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Gloomy soul? Not really

So senior week is over. For “Opposite Day” on Wednesday, I actually dressed emo. For this once-in-a-lifetime stunt, I borrowed my sister’s shirt, pins, and wristband. She’s not emo, but she probably could be if she wanted I also wore eyeliner. Though this picture doesn’t do it justice, the effect was priceless. (As you can see, we have to wear ID badges for security blah blah blah. If I were a real emo kid, I just wouldn’t have worn it. Actually, I wouldn’t have worn it if I were most anyone else. But I am me.)

I got some interesting reactions. Some people said that I had the look for being emo and should dress like that more often. Others said I never should look like that again. Personally, I don’t think it was really comfortable. I’m not really one to conform to a particular style; I just wear whatever’s comfortable, and I don’t really see the point in wearing pins and black clothes all the time. But it was worth it to make my friend Gilbert’s photoshopped emo Jordon picture a reality:

Other people did some crazy stuff that day. Ed (yes, that Ed) dressed as a farmer. Andrew, who’s usually into metal and stuff, wore a suit and fedora. Tyler wore a red dress, and actually didn’t get in trouble. It was definitely my favorite day of Senior Week, although the next day was interesting. You were supposed to dress up as a character from a cartoon, although some people dressed as non-cartoon characters. For example, Justin, Mark, and I dressed as our characters from Beowulf: The Movie and Beowulf 2: This Time It’s Personal.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the new version of Ubuntu, which came out yesterday. I started upgrading immediately, and it really was quite simple. The downloading of the files was estimated to take a few hours, which was fine by me, but what I hadn’t counted on was that about a million people were going to be downloading those files at the same time. The downloading continued late into the night, and the process still wasn’t done this morning because a dialog box had come up and paused the upgrade process. So I let it finish, but I had to leave for work before it could finish. When I got back home this afternoon, there was another dialog box waiting for me, so I clicked it, and the upgrade was soon finished — all I had to do was reboot.

So, yeah, it took about 23 hours, but that’s only because the server was hammered and because I couldn’t supervise the computer during that whole time. If I could do it again, I would have started early on a weekend morning and monitored it periodically throughout the day. Then it would have gone faster. But I’m pleased to say that apparently nothing got borked up in the upgrade process, so things have been smooth. The new feature I’m enjoying the most are the desktop effects, where windows wobble when you move them, and your virtual desktops appear on a cube. I’m just testing it out, and if I don’t like them, I’ll turn them off. But it was very handy that Ubuntu automatically downloaded the necessary drivers to make the 3D acceleration stuff work. 15 cool points to Ubuntu. Here’s a video (not by me) of these effects in action.

At this point I’d like to mention that my friend Luke can provide those of you in South Florida with CDs of many Linux distributions, including the new Ubuntu 7.04, for a small fee or a blank CD-R. Just leave a comment, and he’ll probably read it and hook you up. Everybody say “Thanks, Luke!”

I’m really excited because tomorrow is Grad Bash, which is like Grad Nite but at Universal Studios. SOME of my friends didn’t want to go, but I’m glad some of them did because I’m sure we’ll have an awesome time. We leave tomorrow afternoon and come back early Sunday morning.

Corey Andrew of Jersey City, New Jersey, decided to write to Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode about joining the Army. She welcomed his application until she found out that he was gay. It turned out that he was just trying to see what kind of reaction he would get simply by revealing to a military recruiter that he was gay. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good one. Hey, come on, guys. This is, what, 2007, and we’re still treating people like this?