Oh, lots of stuff

As much as I like the "Fixed" theme, I get sick of dark themes very quickly.  I’m also generally sick of sans-serif fonts, and lately I have a newfound appreciation for serif, and for plainness in web design.  So here we are.  This is the new fall theme.  (Of course, there needs to be the usual disclaimer for Internet Explorer users: IE doesn’t adhere to standards when rendering web pages.  The current case in point is my Last 5 Visitors jammie: it doesn’t have any background color, but IE gives it a white background.  As a result, there’s an ugly white block underneath it, on top of this theme’s background image.)

In my music class today, the professor had a slide that contained the phrase "vernacular language."  She stopped and said, "I had not heard this phrase until I got to college, so I want to explain it to you.  How many of you are familiar with this phrase?"  My initial reaction was that she is completely insane; how can a person possibly go through ~18 years of life having never heard the word vernacular??  Then again, this professor had just finished saying that a violin doesn’t require air to make sound, so if that tells you anything...  But here’s the sad part: only about half the class raised their hands.  Now I went to private school, so I can only speculate about what kids have (not) learned in public schools.  I know public schools are not so good with the grammar and language skills (I know that because I interact with society every day), but surely they can’t be SO bad as to never present any kind of lesson involving the idea of vernacular languages... right?  Or so I’d’ve thought.

And on the funny tip, I drove out to the FedEx center to ship a package, and on the way I drove over some speed bumps... except instead of the usual yellow sign that says "BUMP," there were big white letters painted right on the road... and they said "HUMP."  Forgive me, but that’s just too much.

Anyway, in that music class, I sat down behind a guy who had a little Vaio notebook.  I look over his shoulder and I see kismet running.  Kismet?  Couldn’t be.  But I look a little closer, and it turns out he’s running Red Hat.  Sweet.  We talked after class, and it turns out his name is Andrew, he’s big into Linux (works as a Red Hat admin on campus and at a local company -- which is pretty close to my current dream job, by the way), and he drives a Golf.  He’s also done some wardriving (which is the name given to the process of driving around detecting wireless networks), which I just taught my musicbox to do.  All pretty coincidental stuff to me.

And speaking of linux, rsync is an amazing tool.  With a single simple command, you can clone an entire hard disk partition.  And you can do it "incrementally", so that for a backup partition, it only copies the files that were changed/added since the last time you backed it up.

rsync -ax --delete / /mnt/backup-partition

-a is the "clone" switch, which basically says "make /mnt/backup-partition an exact copy of /" ... and -x is the single-filesystem switch, so that any other partitions that you have mounted (usually under /mnt/) are excluded.  And --delete says to remove any file from /mnt/backup-partition that no longer exists on the source (/) partition.

Two things about this are particularly cool: one is that you can take the backup partition and boot it*, and it’s fully functional just like the original (which is something you can only dream of in the Microsoft world, unless you’re using some partition cloning tool that doesn’t actually copy files, and needs to be run as the boot disk to work, and might not work anyway if you move the disk to another system).  Two is that rsync uses some kind of advanced algorithm which allows it to only copy the parts of a file that have changed, so if you’ve got some huge file where you’ve only modified a little bit of it, it won’t need to re-copy the entire huge thing.

Also, / happens to be the root directory on a Linux system, which contains the whole partition... and I happen to have another partition mounted at /mnt/backup-partition/.  But / and /mnt/partition/ are just directories as far as rsync (and Linux in general) are concerned, and rsync can clone any directory to any other directory, even if it’s not the whole partition.

*Of course, the backup partition needs a proper boot sector, so you’ll need to run the lilo command on it once (which takes all of 3 seconds) before it will boot.

Posted by Anthony on 5 replies

Comments:

01. Oct 22, 2003 at 10:11am by *amanda*:

>Then again, this professor had just finished saying that a violin
>doesn’t require air to make sound, so if that tells you anything... 

No it doesn’t.  If you’re picking on her for pointing out the obvious, you’re wrong.  If you’re picking on her for being incorrect, well, why would an ordinary musician need to know anything about the nature of waves beyond what they need to know to tune the instrument?

>But here’s the sad part: only about half the class raised their hands. 
>Now I went to private school, so I can only speculate about what kids
>have (not) learned in public schools.  I know public schools are not
>so good with the grammar and language skills (I know that because I
>interact with society every day), but surely they can’t be SO bad as
>to never present any kind of lesson involving the idea of vernacular
>languages... right?  Or so I’d’ve thought.

I’m in a bad enough mood tonight to be offended by this.  Public schools are not always inferior, and there are also important lessons to learn outside the classroom (in the hallways, in the locker rooms, on the receiving end of threats).  Students learn based on their effort and their parents’ effort.  I’m tired of being looked down upon by snobs because of my public school education.  West Michigan is full of CRC and RCA snobs, and my mom’s side of the family is obsessed with their little Chr. subculture of private schools, colleges, home schooling... not interested in my secular experiences, even though I had actual chances to share the truth with other students.  My college classmates from private high schools didn’t know the B. as well as I did (and other subjects, too), and they’re still back in their small world while I’m out making my feeble and pathetic attempt to reach the nations.  So much for the advantages of rlg. education.  They’re the ones who are supposedly prepared to "redeem the time," so why am I the one out here?

I know, I’m ranting.  Sorry.  When (not if, when) you catch me being snobbish about something, please tear into me in a similar manner! :-)

In fact I might go to a private school someday.  I need more B. education. :-)

02. Oct 22, 2003 at 02:07pm by Steve:

Anthony struck a nerve with the public school comment I see.  He’s right though, you should probably just deal with it.

"If you’re picking on her for being incorrect, well, why would an ordinary musician need to know anything about the nature of waves beyond what they need to know to tune the instrument?"

They probably wouldn’t; I fail to see, though, how a professional teacher of music is simply an ordinary musician.  So should you.

Furthermore, I don’t think anyone looks down on you because of your public school "education."  This is a matter of looking down on the public schooling system for doing (and getting away with) such things as not once mentioning the word "vernacular" in an English class throughout the entirety of a child’s years in school.  If you think this is acceptable, then.... etc.

It’s no wonder 93.84% of people in this country can’t speak or write properly.

03. Oct 22, 2003 at 10:18pm by Anthony:

Not that I feel any further justification is necessary here, but I would like to make a few comments pertaining to my original post.  Namely:

Now I went to private school, so I can only speculate about what kids have (not) learned in public schools.  I know public schools are not so good with the grammar and language skills (I know that because I interact with society every day), but surely they can’t be SO bad as to never present any kind of lesson involving the idea of vernacular languages... right?  Or so I’d’ve thought.

So there are a few things that should have been clear from the beginning:

1. I can only speculate about what kids have (not) learned in public schools, having not attended one myself.

2. The things that I DO know about public schools (specifically their less-than-stellar training in the language skills department) I know from firsthand experience.  The majority of people come from public school educations, and the majority of people have trouble using English properly.  And among the people that I interact with frequently, those coming from private schools usually display much better mastery of language skills.

3. My final point in this paragraph of the OP was to give the benefit of the doubt to public schools anyway, by saying "they can’t really be that bad... can they?"

4. I strongly disagree that lamenting the state of public education in one’s country, and providing a specific example of that sorry state, is qualification for being a "snob."

04. Oct 23, 2003 at 09:56am by *amanda*:

>They probably wouldn’t; I fail to see, though, how a professional
>teacher of music is simply an ordinary musician.  So should you.

It sounded like a gen ed music appreciation class.  Sorry for jumping to conclusions.  A professor for music majors is a different story.  I can imagine a lot of universities hire adjuncts for the gen ed classes.

>This is a matter of looking down on the public schooling system for
>doing (and getting away with) such things as not once mentioning the
>word "vernacular" in an English class throughout the entirety of a
>child’s years in school.  If you think this is acceptable, then....
>etc.

Look, the thing that bothers me the most is the sweeping generalization that I perceive from you and Anthony.  Correct me if I’m misinterpreting.  Not all public school systems are inferior.

Somehow I managed to learn "vernacular", "indigenous", and study Beowulf, Dante, and Chaucer in high school English class.  As a science student, that was my deepest exposure because my community college lit teacher was an adjunct who wanted us to read "existential" pieces that in retrospect really didn’t teach me anything except that I’m not at all interested in existentialism.

I’ve never met anyone else on the science side of things, public or private high school graduates, who had received such a literature or writing background in high school.  In fact, I don’t know if any people I’ve met on the arts side of things learned so much in high school either.

05. Oct 23, 2003 at 09:58am by *amanda*:

>4. I strongly disagree that lamenting the state of public education in
>one’s country, and providing a specific example of that sorry state, is
>qualification for being a "snob."

I apologize.  I have no right to engage in a personal attack, especially since I don’t even know you personally.  Sorry for being a jerk!

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