Yesterday I took a long bike ride from my friends house to school, some people see it as relaxing while I see it as exercise. I’m trying to lose weight and one of the ways to do that is to exercise and live an “active” lifestyle. Since I haven’t actually exercised daily since  was on the swim team in high school 2 years ago I need to get into doing it again. an “active” lifestyle is not really my thing though, as you can see by most of my posts about computers. I am making a small change and that is taking after my favorite blogger on rowdykittens.com and my friend who rides his bike to school nearly every day. I’m going to start riding my bike on Fridays to school from my friends house and hopefully will make other changes too.

Many people would say this is no argument and that they have had their laptop for longer than their desktop has lasted and I would say one thing to them “are you sure?” Many people flat out ditch their desktop when they get a look at that shiny new laptop of theirs but really is the desktop still able to function when you pull it back out when your laptop is annoying you with important updates and getting a hard drive or disk drive replaced? As a generation I believe that Generation Y, as my generation is called, throws away technology too quickly for something faster, cooler, cheaper, or smaller. A netbook is only a quarter of the power of a barebones you could get at tigerdirect for the same price though we go for it because it travels more easily and it’s lighter. Tablets are more for reading and light work such as word documents or note taking.

My barebone pc was built at the day when vista 1st came out, in fact, on that day I begged my dad to take me and get a copy for our new machine and he did because he did not already order an OS or get one ready yet. Vista actually runs great on my desktop and doesn’t have too many crash situations playing the sims 3 but that is the only real reason I need it. My laptop is not a powerhouse so I might get a couple hours of good or adequate game play on every 3rd boot up of Windows 7 While Fedora works flawlessly (after you get the drivers in) every time I start it and has a beautiful desktop to compete with Windows in efficiency and Mac in great looks. When I use my laptop with Fedora It feels as if I actually can get something done and am not bogged down as much until I try printing something out from google docs on the school computer and windows there, unsurprisingly, crashes or freezes if I even look at it. Commodore OS and Fedora 15 were really my favorite distributions even though Ubuntu is by far easier to use and I would never recommend Fedora to a beginner.

Do you use Linux? how does it compare to your PC or Mac?

Anyone who is above pre-calculus know that I’m joking by saying that and some people would know if they were in Algebra II as well. I have a couple of problems I’m having trouble with but will ask my teacher tonight about them. Since the beginning of the new year I decided to switch my major to math, am I very good? Somewhat. Do I have fun doing math? YES!

Most people don’t have fun doing math homework and I don’t understand them, if you are doing math homework you are problem solving and preparing for a tax season somewhere in the future. I’m not the best at math but I want to be a math teacher, why? I want to be a math teacher because it’s challenging, you aren’t just naming facts like a zombie or creating useless things that don’t matter much like in art class. Sure, it’s pretty but how many of your childhood drawings do you keep, and now, how much math do you remember from your past years? the amount in the second category should be larger since each year expands on the knowledge from the past year. Why not teach if you like teaching, just teach the kids your subject instead of focusing on the subject focus on something more meaningful like the kids in your class.

Why not teach? Would you ever think of teaching your favorite subject?

This isn’t the love story of a kid and his first car, nor a financial story about how I have no money for a new one. I have been waiting for my car to keel over and die on me since 2012 started, why you might ask? Well it is a simple story. In Michigan they use salt on the roads in the winter that give the under body a lot of rust and it was only a matter of time before I would have to replace something. I was planning on keeping it until the repairs really were killing me to pay because I got the car from my parents after they had owned it for a while and put around 100,000 miles on it, at the end of its life it had around 200,000 miles and the insurance company gave, or is giving, me $6,000 to replace it! Someone rear ended me the other day which is why I have been thinking about this more and more recently and it is amazing how I look at the cars for sale here around the same age and many of them look brand new! I still don’t trust them and I wouldn’t want to buy one without asking if anything is wrong but they are very nice looking Automobiles. The problem isn’t quality but the price and the quantity available. In Ventura so far I have found 3 pages of Crown Victoria’s and one ford escape and 3 ford escorts, all of which I like but also know that the gas is expensive for 2 out of 3 of them and that the escape has a chance of not being to California’s standards. I wanted to put that money toward a new car so that I could use it for the rest of college and into my career for a while but it seems that all of this has a way of not working out since the insurance would be over $200 a month which is more than the car payment! The most direct route is to get a used car with half of the money and assume the other half will be gone within a few years for repairs and gas. I have no clue what car to get I look at reviews and am in a confusing maze of annoying pop-ups and crazy sales pitches. The only thing I know for sure about these cars is that half of what is said on the sellers page is made up BS and the other half is still suspicious. I wish I was in good enough shape to ride a bike 12 miles to school but I seriously doubt I’ll be in that good of shape in less than a year, much less a month. I just am not sure how to handle this car buying thing.