for the sake of augmenting the food with a specific tang of flavor (such as is done for many east-Asian dishes, and many meats used in Italian cuisine). But this was not it. No addition to taste or anything of the sort. It was just for the purpose of ensuring that one's throat burned sufficiently as the food was swallowed. (As a minor comparison point, those who know me know that my mom is of Spanish descent, and even she had trouble eating it because of the spice.)

But I digress, I suppose it's time for ( another meme! )

Eric Christensen asks, "What [new] language should I learn?" I’ll throw in my two cents...or in this case, my two foreign languages. :)

As a good half of my family (maternal side) are of Spanish descent, it was only practical that I [formally] studied it for four years of high school. Actually, Spanish was my first language; but then I started going to school for more than a a decade in English-only and the Spanish stuff apparently bitrotted into the back of my brain somewhere. I spent the first semester of high school basically remembering instead of learning new material, which started soon thereafter.

Then again, the simple fact that I did have so much available practice outside of school is certainly responsible, if at least indirectly, for why I was able to learn so much of it relatively quickly.

Now, though, I’m extremely comfortable with it and aside from some regional-/cultural-specific vocabulary quirks, I can (and do) happily hold verbal and written conversations with those for whom it is their native - or sometimes - only language.

Spanish is an extremely practical language to learn if you do a lot of international traveling, as well. According to Wikipedia’s entry, Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, the second most widely used language in the United States, and the third most common language worldwide (both on the Internet and by speaking population). Granted, there are a variety of dialects to it, as there are most (all?) other languages; but their differences tend to be minor, with the same essential grammar and phonetic usage, usually just differing in some specific vocabulary.

Thanks to its Latin-based etymological roots as a romance language, it becomes significantly simpler to learn to communicate in other similar languages (such as French, Italian, et al.) once you master the essentials of Spanish.

The writing system is all phonetic, too; and is not very difficult to learn since it is essentially a superset of the Latin/Roman alphabet: some vowels get the acute accent diacritic (´), and there is the ñ ("eñe") character. That’s about it. ;-)

(Okay, okay...technically there are also the "ch" and "ll" digraphs; but those are treated as letter pairs for collation and other purposes.)

If you’re wanting to learn a language just for the fun and interest of it, however, I recommend you stretch your mind of its comfort zone. Try Japanese! I’m currently taking an introductory course and while I can’t honestly say that it is easy, I can promise that I am enjoying it greatly. Its writing system (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji) and grammar (with which culture is intertwined quite heavily) are so vastly different from English and other Romance/European languages that it forces one to think more abstractly and not just translating words and grammar; but translating the raw intention or meaning of it.

The two sets of Kana (entirely phonetic) are rather simple, actually. It just takes a lot of patience and even more practice. The Kanji, on the other hand, often have complex stroke patterns and - more often than not - many possible pronunciations (so-called "readings"). Even these are not difficult with diligent study, however! (I find flash-cards for these to be INCREDIBLY helpful.) Normally these readings are based upon usage of the Kanji.

For example, the character 人 is pronounced ひと ("hito") when simply being used as “person;” but is read as じん ("jin") when being used to describe nationality, and as にん ("nin") when being used as a counter for numbers of people.

• あの人（ひと）…
  (Romaji: "ano hito...")
  That person...


• 私はアメリカ人（じん）です。
  (Romaji: "watashi wa amerika-jin desu.")
  I am an American.


• そこに三人（さんにん）がいます。
  (Romaji: "soko ni san-nin ga imasu.")
  Three people are there (lit., exist in that place).

Also, Japanese grammar is, as far as we’ve learned, extremely regular. One does not need to be concerned with gender- or subject-based conjugation as with other languages; and there are essentially three categories of verb conjugation: "-ru" （〜る）verbs, "-u"（〜う）verbs, and "-suru" （〜する）verbs. Then there is 来る ("kuru," to come [towards]) which is otherwise the only irregular verb in the entire language. Quite pragmatic.

It’s definitely a bit odd at first that there are specific conjugations and inflections for cultural aspects (e.g., polite/formal vs. plain form), and there are some exceptions to most things (for example, 二人 is read ふたり, "futari" instead of ににん, "ni-nin") but they tend to be few and far between, and all-in-all (from what I’ve learned so far) it’s quite an interesting language!

I suppose Mandarin Chinese, with its similar writing system and tone colors in pronunciation would also be an interesting venture; but I think Japanese is more practical because then one can watch anime and read manga more readily.

I now will retire to my email-checking. I bid you adieux...

I don't know why I waited so long to do this, but I finally went through and starting uploading some of my photos to my DeviantArt gallery, mostly of various scenery shots.

These were taken with my phone (2 M-pixel camera), so I apologize for it being a bit grainy if you try to zoom in much, etc. =/

[Edit: It would help if I could spell properly...]

(Romaji: "sugokatta desu!"; English: "It was awesome!")

So, right before today's Linear Algebra exam, I went up to the whiteboard and wrote 「がんばりましょう、みなさん」(Romaji: "ganbarimashou, mina-san!"; English: "Let's do our best, everyone!") and I guess the class was in a bit of an Asian mood or something because we were able to coerce another student into writing it in Korean, and another to do the same in Vietnamese, though he ran out of time before the professor came in so it was just the Japanese and Korean there.

The professor looked puzzled as he walked in, and after we explained the writings to him, he chuckled and agreed. He decided to leave them up there for the duration of the exam. :)

楽しかったですよ…
(Romaji: "tanoshikatta desu yo..."; English: "It was quite fun...")

[Edit: Fixed adjective inflections, thanks to katoriina_san.]

Having aced two math exams in twice as many days (w00t), I feel it necessary to do something completely speshul [sic], and ergo I have bestowed upon myself another meme from the great sciathan_file . So here we go.

1. My username is codergeek42 because I use this same alias on nearly everything I do online. Actually, it came from a dare from one of my best friends originally to change my AIM screen-name. "Coder" being that I am a programmer at heart; "geek" showing...well, that I'm a geek; and "42" coming from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, being the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

2. My name is Peter because my parents thought it a great name, coming from the saint of Biblical history, the founder of the Church. I agree wholeheartedly with their choice, though I'm not as religious myself. St. Peter was also my Confirmation saint.

3. My journal is titled "Caffeinated Thought Processes" because I'm an addict and advocate of the wonderful drug called Caffeine. Yay, lack of creativity! :o

4. My friends page is called "Party Members" because I've been playing a lot of classic RPGs recently (Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, etc.), so it seems to fit the whole "Friends" idea quite well.

5. My default userpic is the Hogwarts 42 message because Harry Potter is a great series, and 42 is an excellent number. (Thanks for sending me that image, Sci!)

Cue the music! DOO DOo DoO!

Well, Rhythmbox was being a total pain in the butt with Music Applet (which is how I use Rhythmbox a good 90% of the time), so until it recently started working again¹, I had no choice but to try an alternative media player.

Banshee fit the bill quite nicely...except for one minor detail: It re-organized my entire Music directory. Most of my albums are self-made compilations from various anime soundtracks and/or other foreign stuff. Banshee apparently doesn't know that I've the "Copy files to music folder" specifically adds "when importing" (emphasis mine). When I set the preference after importing my entire folder, it should not re-arrange the already-imported stuff for me. I don't care if it's more efficient and better organized and will tell me the meaning of life! It's not right.

So now instead of Music/Compilations/Album/## - Song.ogg I have a bajillion folders with just one or two files (Music/Artist/Album/##. Song.ogg) since the compilations are by nearly as many artists as there
tracks on the disc. Now, after my Linear Algebra exam on Thursday, I'm going to spend much of the weekend just rebuilding my music hierarchy to its former glory.

While I greatly appreciate the work the Banshee hackers have put into it, one thing a user application should never do is alter how external files are organized (unless explicitly instructed to do so).

Okay, bugs happen; but messing up my Music is something that irks me past any tolerance and patience.

Edit: Okay, maybe recommending against it isn't such a friendly thing; but it still seems rather odd (and surprising) behavior.

(¹) I still have no idea what this was. Don't get me wrong, I love it when bugs disappear...but only when it's because they were actually fixed and not just silently worked-around or ignored. :-/

So, having been tagged by sciathan_file, I must complete the meme!

1. List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.
2. Tag seven people to do the same.
3. Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you.

( What quirks? I'm perfectly normal in every way...XD )

Ta-da! I now tag nimda, anoracushla, evilrobot69, gregdek, jkeating, mmcgrath, and spyderous. MWA HAH HA. =)

[P.S.: Apologies for tagging you people! Feel free to refrain from the meme if you like; but I only know a handful of LJers... T_T)

[This is not Fedora-related in ANY way...]

As you may know, my good friend sciathan_file has begun holding writing challenges. (They're fun!) So, without further ado, I present my first submission!

Challenge: The Inanimate Object Speaks!
Deadline: February 3rd, 2008
Length: 376
Fandom: None...but it's a bit nerdy.
[PDF] Download: Sentience

I wrote it in the span of about two days over the past week or so, but since then it hasn't changed much. (That is, my first draft became my final draft, minus some wording fixes here and there.) I think it's a bit too short, to be honest, but after that it seemed like anything extra would be more "fluff" than actual content.

Also, the formatting seemed essential for parts of it, so I kept it as a PDF since my HTML-fu is really not what it used to be. (Just for ease, I'll probably do similar with other submissions.) Also, knowing my name (Peter) will help you...well I don't give away too much. Go read it! ^_^