William Matheson (nova_one) wrote,
William Matheson
nova_one

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meme: interview

Meme thing...

I'm answering zephyrcrow's questions. Here are the rules:
1. You can leave me a comment saying something like, "Interview me," or "Interview meeeeee!"
2. I will respond by asking you five questions, possibly of a very intimate and creepily personal nature. Or possibly not so creepy/personal. It's usually the latter with these things, isn't it?
3. Please update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Please include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, please ask them five questions.

1. What the heck is an Ubuntu and why's it worth so much hardship?
Ubuntu is a very popular distribution of Linux, possibly sharing the "most-downloaded" crown with openSUSE. It's purportedly "Linux for human beings." It sounded right up my alley, so I gave it a whirl. I wasn't counting on the insane partitioning difficulties and limitations, and I didn't have the technical expertise to make it live nicely with Windows XP. I couldn't even figure out how to disable "tap-to-click" on my notebook's touchpad, and it couldn't be done through the GUI (graphical user interface), it would have had to have been done through a configuration file. That didn't daunt me, but I couldn't even gain write-permission to change that file! That was the last straw, and I vaporized the partitions and went back to XP.

Why was it worth so much hardship? Well, everyone was saying, "buy a Mac! buy a Mac! buy a Mac! Windows sucks!" etc.. And to some extent, they're right. But buying a Mac was out of the question because you get lower-spec hardware for a premium dollar. So what I figured I'd show them a thing or two and have an easy go at (native!) Linux, which you can't do on an Intel Mac. (And the Mac restricts your Windows choices to XP SP2 and Vista.)

I guess the moral of the story is, "never solicit advice when you're buying a laptop."

2. When are you going to visit the U.S.?
Oh, but I've been! Remember when I went to New York City in January '06? And I went down to Boston when I was 6. So those are my two ventures into the Great Republic. I just turned down a job at a summer camp in PA, so we almost had three.

I'm sure I'll be back again someday. And I'd like to see California.

3. I've never been to Nova Scotia, and I'm curious about what it's like. Tell me about it!
Well, it's hard to describe since I live here. Also, there are two Nova Scotias - Halifax, and the rest of the province. Halifax is either a very small big city or a large-ish small city, depending on what features you're looking for.

Linguistically it's sort of interesting, but if you want really interesting, you have to look to Newfoundland. Some parts of Newfoundland are still relatively isolated, and what is now called Newfoundland and Labrador only joined Confederation in 1949.

We (and the Maritimes in general) are also unique geographically in that we're surrounded by ocean, French-speakers (Québec), and America (Maine). There's not a lot of wiggle room!

Nova Scotia itself consists of a peninsula attached to the rest of the North American mainland through the Chignecto Isthmus, in addition to an island known as Cape Breton Island.

If you'd like to hear Cape Bretoners talk, here's a McDonald's commercial that was filmed in Sydney (although the opening shot is from Kelly's Mountain, 20-30 miles away from the city). In fact, I will do a comment reply to your original post to make sure you get to see this.

4. Is that Heather in your usericon? Tell us more about Heather. She sounds rad.
The girl in the picture is Yulia, a Ukrainian participant in from my NetCorps program - the picture is from Nic's dismissal party in October 2004. That was a very stressful time in general (I still remember screaming into my phone "I HATE CANADA WORLD YOUTH!!"), but we had a very good "communication session" in Nic's hotel room, where we were assisted in said communication by a bottle of vodka.

Heather is pretty rad. She's a cute beguiling little blonde-haired girl. She's one of the sweetest people I've ever met. I'd like to meet more people from her homeworld. =) Right now there's a lot of stressful things happening, and it's complicating our lives, but I'm glad I'm around to help her.

5. I just started using the tags system on LJ, and after going back and adding tags to about 120 posts, I realized I have no idea what I'll ever use it for. You seem to have a pretty good handle on it - what's its utility? How do you organize your stuff?
Thanks! I basically just fire up whatever tags I feel like. For instance, every post that even so much as mentions Ukraine gets the "ukraine" tag. The result is that people (usually just me!) can go to http://nova-one.livejournal.com/tag/ukraine and see all the Ukraine-related entries. That's really the only use there is for it, though. I don't utilize the tags very much at all, but I may someday, and since it only takes a few seconds, I tag all of my new entries. On the other hand, going back in time and tagging old entires is out of the question for me. I like the idea that my posts gain more features as time passes and I grow up.
Tags: answers, friends, interviews, memes, tags
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