so it turns out i’ve been (mostly) running two miles a day in the month of september. sweet! thanks, google maps.

i am “i feel like i just got off a plane” tired. weak, slightly nauseous… i’m thinking it’s a hangover from tea.

i really hope the annoying guy in my classes drops out of the major.

ugh, three (or was it four?) 12-oz cups of tea during work leaves me feeling slightly nauseous, and with quicker movements. sleep will not come easily tonight.

deciding to bleach my hair today (new patches to be expected), with the disruption to my showering schedule, i decided that i might take this week off from running. now, i may feel compelled to run as i do right now in the coming days, but i believe that my overwhelming laziness and aversion to sweat and exertion will win out. let’s see if i will lose muscle, weight, and appetite. consider this the last part of the summer 2009 exercise experiment.

in other news, i think i may have finished a piano piece today. now i’m going to download lilypond and try to write it out in real music notation.

*edit*

couldn’t stay away from the running. started jogging after four days instead of seven.

i’m thinking about taking a rest day from my jogging tomorrow. my hamstrings have been feeling sore/strained, so maybe i need a “rest day”. maybe it was from the shoe-switching, or maybe it was because i didn’t eat a real breakfast, or because i didn’t drink enough water (which i never do). or maybe i’m pushing myself more than necessary. what’s the point, though? today, a guy passed me faster than i could have passed a snail, and i was discouraged about this dream of calling myself a runner. i’m no better than i ever was in middle and high school.

athletes only have rest days once a week, though. the rest of us mortals are only recommended to do cardio three times a week, a.k.a. every other day. sigh. i really wonder what it’s like to be an “elite runner”. is it just easier for them to be so fast, or is their willpower beyond my imagination?

running in cushioned shoes is definitely harder than running in flat shoes. my legs were unusually tired today.

i might try running in converses tomorrow. x_x

my first blister. = /

it’s weird how i feel most capable of running at the end of my run.

as a side note: why is my hardware clock so off???

[edit]

installed open ntpd (network time protocal daemon). time is now correcto!

hp laserjet 1018.

decided not to use the AUR package because there seemed to dependencies that weren’t actually needed, like vim. not sure about ‘foomatic db engine’ and ‘psutils’ though.

installed it the old way, following the instructions fro mthe foo2zjs website.

configured cups by going to http://localhost:631 (really weird but interesting way to configure something!). had to plug in and turn on the printer in question in order for it to recognize the device. found the ppd file in foo2zjs/ppd and uploaded it. root and password.

not working at the moment. might have to restart?

[update]

i ended up using the aur foo2zjs package, deleted the source install stuff. installed all the dependencies it asked for. had to add my user to the lp group in /etc/group. cups was already started, so i restarted the printer. and it worked!

yay!

1. installation

looked a lot like the slackware installation. i was a little confused about whether or not a separate /boot partition was needed, but nah. grub took care of everything. i think it boots windows, but windows is still going “NTLDR is compressed”, so i don’t know.

2. conf files

it seems like arch’s /etc directory is less cluttered than slackware’s, and the config files are fewer and more concise. nice and neat.

3. wireless

wireless was pretty easy this time around! the kernel came with the iwl3945 driver (replacing ipw3945), so i think all i had to do was get the ucode and install it. it uses wlan0 as the interface instead of eth1 now, interesting. dhcpcd works reliably, yay.

4. Xorg and KDE

learning how to use pacman while installing Xorg was… educational. my first problem with pacman was simply that the only mirror i uncommented wasn’t available. added some more mirrors to download kdemod. i think the kde mod is a little buggy, but it’s still very nice and streamlined. kde4 seems to have a file navigation system (not just konquere as a file browser!) similar to macOS. sweet! simpler and more intuitive. but editing the panel bar is more of a hassle now. oh, note to self: if you want ’startx’ to start kde’, you just have to uncomment the line in the ~/.xinitrc file.

5. sound

downloaded alsa stuff, tried a bunch of things on the wiki. eventually, restarting X did the trick.

pacman (the package manager) is pretty awesome! i can install things so much faster now. i think i may have been doing it the long way with slackware. anyways. i seem to have an alpha version of firefox called shiretoko. it likes to refer to itself as shiretoko. we’ll see how this goes.

it’s optimized for i686, so it’s fast as hell. the installation is command-line based, so that means it’s very do-it-yourself. i’m going to download KDEmod 4.2 from the chakra project, and that way i won’t have all those extra applications. i think i can also download lilo instead of grub, so all is well!

i’m not too fond of the new logo, though… i thought the old one was cooler.

Figure 1 — New logo	Figure 2 — Old logo

two articles detailing the awesomeness of arch:

+ life on the cutting edge – archlinux
+ arch linux – 2008.06 Overlord

unfortunately, the server at archlinux.org is undergoing maintenance right now, so i guess i’m just going to have to watch the taiwanese drama ‘black and white’ until it’s back up again. hope it’s sooner rather than later.

time to go back up my files. x_x