I’ve seen every episode of Donald Trump’s reality show The Apprentice and tonight’s episode made me extremely happy! Omorosa is gone! I haven’t been this happy since Trump fired Sam. I didn’t hate Sam, I just thought he was an incompetent leader. Omorosa, on the other hand, was evil and self-serving. I realize the goal of the show is to win, but you don’t have to degrade those with whom you are competing on a show like this. That’s exactly what Omorosa did. She criticized every move that she didn’t make. I’m just glad Trump has enough sense to know that someone of her personality cannot lead a company.

I broke down and bought magicalsavant.com. It’s a more interesting web address than jerrytravis.com even if it is harder to remember. I may use magicalsavant.com if I sell my own software someday. Magical Savant Software has a nice ring to it.

Click here to read the interview that Bill Gates gave to PC Magazine recently. After reading it, you’ll probably be wondering how this man has amassed more money than anyone in US history. Michael J. Miller, editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, did the interview, and I feel he asked some very good questions that we all have been wondering lately. He asked Bill Gates why Windows has so many problems with viruses and worms. Bill’s response, from what I could distill, was Windows has problems with viruses because it’s so popular. What does the install base have to do with the fact that Windows easily allows viruses to run on it? In the small server market, Linux is fairly dominant and it’s rare when you hear of an exploit that cripples all these servers en masse. Granted, the popularity of Microsoft operating systems does help justify spending the time to write a virus. If Microsoft wrote a secure OS that was very difficult to write a virus for (Unix, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X…), it would be very hard for virus writers to justify spending so much time to do so.

Gates goes on further to deny, very streniously I might add, that Windows is not more vulnerable than Macs or Linux boxes. While other OSs have their holes and vulnerabilities, they are so much harder to exploit than those on Windows. That’s because the people who write other non-Microsoft OSs realize that if something can be broken, somebody eventually will. When you write code with that mindset, you try everything you can think of to break the stuff. Microsoft obviously does not think defensively. [Note: I do realize that a product as complex as Windows will have holes in it no matter how well it is written. Microsoft, however, with Bill Gates as its mouthpiece and figurehead, uses this an an excuse to allow too many bugs to be released to the general public.]

Miller asks Gates about the lack of improvements to the search speed of the popular Outlook email client. (The slowness of the searching speed in Outlook has long been a sore spot with those who use it and keep a lot of email.) Gates says that Microsoft could fix it, but then goes into a big load of crap about some new features in upcoming products. He circumvents the issue and starts plugging new products!!! This is so typical of Microsoft: Ignore the now, leave the broken unfixed, and add new features that 99% of computer users never use. Microsoft really needs to realize that new features are only part of the reason people like to upgrade software. Improving upon the speed, stability, and security of existing releases is just as important. Based on this interview, I think it’s safe to use Steve Jobs’ former favorite phrase: Bill Gates “just doesn’t get it.”

Here’s a list of (mostly free) utility software I use very regularly. I’ve used most of it for many years and have found that most of it takes the tedium out of using a computer effectively. Enjoy!

• SCWebCam3 – What I use to take snapshots of my desktop and upload them.
• Mozilla FireFox – A free, secure, open-source browser that has tabs and a built in pop-up blocker. Once you try it, you’ll never go back to IE!
• ZoneAlarm – A free firewall. With so many holes in Windows and always-on, high-speed connections to the Internet, it’s crazy not to use a good firewall like this.
• Style XP – Change more than just the colors of Windows with this theme manager. Once you get this program, thousands of free themes and visual styles are available at ThemeXP.org.
• PDF995 – The cheapest way to make decent PDFs. As its name implies, it costs $9.95, but it’s well worth it if you need to make PDFs on the cheap.
• SpyBox Search and Destroy – Great spyware removal tool. I use it now instead of Ad-Aware because it gets rid of more system hijackers.

This list could go on, but these are the titles I couldn’t live without.

I like to keep my desktop neat. Everything has it’s place. This summer, I took this concept to a new level and designed an anal retentive wallpaper. It’s a great piece of engineering. It has places for files, folders, system stuff, games, and random junk that doesn’t fit any catagory. Why am I deciding to share this now? Because I ran upon it today and decided to use it again for awhile. It really is nice to keep everything organized. If you want your very own copy of this gorgeous background, click on the small image to the right to get the full size image. Once it loads, right click and “Set as Desktop Background.” Happy organizing!

I am increasingly disgusted by the fat and lazy who are too sorry to take the stairs in the Combs Building. The area in front of the elevator is so clogged between class changes that it is nearly impossible to navigate past it. If you’re lazy enough to take the elevator, at least stand back out of the way of those of us who are mobile (or at least attempt to be).

If you legitimately have a problem that prevents you from using the stairs, taking the elevator is an acceptable thing to do. If, however, you simply lack the wherewithall to climb two flights of stairs to the 2^nd floor, you need somebody to shake you! The media wants to blame McDonald’s for the obesity that is prevalent in this nation. I blame the people who always have to use the elevator.

I’ve be hunting fervently trying to find a teaching job for the fall but to no avail. The way it looks, I’ll have to substitute my way through the MaT program. That’s ok by me, but I’ll be living poor for awhile longer. I don’t require a lot of money, but I really don’t want to live with my parents anymore. They’re great and all, but when you’re 22, you don’t want to answer to them everytime you come in late or make too much noise running a late-night computer experiment. (And yes, I will still run late-night computer experiments even though computers won’t be my primary profession. I love them, remember!)

I really like being young. The future is still really far ahead of me and I haven’t made any decisions yet (marriage, children, etc.) that limit my ability to go where I can be happiest. The next couple years will be uncertain, which is something I normally don’t like. At the moment, however, I don’t think I mind what’s going on. Let somebody else worry about what to do with me for awhile. I am a sentient being who reasonably capable of finding some form of income. Besides, when is the last time somebody starved to death in America who was willing to go find some food! As far as my thoughts on my future, I’ll let Einstein sum it up for me: “I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.”

The weather here the last two days has been so incredibly odd. Sunday evening, we were greeted with about half an inch of ice. Looking outside at the crystaline water was incredibly deceptive. The ground looked as though it had maybe a dusting of snow on it. When I went to my 10:20 am class yesterday, I soon discovered why everybody had been asking me if we had class. The streets and sidewalks were covered with ice, so I gimped my way onto the grass whenever possible to avoid busting my tail. By noon, though, the ice was almost completely gone. It had went from 25 degrees to about 65 in about 5 hours!

This morning, I woke up and looked outside. The sky was the craziest shade of orange I had ever seen. It looked as if Morehead were being sucked into some hell dimension (or at least what I imagine it would look like). I showered and came back to the room. The sky had went from crazy orange to a foggy gray in a 20 minute timespan. About an hour later, it started snowing like crazy. Right now, it’s super cold and windy, and it’ll be snowing one minute and clear the next. This is just another example of how Kentucky has some of the most unique weather patterns in the world.

I have decided to forego a job in the computer industry and instead teach. There are two reasons for this decison. One is that as a teacher, I get all holidays and summers off. The other is that the only way I can change the many things I hate about eastern Kentucky is to take hold of the education process. Instilling a love for education in kids is tough. I read one study that said that kids are only influenced somewhere around 12% by what they are taught in school. There’s no way I’d bet on a horse race with those kinds of odds, but I think there are enough kids living in eastern Kentucky right now that have the potential to do great things. My job as a teacher will be to help them find opportunities that they may have otherwised missed.

I guess all my years of studying computers won’t go totally to waste since that’s what I’m going to try to teach. As far as ushering my students into the 21^st century, I couldn’t have picked a better subject. There is almost no job or skill these days that doesn’t require some computer knowledge. I hope my students become so proficient with technology that there is no way that companies will send jobs to India. I’m sick of hearing about the superiority of India: Educated eastern-Kentuckians will do just fine!

The obvious response to my mission is that thousands of teachers started with the same vision yet it seems that none have managed to do very much about it. This is true. To put this as arrogantly as possible, I haven’t tried yet. If I weren’t so bull-headed, I wouldn’t have made it this far. If I devote my life to the cause of education, I believe that things will change. I may not live to see it, but I can sow seeds that will blossom long after I’ve gone. No matter what happens, at least I can say I tried.

Even though it is the 11^th of January, I figured I’d post my thoughts on the state of technology in 2003. In a nutshell, 2003 was a very disappointing year. Nothing revolutionary (or for that matter evolutionary) happened. PCs got faster with better graphics and more memory, but the applications that take advantage of this power never materialized. Statistical analysis and number crunching have benefited because raw proccessing power is the key to such apps. There are plenty holy grail applications that have failed for years because of the lack of speed. Voice recognition, facial recognition, and natural language text translation could become a reality now if somebody would try to code them again in earnest.

Consumer electronics saw some really neat trends with the most important being digital music. Portable digital players got smaller and cheaper with higher capacities. The Apple iPod is the coolest even though it is more expensive than all the others. Napster, iTunes, and MusicMatch have all made buying digital music easy and legal. I think the music industry should have embraced the downloading of music years ago because they are making money hand over fist with it. It’s so much cheaper for them than trying to sale CDs retail style, especially now that they’ve finished digitizing the existing catalog. Aside from digital music, large format High Definition televisions got cheaper. Sadly, HDTV content didn’t get much of a boost despite government mandates that all stations must broadcast HDTV signals by 2006. Let’s just pray that 2004 is more interesting.

Mom got me a Game Boy Advance for Christmas. I didn’t ask for anything this year, so this awesome gift really blew me out of the water. I really like the GBA as a platform because there are so many games for it that have been ported over from the Super Nintendo. Two games in particular that I’m incredibly excited about are Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

The first game I went to buy was Zelda since it really is my favorite game of all time. (I have beaten the game at least 2 times a year since I got it in for SNES in 1994.) The hunt for the GBA version of Zelda proved to be as elusive as the hunt for the Triforce itself. I started off going to the Wal-Mart here in Hazard. Not a trace of the tiny cartidge, even though I had seen one there not more than two days before Christmas. In an effort to find it, Mom, Dad, and I loaded up and went to the Super Wal-Mart in London. Again, no dice. We proceeded to the Big-K. Nada. On the way back, we passed by Manchester, which has the smallest, most decrepit Wal-Mart I have ever been to. Mom suggested we try there.

I merely laughed but Dad pulled off the exit anyway. I went in, navigating through the puny store to its proportionally matched electronics section. In the GBA case, there lay eight copies of that which I sought. Just as in the game, sometimes the most unlikely place will hold the key to a query.