12.29.2006
6:23pm

I've been trying to limit my Internet time this holiday break. Today I caved and spent a good amount of time catching up on news and blog posts. I found a serious-yet-amusing "Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" by a researcher at the University of Auckland, via Brian's blog.

One of my Christmas presents, Need for Speed: Carbon, had the contents stolen by a merchandise packer at Amazon.com and my parents failed to realize it before wrapping it up. My Dad sent them an email on Christmas day and the replacement game arrived today. Kudos to them for resolving the problem without any accusations or unnecessary red tape. I can't wait to get home and try it out on the desktop PC.

12.23.2006
11:11pm

When life gives you lemons, have a Coke and a smile. My flight from Orlando/Sanford airport with Allegiant Air was cancelled yesterday due to low visibility at the Roanoke airport. Everybody at the terminal was upset, because we had been waiting an additional 2 hours for the airplane to arrive that was going to take us on our way. I had to drive back to Palm Bay for the night, but I don't mind driving so it wasn't a big deal. I decided to go see The Good Shepherd to occupy myself. Unfortunately the movie was very long (close to 3 hours) and very boring for the purported "Best Spy Movie Ever." It certainly had a star-studded cast but that didn't really help matters much. I might be in the minority in my judgment, since the critics are rating the movie well, but I still did not enjoy it much at all.

I also learned something important Thursday night when I printed off Dan's flight itinerary. Orlando has three different airports, not just one. I thought I was flying out of the main international airport (MCO), but I was actually supposed to fly out of the Sanford airport (SFB). Since Buff was only going to drive Dan to MCO, I decided to drive myself to the Sanford airport. It ended up being a good decision because of the flight cancellation. I went back to the airport today (Saturday), and our flight left an hour late but was otherwise uneventful. When we made touchdown in Roanoke most of the passengers applauded.

12.21.2006
2:28pm

J.K. Rowling has announced the name for the seventh (and final) book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Doesn't sound very upbeat, does it?

Tonight I've gotta get packed up and ready for my flight to Roanoke tomorrow. I'm leaving in the morning with Dan since he is also flying out tomorrow, but I have an additional 4-hour wait at the airport so I'll be wandering around and using the free WiFi again. I've gotten used to this unusually warm weather; today the house windows are open and it's a comfortable 79 degrees outside.

12.20.2006
4:04pm

Windows Vista is coming off the laptop I think. There are too many things that are either poorly implemented or not currently functioning (due to driver support). I was surprised that ATI had a fully-functioning driver for Vista, but Dell and Creative have some catching up to do. The touchpad driver kinda works but I get a warning message about incompatibilities. Also, utilities that I have been using for a long time like PowerDVD XP and Nero Express will no longer work in Vista. Even the brand new version of AVG Antivirus crashes sometimes upon system startup, and some other times it works fine. I could run dual-boot for a while, but I think most of the time would be spent in XP anyway.

I decided to take a screen shot though, so I can look back and see what I'm missing... it is a nice looking OS :)

100 Ways to Save the Environment.

12.19.2006
11:49pm

Harry Potter and the Chamberpot of Azerbaijan. Making fun of Harry Potter is a worthy enterprise, and the Brits do a good job of it. I still love the books and movies though.

10:27pm

Final grades are in. My only B this semester was for OS Concepts. I'm elated.

12.18.2006
5:49pm

Today is December 18th. It was 80 degrees outside, and the A/C in the house had to run. I mowed the lawn and worked up a sweat. Where is our cold weather...

I'm working on wrapping up Eldest now. I read about 400 pages yesterday until it was 1:45 in the morning and I decided I had to go to bed; there's another 100 left to go. It's engrossing to say the least.

12.16.2006

10:49pm

So this evening I went to see Eragon at Oaks theater since I finished the book a week ago and wanted to see the movie. The reviews on IMDb and Rottentomatoes were pretty bad, but sometimes I disgree with the general consensus and enjoy a movie anyway despite the negative response. The movie had some good parts and some bad parts, with most of the bad parts due to time-saving shortcuts. The book was about 500 pages long, and they skimmed that down into a 106-minute movie. The casting selection for Ajihad was poor; I thought Djimon Hounsou did a fine job in Gladiator but he isn’t really cut out to play the role of a powerful leader. Not to mention the fact that they cut Ajihad’s screen time down to near-nil. Saphira was definitely the highlight of the film, and they did an excellent job rendering a convincing dragon. I had to keep myself from laughing during the scenes with John Malkovich as the evil king, because he comes across as an irritable and whiny despot. We are supposed to believe that he ruthlessly killed off the other dragon riders and forced everyone else into submission, but John Malkovich? Come on. Jeremy Irons was much more convincing as Brom, the well-traveled and wise mentor to Eragon. Overall, I think if they had stuck more to the book and had made a 2-2.5 hour PG-13 movie instead of the shortened kid-safe PG movie, it would have been much better. I don’t forsee the sequel (Eldest) being made into a movie, because it’s unlikely this one will make back the $90M production budget.

1:31pm

Amazon.com sells expensive stuff too... and man look at that $501,000 discount! This was posted on Digg and people have already started posting humorous comments on the Amazon product page.

1:34am

Well, I already know my OS Concepts grade because Dr. Silaghi emailed them out. It's definitely a B, and not even a midrange B. I checked the numbers and even if I had gotten 100 on the final I would have had a high B but still no A.

Still, news of a 'B' can't ruin my good mood tonight. I finally got to see something that I've been waiting about 3 years for: The Lion King on Broadway. The Gazelle Company tour is currently playing at the Orlando Centroplex until January 14th, so I jumped on my chance while they are in Orlando. Tonight's show was sold out with a little over 2,500 attending. When I got my ticket back in October, I was able to get a seat in row CCC which I thought was the third row back. Turns out it was the first row, which had some associated advantages and disadvantages. One major plus was the acoustic experience, which from what I've read is much better in the front of the orchestra seating section than it is in the rows further back or the balcony. TLKoB has percussion on the left and right stage wings so the front row is right in the middle of them and very close to the orchestra pit itself. Also, being very close meant that details in the costumes and props, and expressions on the actors' faces were easy to make out. The main downside to being in the first row was the fact that the stage is elevated higher than the seating, which meant that I couldn't see things that were placed close to the stage floor. Also, the beginning Circle of Life scene works a lot better if you have perspective of the whole stage from a positive vertical elevation rather than a negative one. During the intermission I checked to see which rows would have been a better choice, and anything closer than row 7 had a disadvantage.

Anyway, ignoring the seating situation, the show was amazing. I already knew some things to anticipate beforehand, and I was already familiar with the music from the broadway musical soundtrack, but seeing it in person surpassed all expectations. The production is of course closely tied to the plot in the movie, but new sections have been added to bring it up to par with artistic theater. The African theme is much stronger in the stage version than the movie. None of the original comedic elements are forgotten, in fact there were some impromptu colloquialisms that were amusing as well; Zazu is definitely the highlight in that regard. Scar steals the show overall, as he gets more stage time than anybody else and generally has the more intelligent lines. He and Mufasa get the cool servo-actuated face masks. Young Simba and Nala were played by two (very talented) kids who personify the original animated cubs down to the smallest detail. The difficult scenes that don't translate to the stage well were handled in an innovative manner that works with a little bit of imagination. Everyone is familiar with the scenes anyway, so it's easy to make the connection between the simplified or symbolic representations on stage and the intended portrayal. I've been trying to decide which scene was my favorite but it's going to take some more thinking before I reach a conclusion. Our show had a couple small technical glitches and several of the characters were being played by understudies instead of the main actor/actress, but nothing that detracted in any significant way from the overal presentation. The only part of the whole musical that I didn't care for was the dance number during Be Prepared which felt out of place.

12.14.2006
10:40pm

Final exams are over! <Mr. Burns> Excellent </Mr. Burns>. I survived the OS Concepts exam today with only a few problems to which I didn't know the answer. There were 22 total questions so I think I scored in the 80-90 range most likely. Rolando only slept 2 hours last night because he was doing so much cramming for that test. I decided 5.5 hours was the minimum that I was willing to accept so I got up at 6am and headed over to campus for an hour of pre-exam studying. That's in addition to the 6-7 hours I spent studying yesterday.

This evening I went to the NetBoss XE 2.2 gold release party at City Tropics. Since I’m not yet 21, I couldn’t take advantage of the free beer/wine, but I did get a Diet Coke and enjoyed some pizza & hot wing appetizers. Nate, Logan, and I got to chat with John DiNome about the future Harris-Stratex company and what it is going to mean for the NetBoss group. John DiNome is one of those people who has to rush from meeting to meeting because he has such a busy schedule, so it was nice to hear from him without the usual impatience. Also, I'm noticing at this point that more people are asking me what my plans are after graduation. Charlie is pretty optimistic that I am going to stay on with NetBoss full-time, but I'm going to wait and see how this merger works out (and the salary offer) before I get too committed to anything. This holiday break I will be submitting resumes and applications to places that interest me, so hopefully I will have a few options when May rolls around. January is going to be hectic as things get transferred over from Harris to Harris-Stratex, like IP address ranges and software product labeling. We have lots of software and scripts that have to be changed to reflect the new name.

I got a cool toy a week ago from Best Buy. I had a 12% Reward Zone coupon and some Reward Zone dollars to use, so I decided to get a USB miniature sound card called the Audio Advantage Micro by Turtle Beach. It’s a very simple device, with only a single output jack that doubles as stereo headphone & optical S/PDIF output. I’m using this on my desktop, since I don’t have room to install a traditional PCI card, and I connected the S/PDIF output to my laptop which has the full-featured Creative Audigy 2 ZS card. Signal-to-noise ratio increased dramatically and now I don’t have any issues with hissing speakers like I did with the on-board audio. Plus, I discovered another cool thing about the AA Micro. If used in Windows XP, Windows XP x64, or Windows Vista, no additional driver is required for basic stereo or digital output. That means I can carry it in my pocket if I have a need to quickly add digital or high-quality analog output to any computer. I still swear by my Koss KSC-75 headphones, which have ridiculously good quality for the price (~$15).

Hold onto your hats, this is a near record length post I think...

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More Vista blathering:

I have found two bugs so far (plus my irritation about the taskbar that I mentioned in a previous post). One of them occurs if the taskbar is set to auto-hide mode and the primary monitor is switched from a screen of one resolution to a screen of a second resolution. I encountered the problem when switching my laptop from the internal 1920x1200 screen to my external 1680x1050 monitor. The auto-hide taskbar no longer showed up at all, until I changed the external monitor resolution down to 1280x1024 then back up to the native resolution.

The second bug I found is a bit more obscure, but it also has to do with the user interface. I was curious to see what Vista looked like without the translucent "glass" effects, so I went to the advanced Appearance control panel and un-checked the box that enables Aero glass. I applied the setting and everything was still ok at that point. Then I re-opened the appearance window and switched from Custom settings to "Best Performance" mode, which basically disables every fancy graphical feature that Vista offers (it's mainly used on server machines or PCs with very limited graphics cards). I applied that setting and Vista switched over correctly (but surprisingly the Mobile Device synchronization program crashed). After seeing the ugliness of "Best Performance" mode, I decided that I wanted to switch back to fancy mode. I opened the appearance panel again and selected the "Best Appearance" option, which automatically checks off all of the graphical features. I noticed that in the list of options, "glass" was no longer listed at all--checked or unchecked. I applied the settings, and everything went back to normal but the "glass" effects were not present. I once again re-opened the appearance control panel, and this time there was a "glass" checkbox option which was checked off. Haha, oops Microsoft. I had to de-select the glass option, apply settings, reopen the panel, and re-check the glass option to get it to work again.

I guess that's technically three bugs I found (but the Mobile Sync one is still a beta-level program so I can't place too much blame there). I was upset to find out that I had to go download beta software in the first place, since Vista RTM is supposed to include the Mobile Device program by default. I'm guessing Microsoft plans to release the non-beta version of that via Windows Update. Remember that Microsoft has had 5 years to work on this operating system.

On a plus note, the new games included with Vista are very nice. Solitaire with 3D animations and cool sound effects was a nice change from the very simple version that has been included with every version of Windows since 95.

12.13.2006
9:10pm

The Hadji final today went very well, most likely aced it. He did make it pretty easy, with hints in the problem descriptions that pointed us toward the right answer.

Tomorrow is going to be a different story with OS Concepts. Dr. Silaghi isn't the kind of person to give easy tests. Or even regular difficulty tests. I've already spent about 3 hours studying today but I won't have enough time to re-read every topic in the book before tomorrow's test. I'm just trying to go over the most important stuff and hope that I can remember the rest from earlier class periods.

12.12.2006
6:13pm

My room is in quite a state right now. It's not the messiest it's ever been, but very close. Most of the clutter is from socks and shorts that I've laid out to dry, since our dryer broke a couple days ago. Rolando is going to have someone come fix it but I'm not sure how long that will be. In the meantime, I've managed to air dry my stuff but it definitely takes a while since we don't have a clothes line outside (they don't work too well in Florida with all the rain anyway).

Tonight I'm getting cozy with Computer Architecture review material. It's not as interesting as it sounds, unfortunately. I keep getting distracted by the aquarium (that happens when we try to study at Ron's place too).

12.11.2006
9:24pm

Two exams are finished... EM Waves and Logic. The first one was kinda rough, but the people I talked to afterwards also had issues with it so I'm hoping there will be a curve. The logic exam was long in duration, requiring a little bit more than the usual 2-hour block, but only a couple of the questions were particularly tricky. Tonight and tomorrow I have to get ready for the Computer Architecture exam, which requires a bit of extra work since we have to turn in a notebook with homework solutions and other miscellaneous notes. Then on Wednesday I have to study for OS Concepts which is bright and early Thursday morning at 8am.

I've been using Vista a bit more, trying to get my regular apps installed, and so far no other roadblocks. Even Microsoft Money for Windows 95 installed properly. It was amusing to get Outlook up and running again and see 250 new email messages pour into the personal folders. I like the new email reminder sound in Vista. I've been using the FIT and Gmail web interfaces to hold me over the past few days. Speaking of Google, they started advertising Firefox 2.0 on their own home page yesterday. If you launch an Internet Explorer browser and visit google.com, you will occasionally see an advertising bar at the top for Firefox. I just checked it out now and it didn't show up for me, but earlier today it was functional.

12.09.2006
5:45pm

Well, I went ahead and put Vista on my laptop. Installation was painless, as was getting the couple of drivers installed, but I found the first "downgrade" from XP that is going to piss me off. For a couple years now, I've been customizing all of my Windows XP environments with the Desktop icons viewable as an auto-hide taskbar at the top of the screen. That way, I could hide the regular desktop icons and show off the nice Digital Blasphemy wallpaper.

In Vista, Microsoft decided to eliminate the capability of free-floating and separable toolbars. Apparently, it was "too confusing" for regular users, even though the toolbars could only be dragged when the taskbar was in its "unlocked" mode. I saw that APC magazine had an article about this, so I'm not the only one who noticed the change. Microsoft should have at least allowed an "advanced user" mode, because I have the feeling I'm going to discover other downgrades that were made for the sake of the "least common denominator" users.

12.08.2006
3:33pm

I need to motivate myself to start studying. Next week are final exams at Florida Tech, and I have two on Monday and one each on Wednesday and Thursday. The first up are EM Waves and Logic; in Logic I know that I need to get 13/20 questions right to make an 'A' in the class, but I don't know the exact score required for EM Waves. I have a strong desire to reformat my laptop since Windows Vista Business edition is available on the Florida Tech MSDN site, but I don't know whether I will proceed with that today or put it off until after exams. My last attempt at installing Vista on my desktop failed horribly, so I'm even more hesitant to try that one.

Last night after work we had the Chili's dinner as planned, and there were actually a dozen people there so it was a good showing. I'm one of the few remaining under-21 people so I enjoyed my Diet Coke, but just about everybody else was having alcohol. A few of us went back to Ron's place to see his new anemone and mandarin fish, and then we watched a bit of C.S.I. before the shuttle launch. Unfortunately, NASA had to postpone the launch due to low cloud cover, but it should be going up Saturday if the sky clears by then.

Today I ended up going with the NetBoss integration group to Hong Kong buffett, even though I wasn't actually putting in any hours at work today. Don was buying for everybody, seemingly for no special occassion, but a few people suspect that he is planning to announce his retirement soon before the merger is finished. After that I had a cake and balloons delivery for Miles of Smiles, but the student wasn't available so I handed it over to Sumit since he lives on campus.

12.06.2006
4:36pm

Second final grade is in: 95/100 in Senior Design.

Yesterday I finally went and got the new tires installed on my car, along with a needed oil change. 60 minutes and $75 later I was done at Wal-Mart, and I get free rotation/balance for the life of the tires. I picked up Pirates of the Caribbean 2 at Circuit City, so I'll be watching that sometime this week. In other news, I finally got my new member packet for the FCF (Feline Conservation Federation). I knew as soon as I saw their web site and mission that I had to join, because I'm very interested in exotic cats and that's what they are all about. Their web site needs some improvement, but the magazine/newsletter is very nice.

Since there is no class tomorrow, I might end up putting in a full day at work and take Friday off. We got in a new Dell server type for a customer, PowerEdge 2900, so we checked that out today. Handles two dual-core Xeons, up to 8 SAS 10/15K drives, four PCIe 4x and two PCI cards, and up to 48GB of PC2-4200. Matt wants to get everybody together for a post-semester dinner at Chili's tomorrow so I'll be attending that.

12.05.2006
9:27pm

The first class grade is in: 99.3/100 in Virtual Instruments Lab. It's amazing how well I can do in a class that is actually challenging and interesting at the same time. It's very likely my best grade this semester.

12.01.2006

Some unusually frank comments from the CEO of Seagate, Bill Watkins.

9:03pm

Final project and a puppy:

The puppy displayed on the Virtual Instrument is Emma, the latest addition to the family. I just found out about her a week ago; Mom was trying to keep it a surprise until Christmas.