Steph’s Blog ∙ Info

Update: Still a few too many technical problems, but I was impressed with how smoothly Ubuntu runs these days. It’s not that far from being a viable desktop alternative. I certainly miss the incredible customization available on the desktop, that’s for sure… but that’s what I miss the most about it.

Oh, well. I do still hope to get a mac laptop as mentioned below.

It’s time for bed but here’s a quick update.

Good night world.

Technorati Tags: switch, mac, linux, vista, windows, OSX, OS X

I was browsing through my feeds this morning, seeing as I’m sick and didn’t go to class, and I came across a link to an incredibly fascinating article. At first I was very disappointed because it was from the Daily Mail, but a Google search found articles that back up the story. Apparently The Daily Mail’s headline was the most sensationalist part of the article.

Being that I’m a psychology major it should be no surprise that I was absolutely fascinated with this article about Multiple Personality Disorder. Meet My 17 Personalities .. is a well written article that is worth the read. Another online source, The Chicago Mag, has an interview with the psychotherapist who has written a book about the whole experience. The 17 Faces of Karen is the title of that article.

Lastly, a general Google link that brings up a number of additional sources is available. The Google search for Karen Overhill should help those who are after more online sources.

All in all, it’s a crushing tale.

Technorati Tags: multiple personality disorder, MPD, dissociative identity disorder, DID, psychology

I now have my travel itinerarie for my trip to Seoul, South Korea.

It looks like we’ll be departing from Kansas City International Airport, which was a given, and then stopping in Chicago. From Chicago we have a straight flight to Tokyo Japan’s Narita International Airport. From there we’ll take a little ride over to the famous Incheon International Airport.

It’s kind of depressing, you know? I really miss my Japanese friend. I miss her a lot. I wish that the situation would have worked out better. The lay over in Japan, not to mention the two weeks that I’ll be in Seoul, could have been a great opportunity to sit down and actually talk rather than chat, and goodness knows that we have tons of silly things to talk about.

Well crap. I’m just going to get myself seriously depressed if I think about that… so anyway..

We still don’t know specifically what we’ll do on each individual day. The general plan that I have for our visit there is:

• Lectures:
Korean Culture
Korean History
Politics and International Business
• Field Trips (the university stuff):
Samsung Electronics
Kia Automobile Co.
Pohang Steel Co.
Daewoo Shipbuilding
Korean Traditional Pottery Yard (this one actually sounds a bit interesting)
Korean Stock Exchanges
DMZ
• Sightseeing (the good stuff!):
Kyungju
Kyungbok Palace
Jinju and surrounding southern coastal area (go go exercise video, get mah bootay into shape! heh heh)
Songkwang Buddhist Temple
Korean folk Village
Seoul Tower and Han River
Korean War Museum
Lotte World (of course!)

Obviously the business related trips are not particularly interesting for me. However, I am traveling with the International Business majors, so there you have it. I wish that I could meander off and do my own thing during these days but I’ve already been told that this is not an option.

My interests are in the culture and the people. I’ve always enjoyed learning about these sort of things, especially the music and the individual people and what it means to be a part of their culture. I wonder if that makes as much sense on paper as it does in my head?

We’ll be leaving May 18^th and returning on the 31^st.

Later folks.. !

Technorati Tags: Korea, South Korea, Seoul, 한국

Read The Story Here

Carly Fleischmann has severe autism and is unable to speak a word. But thanks to years of expensive and intensive therapy, this 13-year-old has made a remarkable breakthrough.

Stop reading my drivel and go read that news article. Also watch the video. This is just amazing! What an incredible way to top the night. Just wow. I love seeing this.

Good night! o/

Technorati Tags: autism, psychology, autistic

I finally got the results from my X-Rays. As the subject says, the rib is cracked.

The doctor has issued a note saying that (to paraphrase), I “shouldn’t receive blows to the ribs for two weeks”. Heck, at this point I’m not sure that I even care. Do I want to go back? Do I want to spend lots of money on protective gear simply take part in kumite practice? The answer to that last question is definitely, “No, no I don’t.”

At this point I’m beginning to lose track of the time that I’ve been away because I’ve been away for so long.

On the bright side, it’s not completely broken, it “just” came close to breaking. It’s also healing. There’s not much that can be done about it other than to wait and to protect it while it’s mending. Obviously I won’t be rejoining karate class any time soon!

Later folks.

Technorati Tags: health, injury, injuries, karate, self-defense, martial arts

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, I’ve missed about four or five karate classes so far.

It’s an interesting situation. The last class that I was in ended with kumite, which is fine. It’s not something that I’m particularly good at, but it helps you learn how to use the stuff that you’re learning, right? What’s most frustrating about it for me is that I can’t wear my glasses because it poses a risk: They could get knocked off, broken, or cause an eye injury if the sparring partner should lose control of their attacks or some other mistake happens.

So it’s rather ironic that I got nailed so hard partially because of the fact that I can’t wear my glasses during a match. Heh. Of course, my sparring partner is definitely to blame as well.
Read the rest of this entry »

Frankly I’m amazed.  My passport was delivered today; processed and delivered at the incredible speed of just under one month!  I didn’t even pay for expedited processing, but here it is nonetheless.

This, after all of the warnings I received about how long it would take to obtain the passport.  Everyone was suggesting months, but this is a pleasant surprise.  My parents and I joked that our last names must, “sound very American”, and apparently I’m not on a terrorist watch list yet.  How else would I have received it so quickly?

This shows how far behind the times am I.  The bottom rectangular shape means that the passport is electronic.  Who knew? *grin*  I wonder how that works.  I couldn’t find an RFID, so I’m assuming that the photo page can be read electronically to verify its information.

Don’t mind the finger nail clipper in the top right of the image.  It’s just being helpful by keeping the thing closed.  I may be a little silly, but I’m not crazy enough to go spreading around images of the inside of my passport. ;)  I will say, though, that it’s mighty fancy.

Three more months and I’m in South Korea - WOOT!

Technorati Tags: passport, travel, international travel, South Korea, Korea

Until today I was using Methylblue’s Simple Captcha. It had worked very well for a long time, but over the past couple of weeks I have began to receive comment spam again. The spam was somehow getting past both the captcha, and despite being obvious spam, it was also getting past Akismet.

Thankfully, I have a third level of defense in that comments go into moderation. I never disabled that option despite having both a captcha and Akismet running on this blog.

Here are some ideas about how the spam was getting through..

1. Spam bots are exploiting a weakness in Wordpress v2.2.2 (I’ll finally upgrade after this post)
2. Someone has discovered a way around certain kinds of captchas
3. They could have simply found a way around this one specific captcha due to its popularity

In any case, I have switched to an image captcha.

Please note that the Flock browser has a minor issue with this new image captcha, and I do not know if this problem is also present in Firefox. When you click on the box to enter the data from the captcha, the text box immediately above it instantly gains focus. This prevents you from typing into the captcha box.

An easy work around for this issue is to use the Tab key on your keyboard to cycle through the text fields instead of manually clicking to move from name, to URL, and so forth.

Hopefully this will fix the spam issue.. if not, then I suppose that there are other steps that I can take.

~Steph

Technorati Tags: spam, anti-spam, captcha, wordpress

My PGP keys have been removed from the keyserver. My pass phrase was not working, perhaps as a result of one or more of my keyboard’s keys unknowingly not working when I originally generated the keys. New keys should be available within the next 24 to 48 hours of this post.

Sleet began coming down yesterday here in Pittsburg, Kansas. It stopped for awhile but unfortunately began again after sun set, and the result was an inch of ice. There is some damage through out the town, with a few unfortunate souls dealing with large limbs breaking through their roofs.

We got lucky compared to those few folks, but we still have a heck of a mess to clean up. The limbs in these photos fell regularly through out last night and knocked out both our power and cable (tv, internet) services.

Click through the photos to see more of them. There’s a heck of a mess there, and the weather report says that we can get more ice until Wednesday. Look for power to go out some more until this icy, wintry weather subsides.

Technorati Tags: ice, weather, winter weather, snow, sleet, hail, pittsburg, pittsburg ks, kansas