Learn less, do more

I don't really have an idea for this post. I suppose this time of the year it should be about evaluating the year, pondering good and bad things that happened.

I made a lot of progress with my work. Not the amount I would consider ideal, though - I've procrastinated an awful lot this year. I'm also running late with my dissertation - I should have it almost complete by now if I had really begun writing it several months ago, like I was telling myself over and over.

I also made a lot of mistakes. I do not complain about them, though, because I tend to see mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow. But I really wish I could "learn" a bit less in 2008...

I failed (again) to begin some serious running. I also failed to get my driver's license.

However, despite this year's less than satisfying progress, I am satisfied with other things I accomplished this year. The first and foremost is swimming. I finally overcame years and years of apathy and learned how to swim with a minimal level of decency.

All in all, I don't think 2007 has been too kind to me. I had a LOT of problems with banks. I procrastinated too much. I failed to exercise my discipline.

Looking at the bright side, when I look back there's a lot of good results to gather, and it actually looks like I've been produtive this year. I just wish I were more efficient.

For 2008, there's a lot to be done. For starters, my dissertation and defense, which I want to happen before April. I need to get a PhD going, after that. I want to get my driver's license. I also want to be able to show my friends how much I appreciate them.

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Serious people are rare around here.

Today's distance: 0 meters.
Yesterday's distance: 0 meters.

Yesterday the heavens fell apart, and it rained all the day. It wasn't even nearly possible to swim, so I didn't go.

Today, with an awful lot of stuff to do, I didn't go either. Although I'm thinking about going later, since my work for the day is done, I'll post 0 meters now since I have the tendency to postpone everything.

A piece of advice to you kids: never depend on people you don't trust if you want to work near the holidays. Especially around here, where everyone goes to incredible lengths to avoid working. I was supposed to still have a lot of work to do today, but I'll have to do it tomorrow because someone decided it was a good moment to party.

Parties are strange things around here. With all the bickering that goes on between the six departments on the Institute, each one traditionally decides to make its own end-of-the-year party - the direction of the institute, of course, obliviously arranges for a general party as well. As a result, everyone attends two parties: one on each department and another for the whole Institute.

The serious people keep working. But, I'm sad to say, they are few.

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Following Dory's advice

Today's distance: 1500 meters.

I decided several days ago to write here the distance I swam in the day. Obviously, I failed to do that until now.

Also, I am aware that this may not be the perfect time to begin doing this, since I'm only going to be able to swim until next friday - after that, I leave for the holidays and come back only in january. Still, it's better to begin at all than continue to endlessly postpone this.

I'm still convinced that this will also help me maintain a higher frequency of posts here, even if they are not very enlightening.

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VT8233 on Linux - making S/PDIF work

I'm making this post hoping it might be useful in case someone googles for something related.

A long time ago when I bought the parts for my current desktop at home I chose Asus' excellent A7V600-X motherboard. It comes with a fancy S/PDIF output RCA jack, and I thought to myself, 'sometime I should get this thing working'. I never got around to it because I didn't have access to a decoder which would be able to process the signal.

Recently Daniel brought the old home theater from his home, and so I get the opportunity. I bought the cables today and set out to the task.

The good thing is that the chipset which comes onboard is supported by Debian GNU/Linux out-of-the-box. I suppose that remains true for other distributions, since it's really a matter of ALSA and kernel compatibility, which is reasonably homogeneous.

Anyway, after a lot of searching (and very few useful answers from almost everywhere, including Alsa's own wiki), I found out that all you have to do is (assuming you run GNOME):

1. In Volume Control, under Edit/Preferences, check 'IEC958 Output' and 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA'.
2. In the Switches tab, check 'IEC958 Output'
3. Back in the Playback tab, set the slider for 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA' to ZERO.
4. That's it, you're done.

This is actually quite strange, since I don't have any kind of control over S/PDIF's volume output this way; anything different than zero simply kills any sound coming from the home theater set.

I hope this helps anyone who happens to stumble with this post.

Next step: to make my FX 5200's S-Video output talk to the television set.

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Stairway to Heaven

Had I been there yesterday, I don't know what could have happened. One thing is certain: there were no other place I'd rather be.

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Contradiction or hyprocrisy?

Interesting thing I saw on the way home: some guy to whom a mohawk is not enough. He decided to make dreadlocks on it, too. What can I say? He was the ugliest thing I've seen these days. I do not argue with taste, though. With 6 billion people in the planet, there's a taste for every thing - and bad taste for even more.

He didn't stop there, though. What really caught my eye was his t-shirt: "No more torture - boycott to everything from animal exploration". So far, so good. That's the guy's point of view, and I respect that. And then I saw his wallet, which was visible in the pocket of his pants. A leather wallet...

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Briefly brief briefing.

This is not going to be a real update. This is going to be a shamelessly brief account of what happened in the last 43 days.

I'm doing good in swimming. Although there are a lot of ways I can improve, things are going ok; 2000 meters and counting. Maybe I'll begin to post here how long I swim every day.

My advisor got promoted. I'm not sure what's the english word for it, but she's now a titular professor in my department.

I'm beginning to get paranoid with my dissertation. It's about time, since I have to admit I'm far (too far) from finishing it.

Christmas is getting close - OMG it's that time of the year already?!?!

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Update.

This is not really an update, but a manifestation of my acknowledgement of the fact that it's been 43 days since my last post.

So many things have happened during this time that is seems a lot longer. Hopefully later this weekend I'll manage to write something about it.

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