Well, I did it on time, but barely. It's now 11:24 PM on Friday and I just finished Scene 1, Page 6. If you've read the past few Making Of JF pages, you know that this is important to me. I plan to do Page 7 tomorrow and Page 8 Sunday and Monday. That means that if you're reading this now, you can probably hit the "Next |>" button and see Page 7 and 8. This is not JF Rough Draft anymore, this is JF Final Draft. That means that I officially take my hands off it. I may decide to change it, but I don't want to. The truth is that JF has gone on long enough. I want to go scene by scene, week by week from here on out. It may not work that way, but I'm going to try at least. Scene 6 will be before December 7th and Scene 7 will be before December 19th. That will be my Christmas present to you. I've decided to visit my parents over Christmas break, so I will be away from my heart of steel and soulmate: my computer. I will be surrounded by computers, but all with WinXP on them, *shudder*. If you have been reading the Making Of JF Pages, you know that I recently converted to Slackware GNU/Linux. I only go into Windows now for three things: MilkShape3D, AS3D Manga Director 3 (the program that makes these wonderful JF pages), and Corel Draw 6. I'm currently developing AS3D Manga Director 4 which is Linux based (I may port it to Windows over Christmas break). I'm looking into a few Linux based modellers and animators, but the truth is that MS3D is unbeatable. AS3DMD4 is reliant on MS3D's file format, so that's an obstacle to any other possible editor. I may have to use Wine or find a port.

Today, I found an independent linux driver for my web cam. I'm going to try it out tonight if I don't fall asleep before I get to it. I got my e-mail working under Linux. It was actually really easy. I thought it was harder than it was. First I tried KMail. I couldn't find how to set up a IMAP server, so I looked for something else. I found fetchmail. Sure... I configured my server and it worked. It worked if you call "OMFG, I accidentally took down whole the UW Internet!" working. I didn't exactly take down the UW Internet, but I did use a sizable bandwidth to download 5 MB of my mail seventy times over. I put the settings just right so that when I clicked the run button, it just ran over and over until I got the clue when my computer slowed to a crawl. I rebooted before it could go past seventy times. I guess I only used 20 kBps for 2 minutes, but that's enough. I decided to try KMail again. I found instantly that I could set up an incoming IMAP server. I did and it was done.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Jav needs to give me a keen new lesson about how to do stuff before I leave his site. The lesson for today is how to mix good and bad correctly. It's a tricky subject. One might think of the polar opposites: good and bad. One naturally gravitates towards good, but we are all sidetracked by bad from time to time. But what is the definition of good and bad? Can you take a situation in your life and classify it as good or bad? You probably can. Since I came here to the UW Seattle, I have found that there are two types of things: fun cool stuff and hard interesting stuff. When I am happy and doing things that I like immensely, I classify it as fun cool. When I am sober and contemplative, I classify it as hard interesting. There's no denying that bad things happen. But certainly there is something to be learned from any bad event. If you face it understanding that it is part of the good and that it is important for the development of more good, you can advance positively. A person can think of hard things as being bad or as a positive lesson. I like to think of it as a positive lesson.

I'll take an example from a lecture back in high school. There's this student and he's having fun with friends. He skips his homework to hang out and talk with friends. He gets in trouble for not doing his homework and his teacher thinks that is bad. The next day he does some of his homework. He goes out with friends on the weekend and has fun. The next week he starts with homework, but falls into his habit of skipping homework. He does poorly on a test, which he thinks is bad. He does some homework and doesn't understand it which he thinks is really bad. He goes out with his friends. He does poorly on the homework. He meets a girl and goes out with her. He goes out with the girl and she encourages him to do homework. He asks for help, but she can't help him. He does poorly on homework, but does it all the same. He gets his mid-Semester reports and his parents don't like his grades. They think he is doing very bad stuff. They ground him until he comes home with an A on homework. He pleads for a tutor. His parents call bull and tell him to find one. He looks and finds one. The parents approve of the tutor's qualifications: college degree, time/location: after school/library, and price: free. So our hero stays after school to get tutoring. But you know what free tutoring sessions are: groups of kids and a person who has alterior motives. Our hero invites his girlfriend who is also doing poorly in school, but whose parents accept such from her. The hero understands a bit more of his studies and does better on his homework and tests. He thinks this is okay, but not fun or cool. Eventually, his girlfriend is stolen by the tutor and he starts hanging out with his friends again. While he has fun with friends, he is smart to keep his grades up so that he can continue having fun and learning his studies. Eventually he goes to a local college and immediately signs up to tutor high school students for free.

If you think that lecture was about me, you're wrong. I didn't hang out with friends back in high school. And I certainly didn't go to tutoring.