Some people might think I’m making a technological reference when I say the fourth arrow and they are correct. The fourth arrow, as I see it, is the up arrow and in most video games that is for moving forward. Since I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do with my life this will probably include a wide variety of videos and random posts. While a lot of them will most likely be related to technology in some way there is much more than that so thank you to anyone who wants to read about this in my new blog.

A truck that works after 20 years. My computer is 3 years old and falling apart, my kindle fire is barely a month old and the plug is loose because my cats knocked it onto the floor while it was charging so what lasts 20 years?

I really thought that I would already be up to my neck in debt to my parents when I wanted to buy this truck but the only repair I have had on it was a faulty sensor and it barely cost me! My computer has cost me $50 in 3 years with the replacement of a hard drive, this truck so far has cost $2,280 to get taken care of, with the Operating System and the constant problems my laptop has not only cost me over a thousand dollars but also valuable time that I used to repair it and use it! A car starts in a few seconds while a computer takes at least 8 seconds (mine significantly longer) to start then people have to wait for the WIFI to connect and the page to load! I wish that my computer was as simple as my truck to use but to me its a necessity to learn anything I can about my computer to be able to fix it or even just use it for homework.

I have never not known how to use my computer. Since the Graphical User Interface make it so easy to use anything on a modern computer there is almost nothing to learn, just press the on button, but if it breaks it costs an arm and a leg to repair it. Staples said that the hard drive would cost $170 to repair and that did not include changing the data and installing the software I wanted. I ended up paying around $50 on Newegg and switching out the hard drives in a couple of minutes after transferring my data, through a flash drive install of linux, to an external hard drive. The longest part of the process was re-installing Windows. Would I have paid to avoid the headache of installing Windows? NO! That was the easiest part and afterwards I realized that I didn’t want windows anyway and switched to Ubuntu.

My old truck is nothing like a computer, it’s fast, easy to use and find problems and it has windows in it while I try to leave windows off of my computer. I think that the only real problem with this truck is, where do I go next?

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.

My right wrist has been killing me because between school and working at Target as a cashier it does not get a break at all! typing is not a one hand thing to most people because most people are taught the correct way to type, which I admit I’m using right now to a certain extent, and don’t try anything else. my counselor once caught me using this method and was amazed (for some reason) that I could type that fast with only one hand while I was flipping through notes with the other. I now realize that writing in pen and pencil could also be a problem because of always using one hand so I’ve been doing 3 things that can cause this so it’s probably a good Idea to see if there is any good way to fix it. has anyone else had any problems like this?

I saw a post on RowdyKittens.com about handwritten letters and I was thinking, why? I was born into a time where handwritten letters became a novelty rather than a common occurrence I got a couple handwritten letters before, they were both from my father while I was at summer camp working. They weren’t much but I still have them somewhere in my room. Rowdy Kittens brought that back to memory and I’m now considering sending a handwritten letter to a college with my check for paying to apply. I believe that colleges would look down upon me if I do that, I have a computer but I would rather spend a week writing the perfect letter for them in pen than typing it with an official letterhead saying Alleriotech or Year of Linux because I want it to be personal rather than professional. I think they probably get hundreds of typed letters a week and might not take a second glance at them but maybe a handwritten letter would show that I care more. A computer is easy, it has spellchecker, a dictionary (which I used to look up the spelling of occurrence), and sometimes templates. I want to stand out and not be one of a hundred letters, I’d rather have the one handwritten letter that gets looked down upon than the hundreds of typed ones that don’t get a second look. What do you think?

Today I called the CSUN Admissions office because I was annoyed that since I was in Community college they said I could not transfer until I got 60 credits so I called Northridge to ask them and the, first off, confirmed it then I asked if I could have them just ignore the semester I spent at moorpark and they said “I cannot advise you to do that” I asked them again on this time asked if it were possible, I got the same answer! I asked a third time just because I really needed to know if I could do it, not if I should but just was it possible, and what do you know: she  said the same thing again! I don’t get mad that easily so I said goodbye and hung up the phone. I was just wondering why this happens? When I was in high school everyone said “go to college” and now I’m trying to get into a four year university and they are rejecting me because, rather than taking a year off school because I couldn’t get in, I went to Community college and could only get useless credits because they were full to the brim. I’m willing to let the 2 classes that I took that were transferable go without receiving credit but why can I not transfer? The way that the school is crowded I will be lucky to get my general ed out of the way in 3 years so I just want to get out of there and start working towards a degree instead of taking useless filler classes because I cannot get anything else.

I bought “The Tiny House Book” by Jay Shafer but found nothing in it about doing the electric or plumbing in a tiny house (not that I was expecting it to be detailed). I did, however, find the free Popomo plans also missing everything to do with plumbing and electric plans. This missing element is the only thing I was specifically looking for in plans (which is why I will write it out in excruciating detail once I do find out how to do it). I cannot find much online about plumbing and running electric to a tiny house and will be a pain to find in books but most of it should be alot like trailers, motor homes, or regular houses so I will check out some Dummies books and look for specifications online that are for bigger houses and make them try to work. Good luck to others who are looking for the same things, I will be researching and will put another post up later with ideas.