Posada

Last night I went to a Posada in the house of a friend, what a lovely experience. I went there with my mom, my sister and a friend who is living in my house for the next 15 14 days. We ate some hot dogs, played some wii, Meet new people, played games, thought of new ideas, sang (burned the lyrics with a candle), broke 3 pinatas and finally watched a Horror movie.

Personally I loved breaking the pinatas the most. It was incredibly fun and I realized that I am a hitting machine. Not necessarily accurate but a hitting machine after all. XD At the end of the night we ate some turkey before leaving.

My first Posada was a huge success and I hope to attend many more in the near future.

Time to remember an interesting year.

On the night of the 31st of December of 2008 I said: "This will be an interesting year" I wasn't wrong, not even a bit. So many things happened to me and to others, good and bad alike.

Were should I start?...Well lets go in order, I think that is the best way to do it.

My third year began and I went to mexico shortly after that. Even then I arrived one day late thanks to the lack of the availability of planes travelling to mexico. I took my first databases class and began working on an "intelligent music player" for another class. Eventually both classes were successful and the program worked nicely. 

But that semester didn't go so smoothly, thanks to the H1N1 virus. A week before final exams the epidemic began and the campus closed completely for a week. People were a bit crazy here in mexico, everybody used masks and avoided everybody else. The city was closed, only supermarkets, pharmacy's and Hospitals were open. In my personal opinion there wasn't an epidemic of H1N1, there was an epidemic of neurosis. As a proof of that we have the example of ITESM-CEM. The put a separation of 2.5 meters between the tables at the cafeteria, all the computers were separated just as much. You had to use a mask and the teachers had to teach with that thing on. At least all that was fun and the extra week of forced vacations helped me finish all the projects.

I started and finished my first story, Deus Ex Machina. I loved writing that story, being only 40 pages or so long I am quite pleased with the result. I also began to draw and color digitally. I found out that I am not bad at doing it. If you want to check some of my art(anthro art by the way) you can go here: http://listix.deviantart.com/

Then I went back to Bolivia just to suffer all the same things over again. But this time there was a difference, indifference from part of the government. The president Evo Morales was really calm, some people died but he didn't do anything about it. He is only a jackass, people only vote for him because all the other options are worse. But lets keep on topic. Many events with thousands of people took place, the bicentennial of the city of La Paz took place like if nothing was going on. As you can see In bolivia the opposite of Mexico took place.

Then the other semester took place, I tried a little harder to find a girlfriend. But every time I met someone I like and then I do some background checking on them I find that they are either taken or lesbian. -_- But I will find my Tomboy girl someday, I am sure of that.

I made new friends, some really good ones. I saved people in my advanced math class and got 100% in the end which is no small feat. I started working on a paper and even learned to use Latex. Now my mom and my sister are visiting me. We will have a wonderful Christmas here in Mexico.

That should be it for now. So Merry Christmas to all of you.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I just went to see the movie after my semester was over. You cant even begin to understand how relieved I feel right now. =D

But lets get back to the movie. It was a really nice movie. Simple as that. Also and on an incompletely related note, I love Foxes.!!!

• Music: Really well done, funny and lovely. 10/10
• Story: The plot was interesting, not the most difficult to understand but it has lots of references that each of us can understand. <3 Like any story of Roald Dahl it has elements that only an older audience can understand. 9/10
• Visual: Its a different style completely. The animation frame by frame is done incredibly well. 9/10
• Feelings: Well you feel really nice after the movie. Each of the characters has a really well developed personality and you can identify with at least one of them.10/10
• Overall: The movie is highly recommended. Go watch it now. 9.5/10

My semester is over and my sister and my mom will come to visit me. I am so happy.

Compiling the countdown plugin for pidgin.

Given my current situation I will have my 3 most difficult exams on Thursday and Friday. So I decided to find a way to put it into my Pidgin status. At first I thought that updating it from time to time would be enough. But then I thought, "there must be something to automate it."

I asked the saint of the searches Saint Google and he answered me almost immediately (I damn my ISP).(Remember that this plugin is not the final one. But it works.)

https://launchpad.net/pidgin-countdown

I found this page and downloaded the file. Decompressed it and then used the ol' trusty Terminal.

cd ~/Documents/count/

Inside that directory there are 2 files.

ls
countdown.c Makefile


Now before compiling, check that you have this directory: ~/.purple/plugins/

If you don't(like me) do the following

mkdir ~/.purple/plugins/

Time to compile.Inside the directory where the Makefile is found.

Make -f Makefile

If you have some errors after this step install this:

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install pidgin-devel

Fedora:

su -c'yum install pidgin-devel'

Then try again the command to compile.

Now the only thing left is to go back to our beloved pidgin and go to tools and then to plug-ins.Check the countdown check-box and then go to "Configure Plug-in". Select the date that you want the countdown to show and then close those windows. Your personal message will display the time until your specified date.

Have fun!

Tips with latex

I am going to post a few tips with latex so those of you who are learning how to use it dont have to break their heads trying to figure out something.

Putting an image on the first page on a report.

Firstly you need to import this package. Just download it from here and just extract the titlepic.sty where you have your .tex file.

\usepackage{titlepic}

Then you just have to put the image you want like this.

\titlepic{\includegraphics{image.png}}

You may modify the size of the pic too if you want but to do that you have to add the options between [] exactly after the includegraphics command and before the {image.png}.

You could write something like

\titlepic{\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{image.png}}

and thats it.

On to the next point do you want to customize the margins of your documents and dont know how? Well if you did it normally you would have to mess around with 11 different measures. Quite crazy isnt it?

Well thank goodness someone made a package for that. Just put the following command to change the margins.

\usepackage[left=A,top=B,right=C,bottom=D]{geometry}

You may omit the margins that you do not care about its size. So if you want you can do this:

\usepackage[left=A]{geometry}

Geometry is much more powerful than that so if you want to read more you only have to go here.



Another little thing if you want to change the size of your default font just add this to your \documentclass

\documentclass[12pt]{report, book, etc}

Finally to end today's post I will tell you about one last command to make your life easier.

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-1}

What this little beauty does is to remove the numbering from the chapters, sections, etc. Your document only has the different sections and still appears in the table of contents.


I hope this little tips may be of some help to someone.

After a long while I am back

...and gosh I have learned quite a few things. So many things happened.

But let me explain a bit about everything. 2008 New year's eve I said to my mom: "I feel this will be an awesome and interesting year" I was absolutely correct.

Among the few things that made this year interesting were the outbreak of influenza here in mexico, receiving the news that one of the family dogs died, getting a tablet and starting to draw with it(with highly favorable results) and lately learning to use Latex.

This year has been great, I have been way happier than ever before and made new and wonderful friends.

I dont intend to bore you with my life(well maybe ocassionally). I intend to make this blog a place where you will find tips from computing to cooking and everything in between.

So to however reads this,

Welcome to my life.