8.25.2005
12:07pm

Katrina is coming... and we're merrily going to class. The torrential rain should arrive here just in time to completely ruin my day off tomorrow.

8.23.2005
9:40pm

First day of classes (for me) is finished. Overall a great day, because of course we didn't have to do any real work--the closest we came was a quick practice problem in Electronics 1. Some good news fell in our laps this morning at 8am... my first class of the day on Tuesday and Thursday will probably get pushed back until 9:30am instead of 8am because our instructor lives 40 minutes away and doesn't want to deal with rush hour traffic jams. Rolando and I have the same problem over here in Palm Bay and it would be much nicer to get to sleep in a little bit longer. The other good news is that I don't have any labs this week which means I get tomorrow off from school as well. Nothing like a 2-day week to kick off the academic year.

I missed the first Student Ambassador meeting of the semester because I was in class, but starting next week I will be able to go regularly. I'm wrapping up my final duties as treasurer and will be handing that off to the new officer, Jenny Frembling. I'm supposed to be Vice President this year so I should probably figure out what that entails. We didn't have a chance to recruit at the Organization Fair since they ran out of tables, so we will be recruiting via professors instead.

Hope all the ECE juniors out there are ready to hit the ground running. From what I saw today it will be very fast-paced.

8.20.2005
11:14am

Saw a fantastic movie last night with about 20 people from Florida Tech: The 40 Year-Old Virgin. It was offensive, crude, sexist, belittling to geeks, but it was a hilarious movie. I don't think I've laughed as much since Goldmember. Many of the jokes are geared toward my generation, the kids who grew up with the Internet and Xbox. The virgin, Andy, has a house full of valuable collectable action figures and he just happens to start dating a woman who sells items on eBay. What a match made in heaven. His co-workers at Smart Tech are the real stars of the show as they impart male knowledge upon poor "I respect women so much to stay away from them entirely" Andy. Anyway, I'm not going to say any more about it here but you should definitely go to the cineplex and see it.

After the movie some of us headed back to the house to play poker since Rolando got some new chips and we didn't have anything else better to do at 12:30am. I've got a three-day weekend ahead of me so I've got no idea what to do to fill the time. All of my textbooks arrived yesterday and today so if I get really bored I can always break those open. Between the three of them I've got over 3,000 pages of fun. Check out mustgrab.com if you're looking for a cheap textbook source.

8.17.2005
7:10pm

Really tacky tribute to the companies that power my electronic life:

All logos are copyright their respective owners.

8.14.2005
12:42am
Myleene Klass - Moonlight Sonata

Reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code tonight. I'm about 1/3 of the way through and it's been great so far--even had a refernece to Harry Potter:

"These books can't possibly compete with centuries of established history, especially when that history is endorsed by the ultimate bestseller of all time."
Faukman's eyes went wide. "Don't tell me Harry Potter is actually about the Holy Grail."
"I was referring to the Bible."
Faukman cringed. "I knew that."

I've got the PDF open alongside Google Images and Wikipedia so I can look up some of the paintings and places he talks about.

8.10.2005
11:58pm

Wow today I managed to get in 8 hours of work and 2 movies; simply amazing. Beware, this post may contain numerous hyperlinks.

The first one was at CinemaWorld: I got to see March of the Pengiuns for free at the SunSmart Conference. They were celebrating a 5-penguin award they got from Linux Magazine for a new 64-bit workstation they manufactured. The documentary was very well-done and I'm noticing that the French seem to make good nature films. They were smart in getting Morgan Freeman to do the voice-over since I'm sure his name brought in some people that wouldn't have otherwise gone to see the movie. Michael Moore still holds the spot of top-grossing documentary with Fahrenheit 9/11 but who knows, this one may surpass it.

When I got home, Cory, Buff, and one of their friends had already arrived to watch a movie at my place. They brought an anime called Appleseed that's made by the same guy that did Ghost in the Shell. It had a Japanese audio track in DTS that was really amazing and had great use of dynamic range. I've noticed that most animes have very attractive female characters--must be because they're all written by guys ;)

Oh, I'm getting a lot better at ping-pong recently. I play every day with the guys at Harris and some of them have been giving me pointers now and then. I'll try to make use of the table at Florida Tech more often--I can always call Chris and have him meet me over there for a few rounds. Since I'm on the topic of school, I haven't yet bought my books for the upcoming semester but I'm going to check the ISBNs at the bookstore either tomorrow or Friday. If I can find the international editions that would be great since they're so cheap--if not I'll just have to cough up the cash.

I'm done with Best Buy for now. I guess that means another resume update but I'll get around to that eventually.

8.8.2005
10:57pm

My last weeked at Best Buy is over... at least I think so. Technically I'm scheduled for next Saturday as well but that will probably get handed off to another person. I've been told by coworkers that my discount will probably last for another few weeks before it is removed from the system.

Work today was pretty boring, just more automation of application installs. I've learned how to do automatic MSI and InstallShield setups which is handy. Rolando's still at Northrop working on programming. He can't go into much detail about what he's doing because of security, but he did say that he's working on plug-ins for NASA's earth viewer program. He's also got this cool universe viewer that looks great on dual monitors.

Nate got his bass shakers last week from PartsExpress after some nudging from me. He liked the experience here so now he has it at home on his couch. Especially great for gaming and scary movies :)

Good luck tomorrow Discovery. Rolando's going to try to watch the return tomorrow to see if he can hear the sonic boom from here. I don't usually wake up until after it's scheduled to arrive, so I will most likely miss it. Let's cross our fingers that we don't get rained on by shuttle debris this time... besides, Florida Tech doesn't have any more buildings to dedicate to fallen astronauts.

Until next time.

8.3.2005
8:44pm

I hate traffic... I stopped at Wal-Mart on my way home today after work, and I spent a total of 10 minutes in the store and 50 minutes on the road. There's 92,000 people in Palm Bay and I swear all of them commute on two major roads.

Aside from that, today was a good day. Bought some new kitchen supplies and reorganized my room so all my computer junk is nice and neat. Chris's last day at Harris is Friday, then he returns to Florida Tech for Resident Assistant training.

8.2.2005
10:10pm

Restaurant recommendation: King's Buffet in Melbourne by Hooters is inexpensive and the food quality is good. Doesn't have quite as big of a selection as Young's Buffet, but comes close to having about 90%. Cost for one buffet and a soda is around $7 including tip.

I got to learn a little of Oracle SQL today at work... seems like pretty neat stuff. I'm thinking about getting mySQL and making a database just to play around, maybe catalog my DVD collection there or something. I'd also like to revamp my entire web site with a more advanced language but that probably won't happen. Nate told me there are some cool features of PHP that I should look into, so maybe I'll learn something about that.

Heh, I got to play Dance Dance Revolution today for the first time in about two years. As it turns out, Nate used to be really good at it so he had the program and pad for his Xbox. I went over after work and we played for about 2 hours. I forgot how much of a workout that game is... I should really get it and play here at the house. My only gripe is that the music selection has gone downhill ever since the first version of the game.

8.1.2005
9:17pm

Well, I finally did it: turned in my two weeks notice for Best Buy yesterday. My boss looked a little dejected but he was ok with it and told me if I ever wanted to come back for extra hours or anything like that, I was welcome. Some of my co-workers knew I was leaving but not all of them, and I'll probably have a chance to tell them next week if I work again. A few people asked me if I had any big purchases planned before my discount expires, but there's not really anything that I want right now. I'll probably think of something a week after it's gone of course.

I got around to organizing some of my files on my computer today. It's pretty amazing how much digital crap I've accumulated over the years, and I tend to be better about purging junk than most people. I have a number of documents that date back to middle school.

That link I promised to our Harris presentation video is here. Extract the zip file and launch the PowerPoint presentation. The video was created with help from Adobe Premiere 6, Macromedia Flash MX, and Windows Movie Maker v.2.

Couple of good links today that I stole from some other blogs I browse:

All Your Base... Bohemian Rhapsody style
What WWII was really like