Kevin Zak

I’ve been following the 2008 elections as closely as I can. I still cannot vote, but I’ve been interested in politics since I was a child, and this is the first election I’ve lived through w ere it felt like more than a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. Normally, I consider myself open to both parties. I feel that if someone represented my beliefs, I’d support them regardless of party affiliation. Since Bush took office, many of us have seen the lies spew out of his mouth and this nation turn into a joke. It’s enough to make a person crazy. Now, with the 2008 elections and his regime coming to an end, we have a light at the end of the tunnel. We have a chance to elect someone to fix what Bush has broken. I firmly believe that repairman is Barack Obama. You will always have cynical people tell you that an inspiration such as Barack Obama isn’t the real deal. They will tell you that you are naive to hope — naive to believe. They will tell you that he is just another lying politician with a nice smile and a competent writing staff. I believe he is more than that. If it is naive to have faith in a candidate, then you can take a giant red stamp and mark my forehead with “naive”. He has truly been an inspiration to me, as well as others. I encourage you all to watch this video, which features celebrities and others singing along with the Yes We Can speech delivered by Obama in New Hampshire. Normally I’m the type of person to mock these “We are the world!” endorsement videos, but this one genuinely moved me.

http://www.dipdive.com/

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Just before Christmas I decided that I needed a bigger mp3 player. My music collection was growing and my 8GB Rio Carbon just wasn’t cutting it anymore. With this in mind I set out to find a ridiculously cheap player with nice battery life. I needed no special features like video playback (that’s what my laptop and PSP are for) nor a nice LCD screen (it just needs to play my music, not look pretty) nor did it need to be tiny (it would sit in my lap or in the cup holder of my car, not in my pocket). Unlike the vast majority of the population, I do not support overpriced iPods (or other equally overpriced Apple products) and thus was not ready to purchase one.

I began reading reviews on several major brands. While all of them had unique features that made them appealing, only one brand had the thing that caught my interest: battery life. Supposedly Creative destroys other mp3 players’ battery life by a wide margin. The only problem was the price. While they were reasonably priced for their caliber, they weren’t quite in my price range. Then I stumbled upon the Creative Zen Touch. It was not nearly as pretty as Creative’s other models, yet it had an interesting concept with it’s vertical scrolling device and it had amazing reviews on battery life. Best of all, I could get a factory refurbished 20GB model for only $49.99. I convinced my parents to order me one and they ended up buying one for my brother, as well.

Size Doesn’t Matter After All

It came via UPS four days later. I quickly opened up the box and was slightly surprised. This thing was by no means small. When I researched it, I didn’t pay much attention to the dimensions or weight. I was more interested in the things I cared about (battery life and capacity). I expected it to be a little bigger than normal mp3 players, but this was a bulky, beast of an mp3 player and that bothered me a little at first. When I held it, though, I found that it fit my hand perfectly. It did fit into my pocket (as well as my car’s cup holder), and although it was bulky, I liked the feel better than my friends’ skinny iPods. I knew that if I dropped this thing, it wasn’t going to break. It’s as solidly built of an electronic device of its size as I’ve ever seen.

<3 Storage

With 20GB of storage, it can hold my entire music collection with plenty room for growth. This was nice, since at about 12GB, I had to carefully choose what I wanted on my previous mp3 player and what I did not. With my entire library on it, I can fire up Winamp, head to the portable devices section, and hit the nifty sync button whenever I buy a new CD. It’s nearly a flawless process.

Firmware should be more Soft

My initial reaction to the firmware was that this was going to suck. I despised the menu layout. The vertical scrolling was either too sensitive or not sensitive enough. Then I read the manual. It turns out that different parts of the scrolling area are for different speeds. This made all the difference. I could now navigate through menus flawlessly. It turns out that the menu schema Creative designed was actually very nice once people understood how to use the scroll pad.

I <3 My Zen

Overall, I couldn’t be more satisfied. I can get 24 hours of battery life while continuously playing music, which is great for me because I forgot to recharge things every night. It syncs flawlessly with my Winamp collection. 20GB of storage is great for me, and this way I can keep adding music to my collection. Once I got used to the scroll pad, the firmware was great. It’s a great mp3 player. It’s not for people who desire these tiny players that are as small as memory cards, but it’s great for what I use it for. It fits in my cup holder while I’m in the car, on my desk while I’m at home, in my pocket when I’m at the mall or walking elsewhere, and in the stuff-holders that my workout equipment all use. I would definitely recommend it to anyone not obsessed with iPods. The one bad thing I could find about it is that the headphones that come with it are terrible. Luckily I still have my $70 noise canceling ear buds from my old mp3 player.

This fall I resigned my position at InvisionFree after two years of providing support and documentation for its users. After two months of unhappiness, I finally decided to call it quits. This was not because of any one person. It was just a general boredom with what I was doing.

My resignation has reduced the amount of stress in my life significantly. I no longer wake up in the morning wondering if there was a late-night spammer that I now have to deal with before school. I no longer feel the pressure of documentation deadlines and I no longer feel required to log in and answer support tickets each night. While having less stress is usually construed as a good thing, I find myself having more and more free time. When I normally would be writing a documentation or giving support, I have nothing to fill these gaps of time. That is, until now.

Recently I’ve decided to become an active member of the Ubuntu community. Ubuntu is an open source Linux distribution that focuses on usability, regular releases, and freedom from legal restrictions. For over a year I’ve been using Ubuntu and its KDE derivative Kubuntu as a secondary operating system to Windows XP. While I still familiarized myself with Ubuntu and Linux in general, I never used it enough to grasp the concepts behind it. Lately, however, I’ve started using Kubuntu 7.10 full time and I find myself learning more each day.

While maintaining my position as an active member of Kubuntu’s IRC support channel, I now frequently visit the development channel, which is full of well-informed people willing to lend a hand. I’ve also started visiting Ubuntu+1, a channel dedicated to the next version of Kubuntu, whatever that may be. Currently, it is Ubuntu 8.04, which is an LTS release. I’ve recently installed 8.04 and have been testing it out for a few days.

I’ve also started the process of joining the Documentation Team there. I proofread my first documentation today, and I had a lot of fun doing it. An operating system is such a multifaceted thing to document that nearly anyone can find some area their interested in. I can tell already that I’m going to have a lot of fun documenting the system.

As the title indicates, I have an entirely new perspective of Ubuntu. Prior to my decision to become active in the community, I thought of it as simply another operating system. Now, after a couple weeks of seeing the community in action, it’s clear that it is so much more than that. Never before have I seen so many people from all over the world work for such a specific common goal. Whether they go about it the right way or not, everyone has improving Ubuntu on their mind. Programmers, writers, artists, and even the most basic of users want the same thing. The best end result possible. Ubuntu works towards a common goal to achieve a unilaterally desired result, whereas other organizations work toward specific goals to improve what they want, as opposed to what everyone wants. This is essentially what sets Ubuntu apart from any other group, and what makes me so eager to help out the project.