I2R Again, Great Fun

Ah, the fresh smell of the free coffee in the Institute for Infocomm Research. It's been almost a year since I last worked here, and much has changed (as usual). Some of the friendly faces that I once knew have moved on to other callings in life, and I find myself in a not-altogether new environment to work in.

This is what I dream of—the working life of a researcher, where knowledge is learnt for the sake of learning new things so as to be able to apply them to something that is totally new for the advancement of some aspect of humankind. This beats the drudgery that is associated with the [artificiality of] homework that I face while I was still taking the courses back in college. Not that the homework was bad, but that there doesn't seem to be any meaning behind the homework. But then again, homework is necessary for ensuring that we have a certain mastery of the concepts that we are required to know and thus qualifies as a "necessary evil".

Ah, but whatever. So I'm now in my office, at a desk with a very decent computer running a not-so-decent version of Linux (it's called Ubuntu) and preparing the environment for the hard core stuff that I'll be working on while reading up on the various articles to get myself up to speed for the stuff that is going to happen during the entire 8-week attachment that I need to do.

Ubuntu is not a bad version of Linux; it's just that I'm so used to the good old fashioned command line (and the extremely minimalistic fvwm2 that I hacked together) that the Gnome interface seems a little too superfluous (and space wasting with their dual bar system). My current default windowing manager on my Slackware partition on Edythe is the KDE (which I seriously don't like but am putting up with it because of some of the useful properties that it has), but I'm looking into either putting up blackbox or even icewm as the default one (saves on power due to less eye candy). AfterStep is another viable alternative, as is FluxBox. But I might just stick with Ion, which is probably really the most suited for my keyboarding ways.

Who said that Linux cannot have a nice GUI? It's just that most of the mainstream GUIs are so fat and clunky that they become fairly useless [in my opinion].

So, what started out as a simple moment-of-contentment thing has turned into a mild rant. Bleah.