Hello everybody,
I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I guess that’s what you’ve come to expect. As some of you know, Elizabeth and I have fully commited to come back to the US in January. Our target for coming home is New York. So for the last few weeks we’ve been hunting for job listings, cleaning up resumes, writing cover letters, and waiting for responses. The whole practice of resume writing is lost on me. Normal people don’t communicate on a daily basis like they do in a resumes. Resumes must be written in a code that says “I am an infalable candidate for any possible task you could assign.” And so you are forced to sell and spin whatever experience you have to make it sound as near to perfection as you can make it without lying.
Cover letters are worse. They have to be the perfect mixture of brevity and guile. They have to say, “Let me tell you about the wealth of experience I have in as few words as possible as to not waste your time.” I am still convinced the perfect cover letter would simply be the word awesome centered on a page in forteen point Cambria. Once you finish writing one you feel a little dirty from the almost lies you’ve just written. Because who says, “I’m going to just be perfectly honest in this cover letter. Surely they’ll contact based on how stark and honest my letter was.” No, we all think to ourselves that cover letters need to represent us in glowing and shiny language that becomes decorative almost to the point of gibberish, becoming random, beautiful sounding syllables that lose have no actual meaning.
Anyway, as much as I dislike practicing the art of job hunting, it is very necessary and I am remaining positive about the possibility of finding something before we leave Nanjing.
Anyway, in preparation for returning to the real world I have undertaken several technical projects to brush up on my technical prowess. On of the more bizzare projects that got slightly out of hand for a while was installing Windows 7 beta on my laptop. Over the holiday in an effort to learn more about web frameworks, I installed Intrepid Ibex along side Windows XP SP3 on my BenQ. Now I’m no stranger to dual booting Linux installations, and I am constantly pleased with how much easier it gets with each new version of Ubuntu and OpenSuSE. But once I started hearing noise about the Windows 7 beta and the fact that the hardware requirements were much much lower than Vista my interest began to peak. I have held off learning the ways of Vista for several reasons, not least of which was that it didn’t seem to be a definitive replacement for XP and the hardware I owned did not meet the requirements. But after hearing aboutaa seemingly better version of Vista that will run on 512 Mb or memory, I thought this was my chance to join the rest of the world in unlocking the secrets of the latest Microsoft creation.
I came across lifehacker’s post on dual booting Windows 7 and Linux which hinted at the possibility of booting Windows 7 and XP also. Now I had planned on replacing my XP install with 7 and then repairing GRUB to get back to my Ubuntu install, but guess what? You can’t upgrade from XP to 7. You can upgrade from Vista to 7, but if you’re on XP you’ll need to start all over again. So I reshuffled my hard drive to make some more room and create a new partition, and after some testing in VMware, I am now triple booting Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu. The interesting thing is I have to go through two bootloaders to get to XP now. On boot I first go to GRUB and choose a custom entry I created to boot Windows 7, which takes me to what looks like LILO which displays two choices. Windows 7 (of course) and an entry for “previous versions of Windows”. Anyway, it wasn’t difficult at all. The only tricky part was how to re-install GRUB after Windows writes over it. But using the teminal from an Ubuntu Live CD made that easy enough. For my next trick, I may attempt a quad-boot and try to add a hackint0sh version of Leopard to the mix.
It’s a bit late, so I may have to finish this update a little later. But just to let you all know, four months from right now the Stilwells are coming back stateside.
