namelesstrash01

I can understand something like a phone number, where each digit is singular and stands apart from the others. If you're saying that about composite numbers (like 'two hundred and thirty nine'), you're the first person I've met claiming that word/number-color synesthesia helps them remember composites/sums.

You own't be disappointed. It's extremely pleasant to use (and fast).

I used Sabayon and I will back this statement 100%. It was absolutely a pleasure to use, and surprisingly more slick than I expected.

Have you tried Mint instead of Ubuntu? It's like Ubuntu's hot, skinnier, younger sister.

Is there any reason you'd use Ubuntu over an Ubuntu-like distro such as Linux Mint? I'm just curious, because I feel like not many people know about Mint here, and the general feeling is that people don't want to use Ubuntu, but like apt and the Ubuntu repos (which Mint uses, without so much of the bloat of Ubuntu, and with a different UI like Cinnamon, which is fantastic).

I use CentOS 6.x almost exclusively, since I work with several different low-end VPS for my businesses. I found it's much, much easier to have adopted a sort of "let it fail" philosophy and replicate across many (then worry about the failure when I have time) instead of paying dearly for a single high-end VPS that does occasionally have downtime. I'm also "sort of" in the business of CDN-type services, so geographical/latency distance is important to me, which is another reason this "let it fail" across many replicated servers around the world works best for my situation.

For hardware firewall/security appliance, I use pfSense (a FreeBSD "distro").

I'm actually a bit surprised to see Mint with so few users here. I expected Ubuntu to have less of a grip on the HN community than, say, Reddit or something. There's definitely a large Arch and Debian community, which is what I expected, but I certainly did not expect to see so many people using an OS that technical people pretty universally complain about. Mint Cinnamon == Ubuntu without some bloat and minus Unity (and plus a great UI called Cinnamon). That's very interesting to me.

I wondered about VPS/cloud server distros people are using, but there's a great comment here with several good answers. Looks like quite a few are using some kind of VPS out there.

Hear, hear! I can (and do) run Crunchbang on tiny embedded devices all the way up through those netbooks. For all of those smaller (capability) devices, you really can't go wrong with #!.

In the interests of Science and defense of this method, I did in fact meet my first wife this way. The problem was that I was simply never around (war, you know), not necessarily that it wasn't a good match.

From what I can tell, there's no pattern in any synesthesia. It's due ("they" think) to essentially a hardware crossover in the regions of the brain responsible for these "cognitions"... You have the same idea I did for some time when I was much younger. A really good friend of mine organized raves back around the first time they were popular and I knew if people could experience what I experience for only a while, it would have a result similar to the consciousness-altering properties of drugs. It's always been normal to me, but I also know what it's like to think of words/colors that have no meaning together, so I can imagine how empty my vocabulary would be without this extra layer of interconnectedness. I'm terribly sorry if this comment meets your disapproval. I'm really just trying to help extend my experience to fellow HNers.

Yes, that's exactly it! Some letters are not there (actually most letters), and I know that some numbers are "weaker" than others. I also know that some of these color synesthetics have changed over time. For example, I know that the number 2 for me didn't always trigger darkish pink, but I can't remember what it used to be. Also, I have lost synesthesia for G, H, and J, which used to be yellowish, yellowish, and green, but now don't "do" anything.

If you are experiencing more of a one-to-one idea/color analogue instead of a simple kind of "association" between an idea and a color, then what you are describing is highly likely to be similar to what I have, which is word-color synesthesia, the most common form of the "condition". For example, it's much more intrinsic than the simple association we normally feel between, say, the word "money" and the color green. That's a simple word-color association. When I see the word "March", I "feel/see/experience" the color blue (and vice versa, though this vice versa is a bit weird because I'm not so good at distinguishing individual colors).

Yes, I know Swedish and German, and this is the case for those words, as well. The "input" is irrelevant as long as it ends up with my thinking of the concept of "Friday" or whatever. In the case of foreign languages, foreign word goes in, "Friday" idea/color comes to mind. It's also the same if I look at a date on a calendar and see that a certain date is on a Friday, but not with the specific word "Friday". Of course, this is the same case for all the other days of the week, numbers, and the few letters. What is also interesting is if the "input" is a color very similar to the synesthetic "color/idea" for "Friday", I will also immediately think of the word/idea for "Friday" (in English). So it sort of can go back and forth.

Also, I will say that as individual letters or numbers "disappear" into a word, I do not get the synesthesia associated. So like "fourteen thousand" does not trigger the synesthesia I get for those individual digits, nor does "Amnesia" trigger my "strong" synesthesia for A, M and N. I hope this makes sense. I'm really trying to describe it as best I can.

Yes certainly, synesthesia has many different forms. From what I understand -- and I could be completely off, but this is just information I've tried to collect since I finally had a word for the condition -- the word-color synesthesia thing is pretty common. Sound-color exists, but it's pretty uncommon. Among many, many different combinations. One of my friends has confided in me that she feels different temperatures with different words. I hadn't heard of that before, but I don't doubt it. There were some scientists who did MRI work on synesthetes and found that it basically amounts to functional crossovers in the brain between the affected areas.

This is an interesting observation. I've been writing code for about twenty years, and using some form of syntax highlighting for a little over ten of those years. I change the colors in vim (and geany, my other IDE-du-jour) to match function names with a bold blue and variables with a bold, dark red. These colors are the ones I definitely change every time on a new install/machine/whatever. I can see exactly what we would think with the color-syntax association, but it's not quite the same as my synesthesia. Like, when I type out a function definition, I don't have a bold blue "mindset" while doing it. However, when I type the word Wednesday in that context, there's a thick undercurrent consisting of the "softish bright red". It's really, really hard to explain, but there is a difference for me.

I have synesthesia in real life. For me, I have one of the "most common" forms, between words and colors. Specifically, I have a color-word synesthesia ("association" is not the right word here) between days of the week and colors. For example, Friday for me is a "medium green", Tuesday is a "light blue" and Wednesday is a sort of "soft red"... Every day has its own color, though I must mention that Saturday and Sunday are both white, though different shades. Each of these colors also has a "brightness" to it that is kind of impossible to describe in terms of regular colors, though colors seen on a computer display get close. I also have some mild synesthesia between specific letters of the alphabet (but not all of them), as well as every single-digit number. It's worth a mention that I can't think of specific instances of this synesthesia helping me remember anything, though I am pretty good with remembering numbers, and it needs to be said that I don't know what it's like without synesthesia, so I can't offer a comparison.

Very much related to this post, I can't say whether or not learning synethesia is possible. It's so hard to describe the synesthesia between words-colors, to such a degree that I'm inclined to say that any learning would be simple association, and not the synesthesia that I experience myself. For example, when I read the word "Wednesday" it's a very specific color of red with a certain bright softness about it. I "see" that color every time I hear or see and then comprehend the idea of Wednesday. When I see "Wednesday" as a collection of letters, there's no color, but when I summon the internal idea/concept of Wednesday, then the color is there. See how retarded I sound? That's how confusing the internal "association" is, and why I am inclined to believe that "one does not simply learn synesthesia"...