Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

What is maturity anyhow? You always hear people saying "Oh grow up", or "Real mature (sarcastically)", but what do they mean? Quite honestly, the past year I've thought I was too immature for some things, and it was something I was striving to fix. But, the entire year I was trying to figure out HOW one became more mature, without knowing what I'd consider mature!

I'll admit it, I've got very, very diverse personalities depending on who I'm with. Not that I'm two-faced, just that I fit in with just about any group of people, which is quite a blessing for someone who's studying a foriegn language (Arabic), pursuing a scientific degree (CS), and doing research as a grad student might while an undergrad. So, labeling them all as immature might be a bit much, however judging my actions as a whole, and how I treated certain situations and specifically relationships, I judged myself immature.
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*sigh* Looks like comment spam's getting through the filter again... *sigh*

Anyways, I've made the long trek home for Christmas Break. I've got a rule whenever I travel either to a friend's place to look at a computer, or any trip where I stay more than two nights:

Always travel with all your CDs (not music, they should be on your hard drive, I mean backups/install discs), and always bring at least a rudimentary tool set.

That rule keeps me out of trouble. My laptop acting up? Great, reformat over night. Forget to bring Y file? Awesome, I've got it on disc, no biggy. My desktop blows a power supply (happens frequently)? Open 'er up, and shove a spare/replacement in. Nothing slows me down if I've got all my CDs and tools with me.

Nothing, that is, except stupidity. My stupidity to be exact. I forgot some crucial things at school (too far to just drive back and grab 'em). Most are just annoying but the worst is my router. I figured... why? I won't need a router, I've got a switch! Short answer: Because a router can do everything a switch can, but not vice versa. I sacrificed a lot of functionality for about 3 square inches of saved space. Stupid.

I got home, went to setup my network, and realized that my parents are using DSL. no problem, I thought. Well, three hours later bashing on Ubuntu I can't get it to work with adsl-start yet. So, I'm typing this from the Windows boot on my Laptop, I'm sorry for letting you down. Also, my brother needs (ok, not needs, though wants) wireless so he can get Internet up in his room. My wireless router is what used to provide that. So, we're both out of luck in terms of Internet.

My resolution:
I shall not travel anywhere without a mini-network. I shall have a router, and at least three cat-5 cables with me at any service calls. Also for my own traveling. If I had a router here, I'd be able to have it deal with PPPoE, and my computers wouldn't ever have to worry about it (how my setup was last year, now that I recall). I encourage others to do the same. If everyone had a mini-network on them whenever trouble arose, there'd be a lot of happy geeks (ok, I culdn't come up with a real reason to encourage it, though I know if I went somewhere, they calimed the Internet was "broken" I'd be overjoyed if they then handed me a spare cat-5 and said it was hooked up to the "broken" modem).

So, when the World of Warcraft Expansion (Burning Crusade) comes out, I hope to have a 300 level Jewelcrafter. Why? Because this is a limited field, and I hope to make tons of money the first few days. Anyways, this post is mainly to get my materials list out, so people can donote.

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Well, here's a design I'm quite proud of. I redeisgned Profession Helper's interface this past week, and I think it looks pretty slick. I took away the four big ugly buttons, and put in a drop down box to select where the tells go. Also, I made the text smaller to fit it all neatly in the same(ish) space. Finally, I've added a slider to change how many of which item you want. Currently the range is one to 50, although that might go up to 100 in the near future. Well, don't just stand there, have a look!

So, a while back I mentioned I make a World of Warcraft addon, Profession Helper. This used (well, still is until the site lets me delete it) to be hosted on Curse-Gaming. Well... here's why I wanna delete it.

Curse-gaming used to have an amazing site.

1. It was clean, fonts and colors and every fit together.
2. It was easy to use, one could find whatever they needed in very few clicks. Very few.
3. It was stable, I never had one error using it for 8 months.
4. It was fast, (I know archive.org isn't, please believe me) since there wasn't that much media, the pages loaded almost instantly
5. It just plain worked.

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