Tricky, since the older Visors that run 3.1 don't have the nifty new serial redirection interfaces. But there are hacks to get around it.
First, use a replacement serial redirection hack like the commercial IRlink or the free Comlink (search for them on palmgear).
Additionally, with Comlink, I've found that I would also have to use a trick to get PalmOS 3.1 to access the serial link directly: I would have to enter "00" for the phone number. This will complete the serial link to the phone's modem. Then you'll have to use scripting to actually dial the number and pause for authentication. -- Other people have said that simply entering the full phone number as "+-xxx-xxx-xxxx" also did the trick.
Good luck, and if all else fails, see if you can trade in for a phone with an IR modem:)
it's going to be a lot more expensive than you expect if you try to go with non-commodity hardware. I'd recommend building something around a micro-ATX motherboard (Gigabyte sells some good ones, and probably one of the only ones that support AMD chips). Couple that with one of those mini-tower cases and you should have a decent COTS system that's mostly portable (but more importantly, uses standard hardware).
If you wanted to make your own chassis, you might thin it down by using riser cards so you can mount the video/PCI cards sideways, but you'll still be stuck trying to find a way to mount the power supply, so it'll still be somewhat bulky.
I think would be difficult to build a system smaller than that for less than the price of an equivalent laptop, mostly because you'd have to find a kick-ass power supply and get other expensive components (SBC motherboards, etc.)
Well, bullies are a fact of life, unfortunately. And if the outcome of the Nuremburg case is any indication, they're not going to get in trouble for it any time soon. It's probably A-OK to even go around saying "You're so pathetic, I wouldn't care if you killed yourself," in school, but the slightest mention of a threat will get you suspended or worse. (An A-student at the high school where my wife teaches got a one-month suspension because she threatened a bully with physical violence when he wouldn't stop abusing her)
The only way to deal with bullies is to just develop thick skin. Just ignore them, don't give them any gratification for their taunts. Let the fight be one-sided. And go find a group of people that do appreciate you, dammit. When we were in high school, we had a group called "Nerds by Choice," and it was a nice place to just hang out and be geeky without getting ridiculed by others. We were often derided and even censored by the school's administration, but it helps a lot if you're not the only one:P .
Before that I was often depressed and would spend lots of time sulking contemplatively to myself. But I developed strategies to get through the hard years. Suicide was never an option; if I couldn't live a good life, it would be fun to at least live a spectacularly bad one, even if it hurt:P .
There have been some studies that showed that dog-owners have lower stress (no such correlation for other pets, e.g. cats).
Maybe it's because they go for walks more often, or because they're less obsessive-compulsive about keeping their house clean and spotless since Spot will just screw everything up again.
Whatever... you can cuddle with your purring cat on the sofa to "increase your bone mass" all you like, I'm going to go out in the sun and chase some squirrels with my dog!:>
Hacktivism should be fine... as in hack in the MIT sense as a prank to a website. I see "cracking" as the process of getting through security (copy protection, weak NT passwords, IIS exploits). But once you've r00+3d a system, then you pull the hack by posting that "political" picture of someone mooning on the front page of their website.
I think we might have lost the hack/crack war to the popular media, but maybe we can salvage it by giving them "hack" for web site hacks, but still insisting that "crack" be used for breaking into security before the hack, or stealing credit cards or something. How could stealing credit cards be a hack? Maybe charging and shipping a realdoll to their address would be a prank, but otherwise cracking a system for information would be just "cracking". Hmm....
I think they're talking about 3 different types of engineered moths: the luminescent, the sterile, and the ones that produce sterile offspring.
I can see where the luminescent ones would be useful for testing yields of the genetically-engineered crop. A crop isn't always 100% the way they manufactured it (i.e. luminescent or sterile), they come out more like CPUs, where only a certain percentage of them work. It might also make them sexually attractive to potential mates, but knowing the yield rate is important too for estimating how many you'll have to release into the wild to control the population.
Releasing sterile moths probably wouldn't be enough to control the population significantly.
The "Terminators" that produce sterile offsping would be more effective than the sterile ones, and of course it's possible. e.g. the donkey is a hybrid of a mule and a horse, and donkeys are sterile. So a mate of a Terminator and the normal moths would produce several sterile offspring down the line, meaning you'd only have to buy fewer Terminators to reduce a given population of moths.
I'm surprised no one mentioned this yet... The
eyemodule 2 plugs right into the visor and can capture 640x480 color. It should come with software that will allow you to dial up to an ISP and email the pictures off. I use comlink and a cell phone with an IRDA modem to connect to the internet (my Visor is more or less my primary computer now, I can use TGssh to log into my friends' computers and do stuff there). So you would need something like the following:
Visor Deluxe or Platinum ($250 / $300, 8MB of memory, runs for about 2-6 weeks off a pair of AA batteries) The Prism would let you look at your pictures in color, but has rechargeable batteries, so probably wouldn't work for you. The greyscale Visors seem to be able to store color pictures, though.
Eyemodule2 ($200 , you can download the picture emailer program from Palmgear.com or freewarepalm.com there's also the greyscale eyemodule1 for cheaper some places)
cell phone with a modem (~$170 for my little Nokia phone with IRDA. There are Visorphones ($300) and wireless modules for the Visor, but then you'd have to swap modules all the time. For service, I have Voicestream GSM, but that's limited to 9600baud digital service right now... I think TDMA (AT&T, Verizon) networks might let you connect up to 14400baud and have more complete analog roaming).
if you want to get fancy, you could spend maybe $100 or so on phone-Visor serial cables so you don't have to hold them together to use the lame IRDA link, so you can keep pedalling while you're connected. Then again, it might be cheaper and more convenient to just duct tape both of them to your handlebars so the IRDA links always work... that way you could use the phone's serial port for a handsfree kit so you can talk to people when you aren't dialed in. A pet peeve of mine with the Nokia phone is that the IRDA port is on the wrong side of the phone, so I have to hold it upside down to use my Visor. But you could probably get creative with a mirror.)
you might want to program a script (or get someone else to program a script:) ) to automate the picture grabbing/uploading tasks with one button. I don't think I've seen anything like that yet...
Good luck! Sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun!
I'd shy away from a BTTV card if possible. I have one and it works great, and there's lots of software for it. However I had a chance to use some of the ATi capture cards with the GATOS project and I was quite impressed. Here are some of the differences I'm aware of:
Since the ATi cards are integrated with your graphics card, you don't use up PCI bandwidth displaying video to your monitor. This also makes for smoother display when you move the video window around, since (at least in overlay mode) the bttv card simply pipes its output to a section of the video card's framebuffer, and when you move its window it takes a moment to update the geometry. And by the time it does, it often leaves a little bit of video corruption until the Xserver decides to update that section again. The ATi cards had no problem moving the video around with its window.
The BTTV card can only show certain resolutions, whereas the ATi capture devices does hardware resizing, so you can quite easily display video much larger than the 640x480 capture CCD. It could display video blown up to serve as your desktop background.
The ATi devices also have other nifty hardware tricks, like zooming in on an area and performing image smoothing, etc., most of which was supported by GATOS.
The Rage 128 3D accelerator that comes with some All-in-Wonders works decently under XFree4. Hopefully the Radeon drivers will work soon.
So right now there's much more Linux software specifically for the BTTV cards, so they're more useful at the moment, but, like the way the 3dfx Voodoo2 was supplanted by more sophisticated cards once the Linux support was there, I'd say the BTTV's days as "the best TV capture card for Linux" are numbered.
how hard could it possibly be to hack up a squid proxy to link through? That should be a lot less work than coordinating a bunch of mirrors, and it might work better with dynamic content...
currents.net seems to be having a bit of a DDoS attack right now... perhaps the perpetrators are seeking vengeance? Or is it the age old Linux-induced DDoS called the "slashdot effect"?
They really should ban Linux... think about it... All the anarchists would start using Linux just because it was illegal, and then they could bring down the government with our mighty DDoS weapon that the Feds are so fearful of... Once we have reason to declare war, Rob would just point the Link Of Obliteration at one government site every other post, and before long, they'll fall and we'll be rid of the FBI, NSA, then the RIAA... mmmm... no wonder they're scared...
If your employer still insists on numbering your PC's just do it in a different language (Babelfish might be helpful here). That way, it sounds cooler, and is at least slightly educational, which you can challenge your boss with if he dost protest too much. And while you're at it, you might as well choose names from any other word in foreign languages, occasionally sneaking in "merde" or "puta". Too bad we can't use Cyrillic, ÁÅÒÏÆÌÏÔ would be a good one...
You might want to search through http://www.linuxhardware.net/ to see what other S3Virge owners have had so say. There have always been problems with console corruption with these cards, and I've heard of people using everything from setfont to SVGATextmode to cope.
As for me, I have a plain old S3V (86C325) card that isn't even VESA 2.0 compliant, so using a framebuffer console is kind of out of the question for me. On the other hand, it's the only card I have that can drive this big old fixed-frequency monitor that my roommate found. I haven't figured out how to set the video timings for the console, so I only use it for X. I've found that newer X servers greatly reduce the likelihood of console corruption, though, so perhaps your best recourse is just waiting for the next version...
From what I've heard of the playstation 2, it doesn't sound like it would be that hard to network it to a Linux box and then have it run a GLX server... does this sound like an unreasonable way to get major graphics acceleration to your regular workstation? As for specialized graphics processing, perhaps there's a similar way to get a whole bunch of them to do clustering when networked to a server workstation... hmm rc5...
Are you behind a firewall/proxy? The realplayer page says you have to open up ports 6970 - 7170 to UDP traffic.
This seems to be the problem in my case... My roommate usurped our connection a few weeks ago to try proxying our LAN himself with WinRoute instead of through my Linux box (using the excuse that it was too hard to figure out how to set up port forwarding for kerberos:P ) It's been a bumpy ride since then... bouncy bouncy
They have ProE at a few workstations at my school. (unfortunately, they recently got rid of 4 SGI's because it turned out that I was the only person who had been using them for the past 2 years, all that's left for undergrads are NT boxen) I never looked at it seriously though, since POVray had always been sufficient for the small design projects I had. I'll definitely have to give it a shot now!
It's nice to think that tragedies like this could be averted if everyone would just stop their mistreatment of nerds and geeks. Damn us engineers! Always trying to change our environment to suit us! But, practically, can we really expect everyone else to suddenly become geek-friendly? I've found it much easier to adapt myself to my surroundings: you (hopefully) have much more control over your own body and souls. It's much easier to improve a situation by controlling yourself than by attempting to control other people. Attempting the latter would merely make us frustrated and helpless... feelings that draw us towards emotional instability, as we learned from elementary psychology. I've developed some of the following guidelines for myself in order to make it through the troublesome school years, (insert Baz Luhrmann disclaimer on "dispensing advice" here)
Learn some people skills: this appears to come naturally to "normal" people, but nerds and geeks (almost by definition) will have considerable difficulty with this area. This is one way that "outcasts" are identified. You must make a concerted effort to realize this problem, and retaliate by practicing your social skills. If these "jocks" and "preppies" are really as shallow as you say they are, this should be easy. Study a little drama, or practice in front of a mirror if you need to. Examples:
Say "hi". Greet people. Smile at them. Many are offended when geeks (who might be shy or preoccupied in thought) seem to be giving them the cold shoulder or ignorming them, simply because they missed their cue on common courtesies.
Be interested in others (or at least appear to be). People love talking about themselves. Unfortunately, geeks especially tend to be so absorbed in their own world that they forget to ask other people "how are you doing?". Ask more questions about them. You'll be amazed by how long people can be in their reply. And you'll be winning valuable brownie points just by sitting there listening with glazed eyes.
Try this even if you're a misanthrope and hate everyone's guts. Sooner or later you'll come to the realization that everyone sucks, and once you come to accept and expect this, then maybe people's acts of stupidity won't annoy you so much.
Keep a good sense of humor: Geeks excel at humor. Try to keep a good sense of humor, even when you're being picked on. Don't let a confronational situation turn serious, that's what bullies want. Turn things around, don't look aggravated when you're being abused, but try to appear to enjoy the attention you're getting. Take the opportunity to crack a joke. This can sometimes win you friends out of your oppressors, since pranks like wedgies and dopeslaps can sometimes be a form of hazing that "jock"-types often pull amongst themselves (not my definition of "friendship", but that seems to be how it is inside some circles).
Strategic alliances: Some tormentors are more dangerous than others. You might be able to ask the "jocks" to help stand up against the "gangsters" that are giving you trouble. Similarly, if you can somehow solicit the favors of the "preppies", they might stand up for you when the "jocks" are being too abusive.
Have some humility: everyone hates condescending behavior. Don't let yourself brag. Downplay your successes if you have to. Say things to make people feel good about themselves. Above all, do not let yourself become elitist! That puts you in the same group as the Nazis, the Fascists, and the bullies who think they can push nerds and geeks around. You're better than that! (oh, um, wait a minute... well, the logic here is tricky... use your judgement)
On forming groups/clubs: It's great for geeks and nerds to band together, the best memories I have from high school were from NBC ("Nerds by Choice"). There were several things we learned were effective, and other things we did that went horribly awry:
First off, by forming an "official" group, you are almost brandishing yourselves as elitist outcasts, which can spawn resentment from about half the people you introduce yourselves to. We tried to offset this by picking a silly, self-deprecating name, and having an open membership. We touted "unconditional social acceptance" to somehow show that we were less elitist than many of the other groups, but it all came to little avail. My recommendation would be to go with an innocuous name and a pretense of a purpose that doesn't seem intimidating to others... like "checkers/cards club" or marginally "SAB" (Students Against Boredom). You'll be more creative than I. Go with something safe, because, believe it or not, even we were censored by our school administration solely due to our name/purpose. Now more than ever, with the Colorado hysteria, it's important to choose a name that's harmless. You have much more important things to be doing than fussing with the administration over your rights to free speech.
Meeting location: naturally you want a hideaway that doesn't get too much traffic, like a remote corner of the school or the classroom of a friendly teacher. You'll be behaving normally (for geeks), which means you probably don't want to attract too much of the wrong attention.
Lunch: The cafeteria is the prime place for abuse, since everyone's stressed and restless and has a ready supply of projectiles. Sit at the tables far from crowds and traffic, so at least tormentors will have to go out of their way to do anything. We'd also avoid going to our lockers before lunch so we'd make it to the cafeteria in time to beat the long, arduous waits in the lunch line, where impatience and tension usually runs high. The best part of my school time was spent skipping lunch entirely in favor of a period in the library or the computer lab, eating a packed lunch in a classroom that didn't mind it.
Learn Martial Arts: nothing can do more to improve your confidence and constitution than good physical and spiritual training. Besides, if you suck at competitive sports as much as I do, you'll need something to keep yourself in shape. Of course, don't go to a school or club that's only into competitive sparring, instead find one with lots of mature people who are more focused on traditional techniques and development. Your goal is not to become a black belt or turn into a fighting machine, but simply to improve your self-control, manage stress, and sharpen your chi. (Not that physical prowess doesn't help... I once threw a warning kick at an oppressor that merely tapped him on his temple; however, I made it through the rest of middle school with the reputation like: "don't mess with that guy or he'll kick you in the head!")
This rift that has been opening up between introverts and extroverts in school environments is only worsened by any "us vs. them" elitist mentality. One of us is going to have to step up and bridge the gap by accepting the other for who they are. Someone will have to evolve out of the natural human inclination to war and quarrel. I have a good feeling it's not going to be the others. Someone is going to have to start providing solutions to this crisis. We've seen the silly solutions the mainstream has been coming up with, it's about time we implemented some of our own.
Whee, I've been holding out on buying a 3D card, since it's the fastest improving hardware right now... it looks like in only a few months I'll have more options for cards that work under Linux than I'll know what to do with:)
So does anyone have any speculations on what the Matrox G400 will have in store for us? It's been on their website for quite a while now, but I haven't heard talk about it anywhere else...
Slashdot Mirror
First, use a replacement serial redirection hack like the commercial IRlink or the free Comlink (search for them on palmgear).
Additionally, with Comlink, I've found that I would also have to use a trick to get PalmOS 3.1 to access the serial link directly: I would have to enter "00" for the phone number. This will complete the serial link to the phone's modem. Then you'll have to use scripting to actually dial the number and pause for authentication. -- Other people have said that simply entering the full phone number as "+-xxx-xxx-xxxx" also did the trick.
Good luck, and if all else fails, see if you can trade in for a phone with an IR modem :)
If you wanted to make your own chassis, you might thin it down by using riser cards so you can mount the video/PCI cards sideways, but you'll still be stuck trying to find a way to mount the power supply, so it'll still be somewhat bulky.
I think would be difficult to build a system smaller than that for less than the price of an equivalent laptop, mostly because you'd have to find a kick-ass power supply and get other expensive components (SBC motherboards, etc.)
W: VFX
P: FUNEM?
W: VFM
P: OK, MNX!
argh, I'm not using too many caps, they're all acronyms! or at least phonetic acronyms... hmm
The only way to deal with bullies is to just develop thick skin. Just ignore them, don't give them any gratification for their taunts. Let the fight be one-sided. And go find a group of people that do appreciate you, dammit. When we were in high school, we had a group called "Nerds by Choice," and it was a nice place to just hang out and be geeky without getting ridiculed by others. We were often derided and even censored by the school's administration, but it helps a lot if you're not the only one :P .
Before that I was often depressed and would spend lots of time sulking contemplatively to myself. But I developed strategies to get through the hard years. Suicide was never an option; if I couldn't live a good life, it would be fun to at least live a spectacularly bad one, even if it hurt :P .
Maybe it's because they go for walks more often, or because they're less obsessive-compulsive about keeping their house clean and spotless since Spot will just screw everything up again.
Whatever... you can cuddle with your purring cat on the sofa to "increase your bone mass" all you like, I'm going to go out in the sun and chase some squirrels with my dog! :>
I think we might have lost the hack/crack war to the popular media, but maybe we can salvage it by giving them "hack" for web site hacks, but still insisting that "crack" be used for breaking into security before the hack, or stealing credit cards or something. How could stealing credit cards be a hack? Maybe charging and shipping a realdoll to their address would be a prank, but otherwise cracking a system for information would be just "cracking". Hmm....
I can see where the luminescent ones would be useful for testing yields of the genetically-engineered crop. A crop isn't always 100% the way they manufactured it (i.e. luminescent or sterile), they come out more like CPUs, where only a certain percentage of them work. It might also make them sexually attractive to potential mates, but knowing the yield rate is important too for estimating how many you'll have to release into the wild to control the population.
Releasing sterile moths probably wouldn't be enough to control the population significantly.
The "Terminators" that produce sterile offsping would be more effective than the sterile ones, and of course it's possible. e.g. the donkey is a hybrid of a mule and a horse, and donkeys are sterile. So a mate of a Terminator and the normal moths would produce several sterile offspring down the line, meaning you'd only have to buy fewer Terminators to reduce a given population of moths.
- Visor Deluxe or Platinum ($250 / $300, 8MB of memory, runs for about 2-6 weeks off a pair of AA batteries) The Prism would let you look at your pictures in color, but has rechargeable batteries, so probably wouldn't work for you. The greyscale Visors seem to be able to store color pictures, though.
- Eyemodule2 ($200 , you can download the picture emailer program from Palmgear.com or freewarepalm.com there's also the greyscale eyemodule1 for cheaper some places)
- cell phone with a modem (~$170 for my little Nokia phone with IRDA. There are Visorphones ($300) and wireless modules for the Visor, but then you'd have to swap modules all the time. For service, I have Voicestream GSM, but that's limited to 9600baud digital service right now... I think TDMA (AT&T, Verizon) networks might let you connect up to 14400baud and have more complete analog roaming).
- if you want to get fancy, you could spend maybe $100 or so on phone-Visor serial cables so you don't have to hold them together to use the lame IRDA link, so you can keep pedalling while you're connected. Then again, it might be cheaper and more convenient to just duct tape both of them to your handlebars so the IRDA links always work... that way you could use the phone's serial port for a handsfree kit so you can talk to people when you aren't dialed in. A pet peeve of mine with the Nokia phone is that the IRDA port is on the wrong side of the phone, so I have to hold it upside down to use my Visor. But you could probably get creative with a mirror.)
- you might want to program a script (or get someone else to program a script
:) ) to automate the picture grabbing/uploading tasks with one button. I don't think I've seen anything like that yet...
Good luck! Sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun!- Since the ATi cards are integrated with your graphics card, you don't use up PCI bandwidth displaying video to your monitor. This also makes for smoother display when you move the video window around, since (at least in overlay mode) the bttv card simply pipes its output to a section of the video card's framebuffer, and when you move its window it takes a moment to update the geometry. And by the time it does, it often leaves a little bit of video corruption until the Xserver decides to update that section again. The ATi cards had no problem moving the video around with its window.
- The BTTV card can only show certain resolutions, whereas the ATi capture devices does hardware resizing, so you can quite easily display video much larger than the 640x480 capture CCD. It could display video blown up to serve as your desktop background.
- The ATi devices also have other nifty hardware tricks, like zooming in on an area and performing image smoothing, etc., most of which was supported by GATOS.
- The Rage 128 3D accelerator that comes with some All-in-Wonders works decently under XFree4. Hopefully the Radeon drivers will work soon.
So right now there's much more Linux software specifically for the BTTV cards, so they're more useful at the moment, but, like the way the 3dfx Voodoo2 was supplanted by more sophisticated cards once the Linux support was there, I'd say the BTTV's days as "the best TV capture card for Linux" are numbered.how hard could it possibly be to hack up a squid proxy to link through? That should be a lot less work than coordinating a bunch of mirrors, and it might work better with dynamic content...
a proliferation green martian alien pr0n
They really should ban Linux... think about it...
All the anarchists would start using Linux just because it was illegal, and then they could bring down the government with our mighty DDoS weapon that the Feds are so fearful of... Once we have reason to declare war, Rob would just point the Link Of Obliteration at one government site every other post, and before long, they'll fall and we'll be rid of the FBI, NSA, then the RIAA... mmmm... no wonder they're scared...
Yes! Yes! Do it! Make Linux illegal!
If your employer still insists on numbering your PC's just do it in a different language (Babelfish might be helpful here). That way, it sounds cooler, and is at least slightly educational, which you can challenge your boss with if he dost protest too much. And while you're at it, you might as well choose names from any other word in foreign languages, occasionally sneaking in "merde" or "puta". Too bad we can't use Cyrillic, ÁÅÒÏÆÌÏÔ would be a good one...
As for me, I have a plain old S3V (86C325) card that isn't even VESA 2.0 compliant, so using a framebuffer console is kind of out of the question for me. On the other hand, it's the only card I have that can drive this big old fixed-frequency monitor that my roommate found. I haven't figured out how to set the video timings for the console, so I only use it for X. I've found that newer X servers greatly reduce the likelihood of console corruption, though, so perhaps your best recourse is just waiting for the next version...
From what I've heard of the playstation 2, it doesn't sound like it would be that hard to network it to a Linux box and then have it run a GLX server... does this sound like an unreasonable way to get major graphics acceleration to your regular workstation? As for specialized graphics processing, perhaps there's a similar way to get a whole bunch of them to do clustering when networked to a server workstation... hmm rc5 ...
This seems to be the problem in my case... My roommate usurped our connection a few weeks ago to try proxying our LAN himself with WinRoute instead of through my Linux box (using the excuse that it was too hard to figure out how to set up port forwarding for kerberos :P ) It's been a bumpy ride since then... bouncy bouncy
$8000 is a lot of pennies, though...
It's nice to think that tragedies like this could be averted if everyone would just stop their mistreatment of nerds and geeks. Damn us engineers! Always trying to change our environment to suit us! But, practically, can we really expect everyone else to suddenly become geek-friendly? I've found it much easier to adapt myself to my surroundings: you (hopefully) have much more control over your own body and souls. It's much easier to improve a situation by controlling yourself than by attempting to control other people. Attempting the latter would merely make us frustrated and helpless... feelings that draw us towards emotional instability, as we learned from elementary psychology. I've developed some of the following guidelines for myself in order to make it through the troublesome school years, (insert Baz Luhrmann disclaimer on "dispensing advice" here)
- Learn some people skills: this appears to come naturally to "normal" people, but nerds and geeks (almost by definition) will have considerable difficulty with this area. This is one way that "outcasts" are identified. You must make a concerted effort to realize this problem, and retaliate by practicing your social skills. If these "jocks" and "preppies" are really as shallow as you say they are, this should be easy. Study a little drama, or practice in front of a mirror if you need to. Examples:
- Keep a good sense of humor: Geeks excel at humor. Try to keep a good sense of humor, even when you're being picked on. Don't let a confronational situation turn serious, that's what bullies want. Turn things around, don't look aggravated when you're being abused, but try to appear to enjoy the attention you're getting. Take the opportunity to crack a joke. This can sometimes win you friends out of your oppressors, since pranks like wedgies and dopeslaps can sometimes be a form of hazing that "jock"-types often pull amongst themselves (not my definition of "friendship", but that seems to be how it is inside some circles).
- Strategic alliances: Some tormentors are more dangerous than others. You might be able to ask the "jocks" to help stand up against the "gangsters" that are giving you trouble. Similarly, if you can somehow solicit the favors of the "preppies", they might stand up for you when the "jocks" are being too abusive.
- Have some humility: everyone hates condescending behavior. Don't let yourself brag. Downplay your successes if you have to. Say things to make people feel good about themselves. Above all, do not let yourself become elitist! That puts you in the same group as the Nazis, the Fascists, and the bullies who think they can push nerds and geeks around. You're better than that! (oh, um, wait a minute... well, the logic here is tricky... use your judgement)
- On forming groups/clubs: It's great for geeks and nerds to band together, the best memories I have from high school were from NBC ("Nerds by Choice"). There were several things we learned were effective, and other things we did that went horribly awry:
- First off, by forming an "official" group, you are almost brandishing yourselves as elitist outcasts, which can spawn resentment from about half the people you introduce yourselves to. We tried to offset this by picking a silly, self-deprecating name, and having an open membership. We touted "unconditional social acceptance" to somehow show that we were less elitist than many of the other groups, but it all came to little avail. My recommendation would be to go with an innocuous name and a pretense of a purpose that doesn't seem intimidating to others... like "checkers/cards club" or marginally "SAB" (Students Against Boredom). You'll be more creative than I. Go with something safe, because, believe it or not, even we were censored by our school administration solely due to our name/purpose. Now more than ever, with the Colorado hysteria, it's important to choose a name that's harmless. You have much more important things to be doing than fussing with the administration over your rights to free speech.
- Meeting location: naturally you want a hideaway that doesn't get too much traffic, like a remote corner of the school or the classroom of a friendly teacher. You'll be behaving normally (for geeks), which means you probably don't want to attract too much of the wrong attention.
- Lunch: The cafeteria is the prime place for abuse, since everyone's stressed and restless and has a ready supply of projectiles. Sit at the tables far from crowds and traffic, so at least tormentors will have to go out of their way to do anything. We'd also avoid going to our lockers before lunch so we'd make it to the cafeteria in time to beat the long, arduous waits in the lunch line, where impatience and tension usually runs high. The best part of my school time was spent skipping lunch entirely in favor of a period in the library or the computer lab, eating a packed lunch in a classroom that didn't mind it.
- Learn Martial Arts: nothing can do more to improve your confidence and constitution than good physical and spiritual training. Besides, if you suck at competitive sports as much as I do, you'll need something to keep yourself in shape. Of course, don't go to a school or club that's only into competitive sparring, instead find one with lots of mature people who are more focused on traditional techniques and development. Your goal is not to become a black belt or turn into a fighting machine, but simply to improve your self-control, manage stress, and sharpen your chi. (Not that physical prowess doesn't help... I once threw a warning kick at an oppressor that merely tapped him on his temple; however, I made it through the rest of middle school with the reputation like: "don't mess with that guy or he'll kick you in the head!")
This rift that has been opening up between introverts and extroverts in school environments is only worsened by any "us vs. them" elitist mentality. One of us is going to have to step up and bridge the gap by accepting the other for who they are. Someone will have to evolve out of the natural human inclination to war and quarrel. I have a good feeling it's not going to be the others. Someone is going to have to start providing solutions to this crisis. We've seen the silly solutions the mainstream has been coming up with, it's about time we implemented some of our own.- Say "hi". Greet people. Smile at them. Many are offended when geeks (who might be shy or preoccupied in thought) seem to be giving them the cold shoulder or ignorming them, simply because they missed their cue on common courtesies.
- Be interested in others (or at least appear to be). People love talking about themselves. Unfortunately, geeks especially tend to be so absorbed in their own world that they forget to ask other people "how are you doing?". Ask more questions about them. You'll be amazed by how long people can be in their reply. And you'll be winning valuable brownie points just by sitting there listening with glazed eyes.
Try this even if you're a misanthrope and hate everyone's guts. Sooner or later you'll come to the realization that everyone sucks, and once you come to accept and expect this, then maybe people's acts of stupidity won't annoy you so much.Whee, I've been holding out on buying a 3D card, since it's the fastest improving hardware right now... it looks like in only a few months I'll have more options for cards that work under Linux than I'll know what to do with :)
So does anyone have any speculations on what the Matrox G400 will have in store for us? It's been on their website for quite a while now, but I haven't heard talk about it anywhere else...
remember to be gentle with your cameras, I wasn't gentle enough ); -- Ex-digicam user