Brian Alexandrowicz

It’s finally the damned weekend. I’ve been waiting for this since Moday. Luckily the football game was cancelled for today, so I didn’t have to go to that and take up my whole day. Went to the Fall Festival at school for a bit and played some Halo 2 for the tech club and bought a hoagie from some other club, I forget what it was. I watched Batman Begins tonite, and I must say that it was extremely good. It doesn’t hurt that Katie Holmes is hot either. My thoughts are getting jumbled right now and I’m going paintballing tomorrow, so I’m going to go get some sleep now, I’ll try and post tomorrow after I get back.
In the meantime, check out my Grand Theft Wigger image, and go to my Deviantart.

So we had the Marple Newtown competition last night. There was some crazy rainfall so we had to have the competition indoors. It kind of sucked to travel an hour and a half just to play inside, but it turned out alright because we got a superior. One of the judges even smiled throughout the whole performance. We won’t find out the caption awards or our placement until later this week, but I honestly don’t care because we got superior.

Good lord Mr. Slutter has been cracking the whip at practice lately. The competition is tomorrow and we just learned the rest of our drill yesterday. We didn’t even get a chance to clean what we do have done. Most of are pretty sure that we won’t get a superior for our first competion, but oh well, nothing to be done about it. There is an away football game tonight so we have to report for that at 2:30 so we can get an hour of practice in before we get to eat dinner. I only want the band season to be over and for us to do well in our competitions.

Thanks to all of the good Jewish people for giving the rest of us 2 days off from school. I’m rather enjoying not going for 2 days smack dab in the middle of the week. Today I didn’t do much besides a little cleaning. I went out to see the movie Serenity. It was pretty good, with a lot of action. There’s not much else to say here, so I’m going to wrap it up. I may or may not b moving my blog to my new website, but I’ll keep you posted either way.

I’ve put together a soundtrack to put on my Xbox for when I need some music to own to. Check out my tentative track list below.

1. Dogfight - Another Day
2. System Of A Down - Chop Suey
3. Smile Empty Soul - Bottom of a Bottle
4. Breaking Benjamin - Believe
5. System Of A Down - BYOB
6. Stone Temple Pilots - Unglued
7. Linkin Park - Crawling
8. Linkin Park - Numb
9. Evanescence - Bring me to Life

Today I went up to Triage with Drew, Dan and Jim for some paintball. There weren’t too many woodsballers up there today, but we had enough for a 7-on-7 match with some other guys from the area. It turned out alright and I had a lot of fun. I played pretty well today, got a little over 6 people out over the course of the day. I only got shot about 4 times, but the times I did get shot left nastly welts, which were acquired when I tried to nab the flag in our CTF round. I didn’t hve any ticks this time, and the bug bites were minimal, so it was at least better than the last time I went. Well today I realized just how much my gun is falling apart. A metal piece on a part of my backblock is bent, I’m missing my velocity know and one of the threads in my trigger frame are stripped. I plan on getting a new gun relatively soon, so hopefully I won’t have to worry about it for too much longer.

Today I volunteered to help with the collection of supplies at the PA National Guard Armory to help out the victims of hurricane Katrina. For the most part it went pretty slow, but we collected a lot of stuff which is helpful. Most of the 3 hours I spent there was boring, with no cars pulling up to drop stuff off. I thought it was good that we helped out, but it was still a little boring nonetheless.

I’ve tried to write this review about 3 times already, and this time I’m going to write it for sure. Also, I know that I’m a little late reviewing Ubuntu, but I felt that I should do it anyhow, so shut the hell up and read.

The promise behind Ubuntu Linux is that it is easy to use and usr-friendly. For the most part, I found this to be true. From inserting the disk to logging in, the process took about 30 minutes. The Ubuntu installer does most everything for you, except you select what hard drive to install it to. It also offers some other more advanced options, but the default settings will be fine for most users. On login I was greeted with a simple and clean interface what was very functional and easy to navigate. Browsing throught the menus I found that Ubuntu comes bundled with a lot of useful software such as the fantastic OpenOffice.org office suite. The piece of included software that I found most useful was the Synaptic Package Manager. It functions like a WinZIP/Windows Installer hybrid program installing tarballs such as Windows would install EXE programs. There was one thing, however, that was so frustrating, it almost brought me to tears. It was trying to setup my wireless network. If you have a direct ethernet connection, then you’re good as gold. If you have a wireless PCI card with a Texas Instruments chipset like mine, then you are screwed. No matter what I did, it would not work. I’m sure that with more in-depth work you could get it to work using the wlan drivers package, but I found that even that did not work.
In my final thoughts, I would say that Ubuntu is a very good Linux distrobution if you don’t mind puttingi n a little work to get things up and running.

Got questions about Ubuntu/Linux? Email me: bacontheory@gmail.com

For a while I’ve been wanting to do a case mod and express my creativity, but I’ve never had the cash or guts to do it. Adam told me just last week that he has an old P3 computer that he would sell me for $20. I think I may just take him up on that offer and try my skills on that computer, if I screw up, it’s only $2o, not $850 like my main computer. I’ve also wanted to OC my video card but I’m a bit skeptical this time around because my last 6600GT broke and I had to get a replacement from Chaintech. There really won’t be that much of a performance gain, as I’ve seen in the past, but I think I’ll give it a go anyhow.

I’m sure by now all of you have heard about the terrible Hurricane Katrina disaster. It’s an American tradegy that took the lives of so many people and caused so much pain. However, there are some things that disturb me about the handling of the disaster. I personally believe that President Bush could and should have responded quicker to the disaster. Food and first aid should have been arriving off of the gulf coast by day 2. Those supplies took much longer to arrive then they should have. The other thing that not so much disturbs me as upsets me is that all of these celebrities do things to raise money, when they have millions upon millions of dollars that they could at least give a million to the Red Croos or another charitable organization that needs the money. Assholes, you’re living it up in your cushy Beverly Hills mansion and there are people wandering the streets left without absolutely nothing. Do your part. Donate and help.