Jake’s Life

Well this weekend went as usual. Instead of sleeping during regular sleeping hours, or even nightwalker sleeping hours, I just slept when I was tired, averaging 2-3 naps per day. I didn’t really do anything fun and exciting. I bought a weight bench and pulldown machine, but haven’t put it together yet.

I also decided to try SuSE 10.1 on my laptop from a DVD that was included in a magazine I bought. I first tried SuSE 8.1 a few years ago and struggled with it since I was first learning linux at the time. Since then I have always had a partition with some flavor installed. I installed SuSE 10.1 over Ubuntu 6.06 and at first I liked it. It was visually pleasing (SuSE Screenshots), and mostly easy to set up proprietary codecs and drivers…but the bloat! One thing linux distributions like SuSE are known for is instead of installing one application for a task, they install five or six. It’s not a big chore to uninstall what you don’t need after giving them a try, but what really got me was the speed of it.

Bootup took a good four minutes just to get to the GDM login screen, and from login to desktop was about three minutes. Now, I have a 2.8 GHz processor with over a gig of RAM in my laptop with a Radeon Mobility 9200 video card. Not the best specs, but certainly not deserving of this. After two days of attempting to speed things up I switched back to Ubuntu 6.06 and upgraded to .1. (Screenshots). I do have to hand it to SuSE for including the IPW2220 drivers for my wireless card by default though.

School is still going…not too well this term. My classes are easy but require a lot more participation than what I’m used to. Group Projects are really kickin’ the crap out of me. But I’ll survive. Work is going fine too. I switched to a different area that is a bit more fast paced and you definitely see more in it. I still work one day a week in my old area to cover a day off though.

Early Sunday morning a Seattle PD officer was killed. He was young–26–a month or two out of FTO and on his own, and killed by someone driving 80 MPH on a residential street. This person also had multiple warrants for their arrest, prior criminal record, and lied at the scene saying she wasn’t the driver. This is all I am going to say about the offender, as even though I have very strong convictions I also have restraint.

Washington is lucky in the sense that we don’t lose many officers…certainly not as often as other states. The bad part is that it hits hard when it does happen. No, I’m not LE yet, and no I didn’t know him, but I can’t help but think if that happens to me, or a friend who is LE. These are the risks that officers take each and every day. Many people recognize the risk they take concerning crime, gunfire, pursuits, fights, stabbings, etc., but what about the everyday tragedies that occur? This could have been anyone who was killed, but it wasn’t just anyone. It was a police officer.