Crazy Few Weeks

The question isn't so much what has happened since the last post, more on the lines of what hasn't happened. In reverse-order, I've had to play catch-up with school, TKD tournament in PCB, prepare for TKD tournament, get school things sorted out for the tournament, etc. Oh, and I received a sweet new tablet from my grandpa. Now, sorted by my whim, here is the exposition on those topics.

The TKD tournament was in Panama City Beach, Florida on Sept. 3. I took first place in forms there at PCB and I am currently in first place for the state champion title. Had a blast hanging out with all of my friends from the karate school and sorely missed those who couldn't come. There is never a dull moment with those Keevins. Try putting that word in Windows' text-to-speech preview and voice speed at slow. Hilarity will ensue for those who know the joke. I apologize for the inside joke; suffice it to say that a Keevin is a (usually) friendly version of idiot.

School is... complicated. Mostly, it is easy—so long as I keep up with the work. Fortunately, a few hours of studying will ensure I know everything I need to know. School is frustrating for me when I'm ahead or can move ahead very quickly, but the class has to take a more deliberate pace than I want. You would think I would be used to this feeling by now, yet I still have trouble with it. I still can't tell if the other students are stupid, don't/can't put the time in, or a combination, to get good grades. A's come so easily for me that I hardly try anymore, this is the first semester I feel like I have been pushed to maintain pace, but, of course, it is still early and I did just come off of a disrupting vacation (in the school sense). Agh! There are too many variables and unknowns to produce a useful result. I'll leave this subject now before it envelops this post.

History class is almost done with the geography quizzes. I can locate most countries in the world now, though, I had no need of doing memorizing/learning that much. What can I say? I am very good at geography. It is almost disappointing to see only 25 items on the quiz when I know entire continents.


The Tablet
It's a HP webOS TouchPad: Wi-Fi only, 32GB of storage; model HSTNH-I29C, revision A. My grandpa bought it during HP's recent fire sale and gave it to me as a "late birthday gift." I was initially quite disappointed with it as it approaches uselessness without an internet connection—something I lacked while down in Panama City. However, once connected at home, and spending thirty minutes trying to get my wireless encryption key (I use very secure keys) into the infernal can't-paste-anything-in textbox, it was quite nice to do light web browsing on it. WolframAlpha is very nice to use while doing Calculus homework.

Biggest gripe I have with the tablet so far is the complete lack of support for ad-hoc wireless connections. The Linux base that the webOS runs off supports it, but you effectively have to jailbreak it to get to the command line to enable ad-hoc networking. This kind of feature is effectively standard on everything else, why would you not include it? Oh well, there will be a homebrew patch for it, eventually.

The tablet supports Flash—unlike the iPad—so the Internet isn't broken. It is very nice to be able to listen to Pandora Radio (ad-free with the Ad-Blocker homebrew patch!) on it; however, it would be nice to let the screen turn off along with less CPU load when Pandora is running, I don't like having a whole core running full-tilt when it is merely playing a low-fi MP3.

The homebrew community is pretty good so far. Lifehacker had a nice article on how to get started with custom software. Here is the guide I used to "hack" the TouchPad. Follow the instructions and install everything they say to and you will be fine.

Other than the total and utter reliance on an internet connection, the TouchPad looks to be a welcome addition to my growing arsenal of technological geek weapons. I hope I can find some time soon to finish a new series of posts I've been working on for a while now. Stay tuned.