Well, Economics was done at 8:45 like it always is, and I make the trek across the campus to get to my 8:55 Computer Science class. The building all the computer labs are in is called Center Hall, which is an old elementary school the university bought and expanded into. Well, after 5 minutes of walking, several of us were greeted with a sign telling us that classes were canceled and that we were meeting in the library. You know where the library is? Right next to Economics...

So we walked all the way back across campus and found the extra classroom was locked up tight. We waited around until 9:05 when our teacher arrived and told us everything we needed to turn in the program we wrote was in his office... In Center Hall, and that a boiler had exploded and hurt a few people and the entire building is closed and flooded and frozen. So he just canceled today's class and told us to be back at the library on Wednesday and we'd worry about Thursday lab later.

So now I have an hour to burn before Chapel, so I'm taking this opportunity to catch up on reading (and blogging) until then, and then I have more hours after Chapel and before Wesleyan Psychology World Changers.

(And as I was writing this, a woman asked me where I got this tiny laptop of mine... That's so neat. She about died when I told her how cheap they are. Super small, super battery, and just as capable as any laptop. These things rock.)

It's -20 degrees Fahrenheit right now. Not wind chill. This is normal temperature, period. Last time it was -20, yeah, that was the wind chill... With wind chill, it's so much worse this time. I don't even want to check. I'm really feeling the catastophic global warming. That thing the consensus tells us is making the planet hotter all over the place. Yeah... Well, this is the coldest winter I can remember. I remember other winters with more snow, but not this cold. Something tells me that this is Divine Intervention for the purpose of making the humanist scientists the laughing stock. I know I'm laughing! Gosh... -20 in Indiana. Who'd'a thunk? Of course it has to happen while I drive to school.

But at least I located the commuter lounge! Nice and quiet. Warm. Friday is my light day, so I have 3 hours of no classes and the classes I do have are actually kinda fun, so it's a nice schedule to enter the weekend with. Got a lot of reading to do, so I'm going to get started on that!

More StumbleUpon goodness! Not like they can filter that stuff, eh? The more I vote up the sites that make fun of liberals, the more I get! If I have to hear biased news, I might as well get the bias for conservatism, aye? Well, here's some nice stuff I found:

Obamunism t-shirts from a place called Conch Tees. Finally, a practical use for that horrible Web 2.0-like logo we keep seeing plastered all over everything. Looks like it was designed for this very thing, wouldn't you agree? I think it fits.

And then, of course, there are all those political satire comics... You know the ones that enjoy drawing President Bush with huge ears? They seem to be a hit with the liberals. Well, get a load of this one from IDB Editorials! I mean, hey, with as huge as Obama's ears are, and as much as that guy stutters around and can't form a coherent sentence without the word "uhm", there should be plenty of decent comics in coming months! Biden doesn't look half bad, either!

Then, from the Cafepress stores for The Conservative Post, we have a few great lines for shirts! One of them is a clever mock of the tired old "don't blame me, I voted for Kerry" quotes: "Don't blame me, I voted for Palin." Seriously, man. I didn't vote for black skin, and I didn't vote for the lesser of two evils, I voted for Sarah Palin. There's another shirt, too: "Change: It's all you have left." How terrible accurate. Change? Change what? Oh, you don't know? Obama never said? Okay.

And finally, the cream of the crop: 21 Ways to be a good Democrat. This brilliant piece includes rules such as "you have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand" and "you have to believe the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good because it supports certain parts of the Constitution" and "you have to believe conservatives telling the truth belong in jail, but a liar and a sex offender belonged in the White House." Good stuff there. Sure to make a liberal seethe. But, then again, it doesn't take much to do that, does it?

I mean, I got people commenting on my last post where I talk about Wikipedia being biased. I didn't let them through, because I don't feel like letting those kinds of people say something right now. I can understand the random traveler posting a comment, and I usually (not always) let those through, but I can see your IPs and names and email addresses... I'm a smart cookie. You don't earn points when you regularly show up and list of bunch of shallow points in an effort to prove a point. Seriously, if I wasn't busy that night and simply erased the comments, I would have systematically answered them and said things like "calling yourself an 'Evangelical Christian' doesn't mean much these days, but I'm glad your college dean says he is, but I know of lots of people who claim to be Christians and are nothing close, so you'll forgive me for not caring if your dean encourages use of Wikipedia, since, for all I know, he could have called himself a Christian and voted for Obama at the same time." I hope you don't think that I'm going to take everything Christians say at face value just because they say their Christian. I mean, heck, it doesn't help that the commentor is a liberal, either! Hah! My own preacher could say that Wikipedia isn't biased and I wouldn't believe him...

I guess these comments fall under rule 20 of ways to be a good Democrat: "You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast, right wing conspiracy." They can't help but try to tell me how absolutely wrong I am... Like Rush Limbaugh told a caller today, if you can keep your sanity, it's great fun arguing with a liberal. Their entire argument for everything hinges on emotion, and if you can keep that in check, then they succumb to the emotions they're trying to trap you in. (Usually anger.)

Anyway... Sleep calls. In the meantime, go make a liberal angry! It's fun! Trust me.

Hey, neat... So I was using StumbleUpon in a fit of boredom and it took me to a neat place called Conservapedia. The page it took me to was a list of examples of bias in Wikipedia. I mean, we Christian Conservative Republicans have known since the day it was created that what Wikipedia meant by "anyone can edit the articles" actually means "misinformed, unobjective liberal suck-ups are the only ones who can modify a controversial subject". All you have to do is read a Democrat candidate article and compare it to a Republican candidate article. Heck, I went to Wikipedia to look up the article for the Expelled documentary so I could show it to someone who absolutely swears by Wikipedia... What did I find? A locked article swarming with liberals trying to explain everything away rather than objectively report what the movie was even about. Wikipedia ain't the place to preach, as it has quickly become. No wonder colleges don't treat them as a source.

I thought it was really interesting... Maybe 143 examples will show what we mean? 143 (dare I say?!) SOURCED examples. As of right now, Expelled is still locked because of "vandalism". Yeah, vandalism... By "vandalism" on these kinds of articles, they actually mean "someone came along and changed something, but then a jobless liberal Wikipedian came by and reverted it, and after several rounds of trying to get the article unbiased, only to have it reset, another jobless liberal Wikipedian with power came along and locked it after reverting it." When you read the list (which, if aren't the least bit interested, you are most likely the kind of person who propogates that kind of behavior), pay special attention to the articles regarding Christianity, evolution, homosexuality, FOX News and leading Democrats (the Lord Messiah Barack Obama, in particular). The bias shines forth quite clearly in these areas!

And people wonder why I don't like Wikipedia? Heck, you can barely use it to read up about computers, what with angry Mac elitists and Linux junkies swarming everywhere. Vista failure, indeed... Let's forget the fact that it Windows XP out of the water at launch, okay? Yeah. That's always good. Omitting facts to support your cause. Failure is determined by lack of sales. Vista has no problems making Microsoft money, therefore, it didn't exactly fail, did it? See? If humanity has the time to try to deface something as unimportant as a computer operating system, what about the truely important things like religion and politics?

Back to reading my textbooks!

So, I'm bored and have about an hour to burn before I have another class. I can tell you already that I'm hooked on this Mini. I managed to figure out how to access student wireless (which is a neat, funky encryption that only allows students to access it), so I was getting everything set up while I was watching a computer history video... Which pretty much covered what I already knew.

And then there was Chapel. Apparently, they're doing something called "Summit", which apparently means "free concert week". I mean, Chapel has always served me as little more than "things can be worse than my own church", but this is full-fledged showing off. Light show, multiple TV, elevated drummer... The works. The "pastor" got up after the music and went into a thing about getting our hearts ready for the message, but it turned more into an explanation and warning about how if we're here for the music, then we're not doing what we're suppose to. "We" being those of us in the audience. It was about 5 minutes of prattling on about how they're not up there to show off and how we shouldn't pay attention to it, and I'm sitting there thinking "well, if your music wasn't designed to be spectacle of light and sound for our enjoyment and more like the classic hymns of reverence, you wouldn't have to spend all this time making sure we're not acting improperly".

Also, the same guy mentioned that he was disappointed in the lack of college student programs at churches, and some in the audience agreed. Once again, it got me thinking... WHY do we need special programs? More excuses to segregate us into peer groups without mentoring or guidance from adults? By the time you graduate high school, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're perfectly capable of sitting up with the adults in "real" service. They're going to get so many special worship programs catering to all these spoiled youths that when they take over the churches, there's not going to BE a main service anymore, it's all going to be specialized for each age to keep them interested...

The hilarious thing is that this guy went on to say that we were going to inheret the church and be the future of it, and we need to learn the right stuff. Right... By exchanging immature ideas off our own peers for the rest of time? What good is it to have a discussion group with your own age in an effort to grow? He kept saying that we're at an incredibly impressionable age in college, and what we experience here will craft our lives from this point on. Great, so we're going to get ideas from other students and young youth ministers and get no training and knowledge from our parents or grandparents in the church?

No wonder churches are dying.

Well, I'm testing out the keyboard on this funky little Mini once again before I go back to school tomorrow. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. So far, I think I only have a few cons to the purchase. Tomorrow will show forth exactly what good can come of it!

Con #1: The Shift key. Seriously, this is a pain in the tail. The one I use is about the size of a standard arrow key, and the Up arrow is right beside it, and I wind up hitting up instead of shift a lot of the time. It's going to force me to forgo the proper capitalization of things when I make notes... At least until I get used to it. I'm already hitting it a lot more than I was lastnight!

Con #2: The Apostrophe key. Usually right beside Enter, right? Well, on the Mini, they apparently wanted to keep the Enter key the same size, so they had to move apostrophe down next to the left arrow key. It's incredibly weird, to say the least. I mean, the shift key is in the same place, just smaller, but the apostrophe is somewhere entirely different. Far different than any standard keyboard, period.

Con #3: Linux. Yeah, I bet I'll make someone angry with that, but I don't really care. I realize that Windows is a demanding operating system, so I really didn't want to have it on this little thing. It's 1.6GHz in an architecture I really don't understand yet, so I don't get the speed, yet. After spring semester, I'll play with putting XP on it maybe, but until then, I'm stuck with Ubuntu... Which really isn't a bad thing, but I need wireless, and I don't know how to do that in Linux, so I'm going to get a crash course. Plus, I use XFire IMs sometimes and Linux clearly doesn't support that. I mean... Games on Linux? There's no point to XFire on Linux! Still, it comes with Pidgin and OpenOffice out of the box, which is all I need, really. It comes with Firefox, too, which is unfortunate. I think if I had to choose, I'd rather use Internet Explorer on this thing rather than Firefox or Chrome. They're not exactly low-power friendly. Plus, Ubuntu isn't remembering the brightness levels of my LCD from boot or returning from suspend, and I can't find anything online about them, either. Oh well... I can handle turning down the brightness every time.

Other than those, which are really more of a matter of taste than anything. Except maybe the keyboard problems. In fact, the F11 and F12 keys are missing entirely from the keyboard... Or are they? There was a BIOS revision (A03, I believe) that mapped F11 and F12 to the Fn+Z and Fn+X keys, respectively. With the small monitor, it sure is handy to load up a browser in full screen mode. I really wouldn't consider the 1024x600 resolution a con. It's small, sure, but it hasn't been much of a hinderance. It's a bit bothersome until you make the task bars retract when they're not in use and until you grasp how to make browsers and word processors run in full screen mode. (By which I mean "run without toolbars" mode.)

So! I think I wrote this in a timely fashion... Considering the weird keyboard. I AM getting used to it, which is nice. I hope to make good use of this dude in the coming semesters! (Heck, it can even watch movies over the network... I watched some Early Edition on it lastnight and it was surprisingly crisp and smooth! Put some videos on a USB drive and I can have instant entertainment between classes... Which I should probably use for studying... But we'll see!)

So I'm writing this on my new Mini! It's definitely smaller than the normal laptop... In fact, the keyboard is different in enough little ways to be completely alien. The QWERTY row has shifted to the left a little and the apostrophe key is on the row with the space bar, rather than next to the Enter key. The Shift key I use for most of my... Shifting... Is on the right and is smaller than the letters, so it's taking quite the developed skill to hit that when I need to without scrolling up or hitting Enter or what have you. Other than that?

This thing is astronomically TINY! Size is always different from measurements you make with a tape or ruler. It's so small that you can barely look at it like the full-fledged computer that it actually is. It has just enough space to cram in 3 USB ports, a power port, a card reader, sound jacks and a wired NIC. Inside it has wireless and Bluetooth. I opted for the cheaper Ubuntu version, and made a small upgrade to 8GB drive and 1GB RAM. I think it was worth it, considering that default installation only left 100MB free, and that was all gone once I patched everything. I'm having problems with the thing remembering my LCD brightness settings, and I'm tempted to reformat and put everything back to see if there was a problem there, too.

Okay, enough writing on this. I figure it's okay for quick note taking, but any form of true writing is going to take a while to get used to, what with the apostrophe and the shift key being in weird places.