• Your friends: they’ll change.
  The last decade is significant to me because I spent it’s entirety in the United States. I left Australia mid-December 1999, when my fourth grade had ended and was pushed ahead a semester into the fifth grade upon my move. Transitions are hard, especially when you don’t plan for them to last 10 years or more. It’s difficult to state I’ve found a coherent group of friends, because they’ve changed roughly seven times. I’ve come to expect it’ll happen again, and with the events of the past few months as they were, I have the feeling it’ll happen soon.
• You’ll often be lonely.
  The aforementioned turnover of friends will often leave you feeling empty. It’s only natural to be upset and confused that you don’t have solid relationships with people.
• Distractions are often your friend.
  No matter what kind, keeping yourself away from obvious thoughts is often the best way to clear your mind and let things fall back into place. Lego is my friend for this – and it allows me to channel a lot of my frustrations into being creative.
• Culture is confusing.
  Let’s think back for a moment to justify what I classify myself as: Australian. Though I was born in India, I only lived there for less than a year of my life and only go back once every five to seven years. I don’t identify myself as ‘Indian’ by culture, since my exposure to that aspect of culture is limited to what my parents expect of me. I grew up with Australian friends, and as such, I see myself as one of them. I don’t want to believe in religion or faith beyond what my parents expect of me. While novel concepts, it causes me heavy discomfort to be allied with any particular faith, when I know what kind of power they have over people, and what kind of hate-mongering they are capable of.
• Your government doesn’t represent you.
  After the last election, it soon became evident that politicians play on the hopes of those who they claim to represent. Politicians will claim things to satisfy the masses, but often do the opposite. Credibility is missing – and it bothers me.
• The nicest, most lovable people can do the most hurtful things.
  And oftentimes, not realize it. The amount of times this has happened to me over the past year is enough to illustrate my point. For further details, ask me in person.
• Look for friendships where the friendship is actually reciprocated.
  My biggest mistake in choosing which friendships I think were good enough to keep was to pick out people I was interested in knowing, but forgetting that friendships often have to be reciprocal to work out well. I try hard for my friends and if it’s you I’m trying hard for, I want you to be able to try back when I need you most.
• Feel confident, never back down.
  If I could have learned from this five years earlier, I may well be a different person by now. Don’t get discouraged from anything, and learn to manipulate events for the better. Having been in situations where my confidence was consistently threatened, the only way to maintain your composure is to start dealing with these situations as problems to be fixed and deal with them as such.
• Don’t be afraid to dump people who get on your bad side.
  Whether or not they deserve dumping is questionable. But if the reasoning is valid enough, do it. Having done this a few times this year, it’s incredibly rewarding to lift the pressure off of your chest. People can be backaches. Dump them and you can have nothing to do with them almost instantaneously.
• Don’t go looking for that certain special someone.
  Pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.
• You’re allowed to explode, when it gets to be too much to handle.
  Seriously, do it. It’s nice to have some sort of controlled explosion of emotion. You might regret it afterwards, but it’s almost instantaneous gratification.
• Try new things, live on the edge.
  But not too close, of course. Routine is boring, trying (and doing) new things is an awesome way to meet people, get a female out of your mind, or simply a way to kill time. Change it up and live a little, because routine is just no fun.

Of course, I’ll probably come back with more. This is all I can think about, for now. Night, internets.

Let’s face it: applications aren’t perfect. And OS X is by no means the greatest operating system ever written. When applications freeze, they can be killed. But sometimes they freeze hard enough that even right clicking on the dock icon and selecting “Force Quit” sometimes doesn’t cut it. While playing around with terminal commands the other day, I found a neat little way to kill applications from the terminal.

OS X applications are hidden from the user. Entering ‘ps’ on a terminal doesn’t produce the output you’d expect from a Linux/Unix machine. Thus, they’re a bit trickier to kill. Here, I’ve used ‘kill -STOP [pid]‘ to freeze up Mail.app for demonstration.

ooooh noessss

Unfortunately, OS X doesn’t capture the cursor, thus you can’t really tell it’s frozen. But trust me, it’s completely unresponsive.

So, how to fix it? First, you pull up a terminal.

See? Term!

Then you enter some stuff into the terminal.

ps -A | grep 'Mail'

The -A argument to ps will prompt ps to output information on processes that you don’t control (root, system) and processes without terminals. The | will push the results to grep, which receives the argument ‘Mail’, prompting grep to search through the list of processes produced by ps for processes with the word ‘Mail’ associated with them. The command will produce this output:

Yay results!

The number farthest left is what you’re looking for. In this case it’s “51845″. A second terminal command, kill, will be able to stop this resource hog!

kill it with kill -9!

‘kill -9′ is a sort of force kill. Give it a process id (pid) and it’ll zap it from the face of the earth. Remember the number from the previous picture? Well, we’ll be needing it here. Enter ‘kill -9 (number without parentheses)’. Tada! No more unreasonable process. Enter ‘ps -A | grep ‘Mail’ again, to find just the single entry! Yayyyy.

Terminal commands are neat little insights into how Unix based operating systems behave the way they do. Replacing any instance of ‘Mail’ with ‘Name of not behaving application’ will also work. Good luck!

Theoretically, I was supposed to have moved into my apartment last weekend. However, having come just the week before, I didn’t much feel like packing my stuff up again only to make another move, even if it was just across town. In total, this week has consisted of 4 or 5 trips to campus to move my stuff slowly into my apartment. Now, however, everything is here, including me! After a grueling two hours of hacking at my desk (which I found in my house’s basement), and another two of cleaning up and unpacking stuff, I finally have a decent setup. Illustrated in pictures, of course:

My Bed:

My end table:

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