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Planes, Trains, but no Taxi

After 20 hours of travel (most of which were on a plane) I made it home to Park City, Utah. A train, a bus, three airplanes, four airports – Kraków -> München -> Chicago -> Salt Lake City and a car – a total of over 5,000 miles. The trip was a long one and it’s been almost a year since I left for Poland. Everything which I brought with me survived, namely I was worried about the liquids thinking that it may break and my bag would arrive wet and covered in plastic. But it’s all there, and I am glad to be home. Last night I went to bed at 2:00 and woke up at 7:30. I am going to try and make it through the day without a nap so I won’t be jet lagged. So here’s to Utah! The land of the Mormons, the 3.2% Beer, the mountainous landscape, big cars and lots of open space.

27.07.2010 | 1 comment | View Post

Consolidation

I have decided to drop a few of my sites after the fact that it was taking too much time to keep all of them updated and it started to take over my life. The sites I dropped (actually just forwarded the domain) are jeffreyswindel.com, daswindler.com, adorakframes.com and postercaseproductions.com. It just became too much to handle. I may bring some of them back in time to come. For now this will be the only site that I update and you will see.

09.07.2010 | 4 comments | View Post

Location, Location, Location

I’m going to start tracking my trails with my Garmin GPS, here I am going to start with five places that I have been over the last four days.

N 54°00.897′
E 020°34.925′

N 54° 22’13″
E 20° 35’33″

N 54° 15’45″
E 20° 48’05″

N 54° 12’33″
E 21° 38’50″

N 54° 11’07″
E 21° 39’02″

24.06.2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Not Scholarly Writing? What?

I have been told that the essays that I write for my studies are not “scholarly.” So I decided to take some time and look up the definition of what it means to do scholarly writing, or academic writing as some call it.

Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about it:

It is a short summary of the full spectrum of critical & academic writing. It does not cover the variety of critical approaches that can be applied when writing about a subject.

Oh, but I forgot Wikipedia is not a credible source for academic writing. So here’s how Dartmouth defines the topic:

Academic writing is writing done by scholars for other scholars and devoted to topics and questions that are of interest to the academic community. Academic writing should present the reader with an informed argument.

It is mainly about the research so I will now state another definition about what Academic writing should look like, because the more (credible) sources you have the better. This one from University of Toronto:

Miscellaneous observations on a topic are not enough to make an accomplished academic essay. An essay should have an argument. It should answer a question or a few related questions. It should try to prove something—develop a single “thesis” or a short set of closely related points—by reasoning and evidence, especially including apt examples and confirming citations from any particular text or sources your argument involves. Gathering such evidence normally entails some rereading of the text or sources with a question or provisional thesis in mind.

So here it is, my conclusion of what I found out about Academic or Scholarly Writing. I am going to prove my point here in the conclusion. In short, it is just searching for something a topic that someone else has written an article on and this said article must be from a “scholarly” source, such as J-Stor, EBSCO Host, Questia and so on. Then you need to paraphrase what they have said in that article, compare it to another and another and then another, to prove your point that you think the person who wrote the first article was actually right in the first place. NONE of your views can be present in this type of writing. You have to be serious and organized (with a lot of credible sources of course).

Then, the most important part is to go back through it again and then make sure that it makes sense to you. But of course it’s going to make sense to you because you wrote it, and it is your train of thoughts. Really, all they want you to do is make sure you spelled every word, including the word teh right. (teh is a word… Is it not?)

15.06.2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Keeping my Geek-dom

The job I left behind was quite an amazing one, the hum of the fans from the rack of servers, the almost limitless amount of storage space in the Avid MediaShare. So  a friend asked me before I left and moved to Krakow to study for a year and a half (something that is completely unrelated to computers – literature)

“What am I going to do once I leave all the servers behind?”

Well, the answer is simple. VMware (and the internet). So the last few months I have been working with VirtualBox and VMware. Finding that the latter is clearly the better one, I decided to ditch VirtualBox. No offense Sun, you do make some great products though and I appreciate you making VitualBox free to the public. I don’t know what it is about VMware that I like so much. I think the speed at which files transfer and the bridged networking response. The last few weeks I have sat in front of my computer for long sleepless nights on a project that most everyone told me was completely ridiculous and makes no sense whatsoever to do. I have been looking for a way to program for the iPhone on a PC, there are such things out there like the AirPlaySDK (something which I am still trying to figure out how to work with) and then something else that struck my eye was Titanium by Appcelerator is one of the best cross-platform solutions for iPhone and Android development.

I just saw this on the Tuts+ Network (Mobiletuts+), here they claim that you can program for the iPhone and the Android on Linux, OS X, or Windows. I still haven’t had a chance to try it out to see how it works, but it looks promising. The other thing that is promising is a virtual machine of Snow Leopard. After a few failed attempts at creating a Hackintosh from Kalyway’s Kernal or the iDeneb, someone showed me a tutorial on LifeHacker where using an EFI boot-loader you could run Snow Leopard on a pretty cheap machine. Unfortunately that didn’t work either (the PS2 ports and the sound never seemed to work for me).

Then comes along Bob’s Mental Moshpit. A blog hosted at WordPress.com with posts about technology and randomness just like your’s truly. With a lovely tutorial on how to get OS X 10.6 running in VMware workstation 7, I got it up and running in no time (and thankgully I decided to customize my laptop, because the Intel Centrino Duo T7500 processor inside can handle virtualization). So now not only is my laptop running Windows Vista, it also has ChomeOS, Snow Leopard, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE. That’s partially how I am handling not being around racks of server space, the other is the massive amount of websites that I am managing.

All of which I have decided to run WordPress Content Management System. But that doesn’t mean that I have given up on Drupal or Joomla (Oh, no…) I have also installed XAMPP (an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl for Windows) where I sandbox and build websites before they go live, and expect some new re-designs of current sites as well

. So needless to say, I have my hands in a number of different petri dishes as usual.

07.06.2010 | 2 comments | View Post

New Hosting Company

After a week of changing hosting companies for my websites, I have noticed a change. Have you? I finally was fed up with my previous hosting company after having eight e-mails in my inbox every morning saying that my website was down from Pingdom. After some thought and some advice from a friend I decided to switch. Now you will notice a change and no more laggy sites and pain of disconnections from the server.

06.06.2010 | 2 comments | View Post

View of The City

Yesterday, we went to the Music Academy of Krakow for lunch at the student lounge. The Music Academy is located on the out-skirts of the city center, with the student lounge on the top floor of the building (Sixth Floor). Here’s a panorama from the balcony; taken with my iPhone because I forgot to take my dSLR with me and so it stayed at home. The photo was then stitched on the iPhone as well using the program AutoStitch and twenty separate photographs.

The View of Krakow's Main City Center

30.05.2010 | 3 comments | View Post

Joined FriendFeed.

As if Twitter wasn’t enough for me, I decided to join FriendFeed. Yes, I know… It does exactly the same thing, although it adds for more exposure on the internets. I have been under the mis-conception that I have been addicted to the web in the form of social networking, e-mail, blogging, etc. But then it struck me that it is the progression of the way things are moving and there is nothing wrong with what I am doing. Sure I depend on technology to do most things throughout the day, but who doesn’t nowdays?

So my thinking of being addicted has changed thanks to the talk I had with my sister last week. I will keep it going until I die or until I get tired of it. (Most likely I will get tired of it first…) Also, I have to mention that I am starting to use my StumbleUpon again, so look for some updates from that as well. The service that they provide is great for the procrastinator in me, you just click a button and it brings up a random webpage of a topic you like. It’s AWESOME!

Anyways, keep checking back for fun updates.

22.05.2010 | 2 comments | View Post
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